espn, inc.] >> coming up on espnews, brett favre makes his preseason debut with the vikings. at the palace gates, the cowboys playing their first game in their new billion dollars stayed yum. and the yankees giving the socks an old-fashioned beantown beat down. in this group today margaret spellings who in terms of this conference of the part of her surface that is of the greatest relevance is that she was bursaries successor if you will in the george w. bush white

house as the domestic policy adviser during the first term and later went on to beat appointed and confirmed as the secretary of education and in both jobs involved closely in the development and enactment and implementation of the new child left behind act. now at this point i am going to turn things over to the gentleman to my immediate right way is going to conduct the discussion and that is my great friend and colleague, andrew busch. this is a homecoming of sorts for amd because he is -- he got here from the university of virginia but he has gone on to do great things from an admiring peers currently professor of government and associate dean of the faculty his sentences administrator ends in one month at claremont mckenna the author

of 11 very well-received books most recently epic journey the elections of 2,008 in american politics along with his university of virginia mentor jim cesar claremont mckenna colleague it is a wonderful book, has nothing to do with the subject of this conference but it's a wonderful book and that will cost you $1,000. [laughter] this before, all for coming. it's a pleasure to be here. the theme of this particular panel is moving from campaigning to governing and domestic policy. this could be thought of merrily that is just as the transition period from election day to inauguration day but i think it makes more sense to think about this more broadly. more in terms of the question how you turned with a campaign talks about in the policy after

january 20 and more generally how does the campaign affect domestic policy after january 20 of? and going to ask a few general questions and there may be specific follow-ups to the individuals who are the main participants and then now about halfway through we will open up to anybody else at the table. that is how we will proceed with this. just by way of very brief introductory comments it seems to me there are several ways to approach this or things to think about. one of them is what sort of context is established for domestic policy and a general way? the second is held as campaign rhetoric about domestic policy translate into the sort of things the president talks about as president or does it? what sort of continuity is are there and not when it comes to talking about domestic policy.

the third thing is appointments, held as commitment to the president's campaign agenda translate into appointments and the domestic realm and what other factors come in and then there is the policy making itself in terms of executive orders and the legislative agenda particularly in terms of how you go about the targeting the first executive orders setting the legislative priorities of originally to try to fulfill the campaign agenda and what other sorts of things did crowded and that may be moved some of the campaign agenda out of the picture over the process. so, starting th the general context i guess my first question is just during the transition and early stages of the presidency, to what extent were policy discussions influenced by the president's

domestic policy commitments during the campaign? and one other sort of factors came in to maybe disrupt some of that focus? and that is just a general question to the people at the head of the table. >> i will jump in. well, and our -- in clinton's experience, we treated the campaign promises as gospel. that was the only scripture to guide us. he had loved all aspects of politics, but he loved the courtesy to the couple see part best and funding for president was the ultimate job interview and that the agenda he laid out represented the terms of his contract. when we got to washington, that's not necessarily how the congress regarded it and even some in our own party followed

the campaign closely and listened to what he said that were not necessarily convinced that everything he promised was a good idea so there was an enormous amount of back-and-forth and a lot of pressure from people who were not part of the campaign and our party or the other party to selectively edit the campaign promises but from clinton's standpoint, he always felt that that was the way he should keep score and for those of us who have been in the campaign, and i sure margaret had the same experience, that was our strongest weapon an internal debate within the administration and debates with congress was to be able to say this is what the president promised. we have to keep this promise and that is a hard thing for a president's allies to dismiss. >> absolutely continent in fact i still travel with my renewing

america's purpose july 99 to july of 2000, and in fact it informed the second campaign as well and i think bush did -- have a dance policy agenda with specifics more so than had been the sort of practice at least in our party particularly to the extent he talked about things about being a different kind of republican that, you know, not everybody on my side of the oil was wildly enthusiastic about the defeat could things like a compassionate conservatism, education, immigration, faith based initiatives, all of those sorts of things that had a little bit of an edge and that is why not only did they inform our first work that day -- we knew we had to get them done quickly and when i see president obama tackling health care right away i see a lot of the similarities his popularity is as high as it is ever going to

be likewise i assume that is the case generically but some of the scholars here would know better that that is the time to do the things that are the most difficult to do. we lived by absolutely to the extent there were specifics and it lays out a series of principles or ideas or core philosophy or orthodoxy which i believe the presidents date. it had a guiding affect interpol to pull iterations so those keystones continue to inform our point of view throughout the administration. >> i will never forget being picked during the transition by someone who was clearly an enemy to present -- [laughter] to present to president carter the case for an incremental approach to welfare reform. this meeting did not go well. [laughter] and i think that -- i think that

-- you know, the presidential campaign is a huge effort, huge labor and nobody else may be listening but these guys are listening to what they have said and by the time they have said them for over two years the believe them. [laughter] we had a notebook that was personally edited by the president he added a bunch of stuff that was the set of campaign promises and this thing was absolutely sacrosanct. at the same time, you know, carter was more i think even than those who found him a kind of insurgent candidate. i worked in the senate. he wasn't our candidate, birch was our candidate, and he ran against washington and he believed that, too and he had a

very difficult time i think making his agenda fit with their agenda and it never did work out and in fact if i could say one more thing h did a tremendous favor to his successors were welded together so we had a failure of leadership to some extent and value of the lower ship. we lost a ton of senate seats when we lost in 1980 that no one ever thought would leave the door and george mcgovern not thought to be in trouble and they've been there all long time and i believe that is when the members of congress began to realize that if things didn't work out for their president it just might not work out for them and so i think there has been ever since then much more of the driven effort to work these things out because there is a fear factor that i think wasn't there in -- until that on

pleasant experience. >> okay. >> succumb it is a given that you come in, do your best, pursue the plan put out in the president's campaign. obviously cases are going to arise from time to time when that is not possible. either you have to back off or sometimes in some cases even backtrack and reverse yourself. when those cases came, how much discussion was there about the problems caused by the fact this was a campaign commitment as to other problems that might arise from that policy? >> wasn't that a central part of the discussion? >> my experience is that it carried by degree. if it was, you know, i think has particularly those of us who worked in a campaign setting i always thought about things that are must haves and things that are nice to have, and on the

must haves, i knew and the president knew because they were created around a set of ideas, principals, believes, whatever, what those were and what was, you know, for up for grabs, and i think those are the things they're sexually to scorecards, the scorecard of, you know, what is central to the president, and for one example of the child left behind annual assessment, all of the stuff we saw from the dlc. [laughter] just kidding. that's how we got 87 votes though i will say that in the senate. and the things that work, you know, less important and ultimately did go by the wayside and those fall by the wayside because of various ensuing events like mine 11 because the budget issues and on and on but i think there are two groups of issues in this kind of context.

>> and i think those of us in the white house are not the only ones paying attention obviously. when the day we took office "the washington post" ran a full-page list of every major promise we had made. i put it up on my wall and as margaret suggested, i had a separate list of the ones i thought were essential, but every time even in the transition before we had taken office whenever there was a hint we were going to deviate in any possible way it was front-page news and in fact i can remember people who had not been on the campaign leaking we were going to break a promise long before the decision had been made to break the promise because they thought that would increase their leverage so by the time we took office we had a reputation for breaking some of these promises that in the and we did

not break. and i think the big -- the biggest piece of information that bill clinton inherited was a dramatic downturn in the revenue coming in the at the tail end of the recession and so the deficit he inherited turned out to be a lot larger than he had anticipated when he got into the campaign and that forced him in order to keep the campaign promises he made it forced him to propose a bunch of painful cuts he wouldn't otherwise have done, and he was actually not bombed out by this at all. he thought when we first told him we were terrified about breaking the bad news he had half as much money for the

country had half as much money as we anticipated but he thought it would be an interesting challenge trying to balance the federal budget and keep his campaign promises. and actually i think was a disciplined forcing mechanism, and a made it easier to prioritize which campaign promises really mattered. >> can i ask bert and then the others during the campaign, you are talking about where you hope to do as president in the present tense in other words one he liked here's what i hope to do. once you take office you have got four years. is there a process by which you try to educate voters even though we are not going to try to keep every promise the first year that it's a four year term that we have a sense of order in which we intend to proceed and will get to everything.

having that patience seems like now in office you have to preach patience and how do you do that and how well does it work? bert? >> i think most presidents are in a big hurry to get to the things the most care about partly because we all believe people had more clout at the beginning but one thing i want to say is a tendency i certainly look back on with regret but not our tenure is we tend to have big ideas and political campaigns and submit these and sometimes when a big idea isn't adopted, when the comprehensive welfare reform isn't adopted or we just moved past it it's like riding a horse any way, and there isn't that tendency to stay with of the f-ing and if you can't get the big thing to get to put some building blocks

together so when things don't work out we tend to leave these ruins behind, but -- [laughter] that discourage other travelers. i don't want to go there. [laughter] so i think that is one of the bad things because you become so dedicated to the campaign idea and somebody else probably has a smaller idea and you negative the smaller ideas and have gotten elected and i think that's too bad and among other things it wastes a lot of expertise built upon congressional committees and among people and administrations when they just, you know, saddle up and ride down the hill. >> i want to add to that. i agree with that in part i think that was our experience with immigration. one of my great disappointments is how -- we have left the place worse than we found it with respect to immigration and the democrats will probably end up passing president bush's and ted

kennedy's immigration plan. notwithstanding there are places where you move on and then places where you say okay not a piece of legislation but executive orders, regulatory process issues, commissions, other ways to scratch the policy in these pronouncements we lay out it doesn't always say we are going to pass a bill that does this or that so there are other ways to scratch and that is part of the game plan you have to consider. >> can you think of an example of doing that, doing executive order or commission instead of seeking law? >> to the extent of the patient this is why i raised in this context is everything missile in thinking about postal reform. it was in the postal union or post office was in bad shape. we needed legislation it was

overdue for the reauthorization but we need to build some more ideas and some consensus and we needed to get a bipartisan group and the president appointed a commission. it didn't work and ultimately we enacted legislation but the point is we need all that so for the people that care the most desperately about postal reform we said we've got this commission over here and we will see you later. >> i think one of the hardest things to get used to is the need to take the long view because you can accomplish as long as you hold on to the job you can accomplish a lot over a long period of time. we were able to double education funding zero even though in any given year we were just making incremental change so particularly for your own supporters who have been waiting a long time for your party to get back in power singing to them when you come into office don't worry, we are not going to double funding in the first

year. it's going to take four years or eight years that is a tough message for them but i think in washington is as important to preach in patients. we've got an entire congress that is counseling patients particularly on the things you want to do that may work very well have gotten you elected, the kind changes to washington you want to make. i can remember after clinton took office, the congressional leadership met with him and said we know you said we should cut the staff but we don't really want to come and we know you want to reform campaign finance law and lobbying by can't do that because if you do campaign finance reform that is taking away the current jobs and if you do lobbying reform that's taking away our next jobs. [laughter] clinton deferred to them on their staff but ended up pressing can and lobbying reform

anyway. but i do think that the country is willing to be -- the country doesn't expect that much. but i do think the key is for the president in the white house to recognize which issues are better dealt with one step at that time and which issues do you have to kind of go along otherwise you are not going to get another chance? >> this brings up obviously the importance of what the message is, the talk that goes on about domestic policy and so my next question is i guess out of all of the areas of domestic policy what were the areas where the president's message for his rhetorical content remained the

same from the campaign and where there was a significant difference between how he had the talk about something while governing versus how you have to talk about something when he was running for president. >> well i can give you an example of presidential rhetoric that was treated as sacrosanct that led to an enormous debate within administration over what it meant. [laughter] bill clinton -- one of the problems is the '92 campaign to end welfare as we know it and he laid out in some specific terms what that meant that everybody that was able to work had to work and had to do so within two years. -- this was going against the grain of his party not a promise washington wanted him to get to any time soon and so there was a

lengthy internal debate what to do to add welfare. and if we did this in a couple of states would that count if we let people stay on welfare forever without count. but what was interesting about it was that of the in part because the phrase itself was so ambitious it was difficult to walk back from that promise, it was difficult to go halfway. and there were on a remember the welfare commissioner from connecticut actively printed out the acronym and welfare as we know it and posted it in every welfare office and tried to instill in her workers that

promise even before we figured out exactly how to keep it. >> well, i think 9/11 of course introduced a set of circumstances that obviously has had the effect of recalibrating our game. there are certainly in the domestic agenda more that got done and more that was in the similar sense may be the exception of social security and i think the way we end up handling that was more of we didn't get it done as opposed to we changed directions. we have a commission obviously and it remains undone by everybody. >> i don't really as part of our problem but i don't really recall the case on a major issue

where we've really changed direction on any respect. >> will then let me ask this, were their examples of cases where on a particular domestic policy issue it actually proved counterproductive for the president to remain in campaign mode when he was talking about issues? >> well i don't know that -- counter-productive remaining in campaign mode i think circumstances dictate how you react to particular things and what you're point of emphasis is. obviously what would have been ridiculous for president bush to continue to talk about education on the faith based initiative in october of 2001. i think that is where the reactive part of this gets into it. it's not that you abandon your agenda or are less committed.

there does at some point as we see right now with president obama and the economy you are playing the cards you are dealt and obviously gross -- everybody had a lot of that. >> i did you know if there was one word president carter repeated throughout his primary and general election campaign and was comprehensive. the word on the other side was incremental. in those speeches washington was a place of incrementalism and that was what was wrong with washington. i think he was elected because he believed, you know, because washington at that time especially was an incremental place it created the conflict that characterized the carter to years but on the other hand if you run on comprehensive i don't know how you can move from blair house to the white house and turning to mr. incremental.

>> one of the interesting tensions all three of the president's faced is that in each case, president came from, was selected from outside washington, had an agenda that was somewhat at odds with his own party and had to some degree a mandate for the changes that he was seeking and so the question is when you get to washington you are faced with a reluctant congress that if they had wanted to do what you were coming to do it probably would have done it already and what kind of -- what compromises are in your interest and country's interest and which ones are not and i think that bill clinton was influenced by jimmy carter's experience that if you push

congress to hard, they will get up on you. i think that he was quickly cured of that approach by them to delete committed 94 results because we found that the only way we could govern effectively was to govern the way we had campaigned and through some trial and error we got to that point. but i think it is, you know, it's an -- it's an important debate the party has to have because if you don't make any incremental progress on your agenda than the country is going to regard you as a failure and so i think the most successful presidents with domestic agenda have found a way to keep

speaking passed the congress come past washington directly to the country on the items they want to get done and eventually congress is more likely to bend to the will of the people in a popular president than to stick to their guns. >> i think there's a point to be made to defend a guide who only got four years. carter came into office right after the nixon and ford administrations which were probably i think the best period of time for democratic members of congress and the history of the world. everything you think was passed under lyndon johnson was passed under these guys and our guys didn't even take responsibility for the part that wasn't perfect. [laughter] best we could do. what have been better but best we could do. and the situation with parties

not getting along this was a political will secret love fest and then comes carter the same guy saying no. [laughter] and i do think that the big electoral defeat especially in the senate in 1980 made its, made the lives of subsequent presidents easier than they would have been had the -- congress is still a post. they are supposed to be antagonist but there was the sense that we may all hang separately here if we don't hang together after the 1980 election i think was not present before then. >> i wonder in talking about how can panning translates into a governing there's the intervening event of the actable election and the size of the victory that the incoming president wins. so, carter, clinton, bush, they

all can't and talking about either comprehensive changes they want to bring about or something equally big. they win victories that are not landslides. carter. narrowly elected, no coattails in the form of new democratic members of congress. bush famously minority president in terms of the popular vote, clinton wins a significant victory but far from the landslide 43% of the popular vote. do you all in helping the president make that transition to you take into account that they were not elected with reagan style or even a obama style landslide and a sort of a adjust accordingly in terms of where you put on your domestic agenda? >> no. [laughter] >> to the contrary even. he redoubled his efforts to, you know, educate and talk about the

reason for the message and so forth. felt like maybe he had more work to do to get those numbers up but far from saying i'd better turn a different direction >> and our case, clinton got 43% of the vote but ross perot got 19 so there was a huge groundswell for change more less of the same kind so we felt like the country was one of the things to change in their hurry. it's one of the ideas need to be essential to campaign by the domestic promises you make me to have a high profile in the campaign because you want to be in a situation where the president is elected he's claiming the mandate the country is aware of, not one that, you know, just happens to be in some campaign literature that reporters might have red or that

a few wonks on the campaign are familiar with. i think the more the country is aware of the fine print, the better off they are and i think it varies from time to time how willing -- how much the country wants to get to the fine print. sometimes they just want a new president and are not even going to -- they are all going to get to the bottom of the contract. in our case, because the country wanted a lot of change but was skeptical of the government ability to deliver on that change they had doubts about our party these eckert mize everything we did and we are quite aware of the promises that we had made. >> but i think certainly president carter felt, you know, that he had implemented this man and ask you work your way through that agenda to some

success by found that as we moved through the years, it was more possible at the beginning stages like where are we going to put our priorities or what exactly is this program going to look like to have how and actable it was to be a factor not how popular but how and actable if you could move past the stuff that he campaigned on because to a degree he can't and he wasn't interested in how an actable it was or much less interested. but if you get past that kind of stuff and to the programs designed in side of the administration then you could at least get the congressional relations concerns to sort of move up the list of things that were taken into consideration. >> the other thing i think it's really important is we have all

been involved in the development of the policy on the campaign trail and how good a job you do in bringing and members of congress and local officials and whomever else you can to be part of that and folsom ownership of those qualities. i'm thinking about obviously most familiar with education stuff, judd gregg and john banner the only things they liked about the kennedy was, you know, pension stuff and maybe a little of the health care. education wasn't their thing and so george bush had to do and did do a lot of education with them about what is this about, and they bought into it and it became their deal as much as his and so i think how you spread around the equities is a real importance and helps predict whether you are going to be successful or not. >> okay. so, you have to deal with

congress. you've made a lot of campaign commitments. , chris gets overloaded to a certain extent if you try to do too much at once or at least that is what they claim. [laughter] how do you decide? i think there have been clues but i am going to ask you how do you decide which of the campaign commitments to put on top and which ones to say well we will wait until the second round until next year? >> ladies first. it is a series of things. how ripe it is legislatively. is it in que, is it up for reauthorization, is a leftover, is there any appetite for moving forward on that issue? is it something the president is? i know when we put education first the president was most comfortable with that issue and is possibly a around that issue

was a strong and was a good strong place to start. one of the prospects for bipartisanship and passage and one of all those sorts of things so i think it is a series of elements on how you decide. >> we wanted to flood the circuits. there was no desire to -- we figured congress was going to -- would slow things as it was that we didn't have to make an easier for them. writing one of the areas we ran into the most difficulty is the congressional system isn't well set up to necessarily handle a couple of priorities at the same time. so, bill clinton actually wanted to pursue welfare reform and health care at the same time because he felt that they were intrinsically related of policy and that they spoke to different

anxieties of the electorate. unfortunately they went through the same committees and even worse, we had the house side that wanted to do health care what welfare reform, we had the finance committee that wanted to do welfare reform and of health care. so, i think, you know, at a certain point in the white house makes the calculation this is what we can get done and have to pursue that and will come back later. i do think that the white house is often wrong in assuming that political capital is -- you start with a lot of it and that it has a half life and all goes away. that wasn't our experience. our work experience was you start off with capital when you spend it while you get more than a few make a bad bet you end up with less.

>> we had basically to pick between welfare and first were doing health care first. i think we felt you could do the same thing at the time for two reasons one is you had one department of health education and welfare and it wasn't possible or capable in designing major programs at the same time. and the other was that you had these two committees in the congress the finance committee and ways and means committee in the house that would have the dominant role in dealing with those programs and you just couldn't possibly do it to them. i think we flipped a coin and we are good democrats so we put the poor people first. but it could have -- it could have come out the other way. i must say this administration does not seem to have that problem. they have got a different cabinet departments and bureaucracies involved in their

big initiatives but they certainly are jamming these congressional committees. we never would have occurred to us, it never would have, i don't think anybody ever spent ten minutes thinking about sending a welfare proposal in a welfare proposal at the same time to these committees but that is exactly what this administration is doing and maybe we are going to learn something. >> i think we are going to open it up. >> one more thing because we've been talking about this transition in the serious and grand terms of public policy but here's what i want to know coming out of the campaign how did you get your job? [laughter] and what did you think your job was going to be? [laughter] do the policy fights get transposed on who gets the jobs but then the white house and the cabinet --

>> i want to know what resulted in margaret spellings in the domestic policy office. >> two things. first, we were in an unusual situation because democrats hadn't been in the white house in 12 years. so, almost no one on the campaign to anyone that worked in the white house so we had little idea what these jobs were. we had a general sense. and we knew stu eissenstat, so he told a little bit about how the place worked. but really even with people older than i, more senior than id didn't know how we white house worked. and you can see a dramatic difference how the obama administration hits the ground running and what we had to deal with our first couple years because they've got people that have done it before and we had

almost no one like that. i think -- i imagine most campaign workers feel the same anxiety the moment their candidate wins in realizing that now you have to share this thing you help to build with everybody else. with a whole party full of people who either were not helpful, were actively on helpful, didn't root for your dog, opposed what you were trying to do and now they were in as good a position to get an influential role in the administration as you were even though you had given up your life for a couple of years and believe in the guy you just elected. so it's difficult and important for the white house to figure out how to integrate the rest of

the world that it's going to have to live with and make sure that -- make sure people from the campaign are in a position to fight for the promises they helped make. one of the rules that james birling and i played in the first clinton term were keepers of the flame. the ones who reminded the more senior people with an older people that hadn't been part of the campaign that we did promised this and the american people signed off on this and this is what the president believes and what he wants to do. and bill clinton completely in power to do that because he pointed to make good on those promises. he didn't want to have to sacrifice them, and i think it

is all part of the moving to washington aspect of the government would. everybody -- the people on the health of because they had been doing domestic policy for the last ten or 15 years they were as natural a candidate to do the jobs we were doing as we were. >> we have not a this similar experience with respect to the eight year period republicans may be were pretty united because we had been in the wilderness, and so at the president i know wanted a combination of d.c. people, the josh bolton's, mitch daniels and people that he had worked with and had known and could trust but he couldn't trust those people but they know us better and to the extent i grew up around a state legislature and worked on behalf of local governments and what not. there was a lot of alignment between that and domestic agenda

so i will never forget when indycar called me, i don't know if this is personal, this is closed press, right? [laughter] called me and said president -- the president wants to talk to you about being a domestic policy adviser i'm like what! are you kidding me? because i was mystified by the mighty washington. i had been in eastern texas and what not. so i thought my god, could i do that and all those sorts of things and karen hughes and i talked about this and how we were going to manage help and it's hard work and people are evil and mean and it sounded as bad as possible. [laughter] so karen hughes and i had to talk about that and she said i don't think we can go. i can't go under those circumstances and the next thing i knew the president was calling in the staging are you running

off the mother's? [laughter] needless to say neither of the mothers were run off and we agreed to do the jobs but that is how i got my job. [laughter] >> i worked for mondale in the senate and then went to atlanta for the campaign where i worked on the speechwriting and trying to make sure the policy stuff was all cord needed and i did some things on the transition but i didn't have the job. it might have been the welfare briefing i gave the president. i don't know. [laughter] so mondale had a christmas party and walks up to me and says how are you giving? i said i'm doing pretty good for a guy that has got absolutely no job so he picked up the phone and the next day i had a job. [laughter] >> so we have had a chance to chew on quite a few things here and i think we should open it up to the of their participants.

>> there is a kind of focused on whether it makes good sense to develop policy during a campaign it kind of identifies what it is voters are voting for and it's kind of a mandate or if it is a bad idea because candidates are running a competitive environment over promised they may not understand the trade-offs or they may decide they do understand what they decide not to give them a hearing. we can see the current administration of iraq and health care and other areas. is the campaign a good place to develop policy and if it isn't does it make sense to look to the campaign to inform policy during the governing period? >> i feel pretty strongly that anybody that runs for president needs to know before they get in the race why they are doing it, why they want to be president and what they want to do as president. as a practical matter once the campaign gets going you can still make policy and should and

can still search for ideas and new ideas, op, but if you don't know why you're doing it and put the most important things you want to accomplish our before you seek the job you probably won't get it for starters. but you will also be completely at the whim of your political operation. i divide the world into the two parties are act and wonks. [laughter] we all speak hack but we aren't. [laughter] and q -- both of those -- both of those personality types are necessary in the campaign, but the country will get a much better results if a presidential candidate has an agenda he or she has thought about and is

serious about and thought through the different aspects of it so that it makes some intellectual sense, and for that matter, i think that the best candidates are one who actually run on something as opposed to just run on the phrase, run on 15, run on the mood. and i think our system was as i said designed to be a job interview that negotiates terms of the shop contract and when you are going to do for the country. >> i completely agree with that and would add only one thing to it and that is all of those -- the string of reasons that bruce stuck together i would add and a track record experience that substantiates that philosophy and that agenda.

>> yes? >> one of the things the president's discover when they get into offices what might be called reality. and campaign promises are very valuable in setting a path and charting the course, but ultimately you have to deal with a situation which you find yourself and i am curious bruce and margaret and burt all worked for presidents who came into office with their party in control of both houses of congress. i ended up working for three presidents, ford, reagan and the first bush. [laughter] neither of whom had majority in both houses. reagan did have the majority in the senate, but he did not in the house when they first came in. now, given that, you have to

figure out what your strategy is going to be to deal with the context as andrew was describing in which you face. it's one thing if you have got your own party to work with and it's another thing if you are gerald ford or george h. w. bush came into office with larger opposition majorities facing him than any elected president in the united states history. so the first thing you have to take into consideration how you treat your campaign promises is what is the composition and the congress and what can you to do. the second thing is what is the reality that i face in terms of the real world? when reagan came in we had two years of back-to-back double digit inflation, the only time in the nation's history. the prime interest rate was 21.5%. spending the previous year had

increased 17%. we had rising on employment. and every taxpayer because we have a graduated income tax with the lowest bracket at 14 and highest 70 had been pushed into a higher tax bracket so we had the phenomenon because we hadn't yet increased the tax code. and so when he came in, he had no alternative but to focus his attention on the economy. this came at a source of intense irritation to many of his supporters who were very interested in a set of social issues they thought were important that had animated their support during the campaign, and i can remember being in a number of meetings with him where they were

excoriating him for ignoring their issues. but he discovered what all presidents discover which is i cannot focus on multiple things simultaneously. i have to decide what are the priorities now, and those priorities are in part driven by what you have said. but they are also driven by what is the context you face with respect to the congress and they are also driven by the reality of what is happening in the country. we went through a campaign just recently in which the number one issue was going to be iraq. if you had looked at the primary campaign -- well, the reality is we now have a president who is facing a very challenging economic environment tha didn't receive a lot of attention during the early part of the

campaign but now necessity has got to consume an enormous amount of time, attention, energy and political capital simply because you cannot ignore the economic realities of what we face now i am interested in what oer people's experiences are with respect to the extent which campaign promises can assist you because i think reagan's campaign promises on the economy did assist him in pushing through the tax and spending initiatives that he did. and the extent they can prove to be an albatross around your neck because you have made the promise in good faith partially because you believe in it and partially because the support from groups important reality changes and you get into office and you now have to decide what

are you going to do? and george h. w. bush faced this with respect to a promise he had made with respect to taxes and how he is calling to be able to produce a budget through what he called the flexible freeze, and when that didn't work because congress wouldn't go along with it and deficits were rising and mounting he was faced with a campaign promise that proved to be very difficult to keep. likewise, most presidents have come into office with one or more commitments to the steel industry which tends to be enormously successful in using section 201 of the trade act to present presidents with an east

cape walls case in the first six months in office that they are going to have to deal with and i know this cost enormous amount of consternation in the most recent president bush's administration as hauer we going to deal with a campaign promise we had when internally large numbers of administration officials thought this is not the direction that we want to take policies. i would be interested in other people's experiences how you deal with a situation where you made a promise that has now been effectively overtaken by events. >> margaret? >> why do i have to start? [laughter] come back to me. >> i would say in the albatrosses department we have don't ask don't tell out of the box in the clinton administration and i traveled with bill clinton the better part of two years. i don't think i ever heard that

promise made. it was putting people first somewhere and he had in fact made it but it wasn't one that had been -- no one fought through hell are you going to content to be convinced right chiefs of staff to go along with this so this is one where there to fold his hand and it was an example of i think you have to be careful in making campaign promises you don't promise things that you have no possibility at delivering. or if you make those promises you have to level with people that's going to be extremely difficult to decide, one of the most important decisions is whether they are going to accept reality and where they are going to try to transform it. i think the best example of a promise we made that opened doors that wouldn't have opened otherwise is that clinton made

such ambitious promise on welfare, never would have happened otherwise. all of our own side would have watered it down to nothing if they could. but because he promised so much, we had to make something that bill wallsten work on the national service of bill clinton hadn't made as big of a promise as he had it wouldn't have come out of the conference on its own. so you can -- the luxury of possibility of a campaign is that it is not entirely bound by existing reality in washington cbo scoring all kind of things. it's important for campaigns not to promise but is mathematically impossible. or to pander in ways that are fundamentally dishonest, but it is important to try to raise the sights of american politics because of a presidential campaign is the one chance you

have to do that. >> i agree i want to make the point i think that is why it's so important he is doing what he is doing. to a large degree the presidential campaigns are going to be what they are going to be, and the speech writers are going to write the speeches. the intellectual content that lies behind it, they are not think tank presidents, and our party's go through various cycles in terms of how intellectually prepared we are in these cycles you'd think would cost with who gets elected. [laughter] but they don't always. so then i think on both sides of the aisle having a vibrant intellectual that penning is critically important, and there are times when each of these groups has gotten into trouble because that part of it wasn't

quite up to the speeches. >> the other thing i would offer you mentioned steel and yucca mountain. but my observation was when i sit here and try to inventory those things they were all sort of things that were very important to a subset of folks, so to the extent that, you know, you end up maneuvering were disappointing or whatever on some of those issues they are not so macrolike i said immigration is my personal biggest disappointment domestically is that it overtakes everything. you know, yeah it makes a lot of people mad school vouchers that's another one. people are still frightened by recapitulate etc. >> why did you? [laughter] was ..

>> there is a reason for that. what that means is in the

transition, you go to sunday more broader and capacious in the nature of events will be narrow. that carries with it to a narrative's that are very, very difficult inside a white house. one is a struggle for the control of the major initiatives. bruce and i first remember the first 12 months that we had healthcare, welfare welfare reform, a major change on economic policy, a very controversial oprah's decision to proceed with votes on train issues that were quite decisive so the question of what comes before what because you cannot do erything at wants with any amount of success is very

important. second three circumstances to violate contradictions between equally serious presidential campaign promises. if this is no accident during the transition there was the famous battle the tests bob rubin authenticate represented an important promise that bill clinton made and bob brash represented a genuine imports and promise that bill clinton had made. the president as president decided he had to decide and he made a clean decision. it was a brave, i think they cold altmann reproductive decision that paved the way for a subsequent partial

redemption of the original promises. but it was certainly not manifest during the campaign that there would be some tension between these two pieces of putting people first but what circumstances force the president's hand and a very, very difficult way and virtually every administration by the end of the day could record instances in which there is a tension between equally important were sincerely promises that have to be resolved for pro. >> campaigning is something like falling in love band governing is like marriage. [laughter] campaigning, marriages a lot

of our governing is a lot of arguments it is purposeful but ultimately more satisfying but more difficult. the interesting things of the early days of an administration as bills adjusted, there is a lot of disbelief that goes on in the campaign that new president supporters see in him or her what they want to see. so there were plenty of battles that went on too fundamentally disagree with a major problem bill clinton had made that they productively ignored it and thought really coming he is for that he just cannot say that on the campaign trail. and for the president

himself, keeping all of these people happy to have fallen in love for different reasons is a challenge. >> nicks in 19681 of his main points was i will cut the crime in the district in the crime capital of the world. during the transition we are trying to find out what does that mean it? at my first meeting. [laughter] with the president they said the crime is very high and the district and the captain has been over to see me. [laughter] so i wrote to cut to the crime. [laughter] and i went back to my office i said mr. maher i am mr. egil

krogh he was to cut the crime in the district so will you go ahead and cut it? [laughter] there was a long pause on the phone. as i mentioned a cray rate was 169 prime's per day i set that aside it cry will go down i will check-in with three months later it was the but 202 per day which was not progress at which point* we have to figure out what do we do really? that was a campaign promise but president had repeated it several times. then we had a brilliant man robert dupont from district of colombia he had done a study that showed a correlation -- correlation between her when addiction and the crimes we were trying to address. i called the mayor and said we have some data i think we need to support you with a drug treatment programs. this is where nixon and the

ford white house were best years. there were no republicans that did drug treatment. [laughter] so we said who can do this or address this problem? >> we found a billion% in chicago and brought him to washington we set up drug treatment programs methadone maintenance was huge could we support making an opiate available to attics? rick these words of barry policy questions driven by the campaign promise to cut the crime in the district. that was our scorecard. how are we doing? we got to the point* where we could reduce the rate of increase that led to a metaphysical discussions and if you reduce the rate of increase are you really reducing the crime it is very difficult to come up with the

answer. [laughter] after four years to show you just how broad minded we were we went down to mr. bork we do not care what people party came from we don't know about this but that campaign commitment he made in 1968 was a very important part we were checking to see how we were doing not just in the district but cities all across the country. >> there is one aspect of it connections that has not come mugabe interested in hearing people's views of it the ada is that the campaign does not stop when it ought to buds but the campaign has too much influence what goes on and

government at and what people think about if there was too much campaigning in the white house or whether something that just passed to be done that is somehow beneficial? >> the romance never ends. [laughter] >> i have heard that. per minute campaigning is pejorativpejorativ e the truth is the person with the biggest microphone need to take it and use it today as legislative and other policy agenda going on of that is a permanent campaign then we're all guilty as sin. how the president uses his time is the most viable commodity you have and how you use that to enforce against what you are trying to do is the name of the game. permanent campaign and this is like the last one and the one before and the one before. >> is sees it as a permanent campaign for ideas. if the next election drives

everything and it is just politics than that can be destructive by its margaret is right, the president was elected on ideas he should spend all of his time fighting for them. >> i think it is a double-edged sword. you can deal effectively with the congress of less you demonstrates the ability to go over their heads to some degree there is nothing worse a there is nothing worse than going over their heads and not making the connection. they know that. they go out and hold their town hall meetings. you do not need a poll congress is the most sophisticated pull the have in this country i think the president's you have been the

most effective those who named their staff that have not gone out there too many times to show they cannot deliver because as soon as that happens, they are the line and stand you're not having a good day. [laughter] >> i went to pursue something more what roger brought up. it is not only significant but how sharp is the line between the parties? we move from a situation and where party politics was fairly flexible and pragmatic to a situation and where that is much less so and much more polarized. i am wondering how each of you had different experiences with party politics are like to hear how the party lines and

the way it operated the congress and country affected your lives in the white house. >> i think this is a fairly simple phenomenon. when i first came to washington in the early '70s as the elementary school in turn, the south still had not gotten over lincoln. that meant you have a democratic party hear that the first on a coalition that went from the deep south to wisconsin and minnesota. but these people disagreed about most things of avandia identity of the speaker. [laughter] but in order to legislate with your from mississippi or wisconsin you had to find friends from the other parties so no wonder propriety was nice.

you were running with one senator and legislating with another. we had a golden age of civility. but the south did get over lincoln and we have the ideological wind up now that's magic moment is just over. i believe this is the new reality pride of think there is any point* and the moaning the old days do not have real liberal people and the republican party are conservatives of the democratic party. that is what has happened. >> i have a variation on that part of the party per se obviously the president has a strong degree of influence

over international with the democratic party it sells it is not problematic call it is a subset at issue identity groups better less affiliated with you or anybody you are connected to probe i do not fundamentally disagree with you, we are where we are and that has changed it will affect our country and that is the exact same thing for president obama. >> i don't think it is in surmountable. i think in spite of the efforts of all of our respective bosses to change it has gotten progressively worse, but it is possible to make progress where there are areas of common interest. we found as the other side

found out how birch was alluding to with a congressmen that their word general goals that both parties are interested to work on an even if they start in the same spot it was possible to find common ground so we had a pretty productive period but of a couple of years before the other side went off the deep end. working on balancing the budget and reforming welfare and various areas where they wanted to do and we wanted to do it was a question of working out the details we could agree on. where we ran into trouble is when reit got into the list of common things and when we got around to proposing child care

in 1998 congressional republicans said we have no interest. we can negotiate fervor but we will not do it. so they decided to launch impeachment hearings. [laughter] i think the challenge is not the partisanship in and of itself but whether there are people in either party who were willing to go out on a limb and reach an break with orthodoxy in their own way to make it possible to reach agreement across party lines there are plenty of areas and happens to a state government all the time. it is the expected model of most state capitals and washington there are all kinds of interests that raise a red flag any time u move toward progress.

members of congress that run in the district's on the house side that are very narrow. they are accurately reflecting constituencies by being more ideological around the country. >> one thing that is critical there is nobody in the congress that feels accountable for passing legislation they will not go all and suffer the consequences if it does not get enacted. president obama it is. that is why when i think of my friend ted kennedy who wants to do some things, that at least as it is important as all of this other that is going on with the interest groups. >> nobody feels accountable to execute the plan. >> there are three presidents

represented also three vice presidents and the most influential vice president in history mondale with carter and all gore with clinton and dick cheney with george to be bush. during the campaign during the transition to what extent was a vice presidential candidate steering you toward certain promises and maybe holding your feet to the fire to achieve those promises? >> bert carp you worked for mondale before he became vice president. >> that guy that we had hired an steadied his career. >> and then my case as it is famously known of vice president primary interest was

not with the domestic agenda so while his staff would weigh in from time to time, he had other interests. >> seriously if there is a frustration that carter white house staff had it was we could only gets in to engage a lot less he did not like people know what he was doing he could not dial them up. and sometimes he thought things were quite important. then there are other issues where he really did go and

take an open position but he might have helped to build this model because he was a protege and he studied the price presidency for a hobby a long time before he was there and brought a lot of thought to it but of all of these vice president he was the heart is. you know, he was doing something. [laughter] >> obligor was a passionate advocate for the promises that he worked on in the campaign and even before clinton picked him he was consulting on the environmental policy so gore helped to craft that speech he gave in the primaries pro luckily, for them comment clinton and gore had different

interest they were especially passionate about clinton has spent that much time on environmental policy as a governor and so he was happy to give vice president gore some running room on that issue and that was true with technology policy and i think it might have been more difficult if you had two guys to were such high chargers to work on all of the same issues and have made different promises that were at odds with each other but it worked quite well for us. >> earlier the questions of the early months when you come into office and how you go about translating the campaign promises into some form initiatives zero or reality. one thing we have not mentioned that i think it's

worth noting since we all came from out of the white house and the executive office of the president when a president first comes to the office, he has a large number of people or positions in departments and agencies that require senate confirmation. people cannot act in those positions until they have been confirmed. in fact, there are a lot of good reasons for them to not be in default and make decisions before hand for both these decisions inevitably swings to the white house. and the omb because of the director had to be confirmed but he will always be confirmed but the associate directors do not have to go through the senate confirmation. when you put together that first program that the

president will deliver a joint session of congress bush did it on the ninth i do not remember but it was february. very shortly after he comes into office. that is the first opportunity we have to address the congress and the country as to what will my priorities be now and was was of the proposals will i advance? there is a huge vantage to the white house staff because they are the ones who are there it is heavy laden with people who were on the campaign and keepers of the blame and that is a very powerful argument we promised this during the campaign you want to be known as administration that keeps its promises. there is a huge vantage back goes to people arguably the

first year before you start to fill out people and departments and agencies then there in a position to be a little more effective with what the white house is doing but the initiative, the drive always comes from the white house. >> time is our fault and i have to call an end to this intriguing and particulate discussion howled domestic policy the transition is made from campaign to governing. i will note this is one of four sessions here at the miller center of public affairs at domestic policy making go to the miller center website though two c-span.org find out when the others will be aired and thank you so much for leading this

discussion. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> i want to get a picture of a group. [inaudible conversations]

into the hall of america is highest court to those places only accessible to the nine justices the supreme court coming the first sunday and october on the c-span. >> now a discussion how to increase colleges and career readiness in this do desperate we will hear remarks from leaders of organizations and institutions from the educational testing company

act and america's choice this is a little over one hour. >> [inaudible conversations] >> if you look around this room you will see people smiling as i introduce our next speaker. jon was super attendant station at -- superintendent of prince george county we had the pleasure to be his partner there and work alongside of him during his tenure there but the whole country was watching him. what they saw was the smooth

leadership, smith but across the and you have to have that combination of skill if you're actually going to transform things. sometimes i say it is little bit like going to the dentist. he says this will not occur but then the next minute he says the two this out. [laughter] he has that kind of leadership with some very thorny issues that have many, many people are thinking they just could not do that level of four. he made it seem like it was easy to do. that is why it was such a pleasure to watch him and if you do not know he now works with gates and using that expertise that he developed not only in prince george's county but also santa monica and he is spreading that across the country i'm sure he will spend a few minutes to

tell us about his initiative with aids but more so than that and chatting with john he was to talk about how can we get things done? thank you very much and we're so happy you are able to join us today [applause] >> nobody ever once used that smooth and aggressive but the dentist is much more like having a root canal without novocain was the nicest thing but think you. i was thinking when charles made the comment about california going into 10 new states i live there for seven years i've said they have more than 12 financial problems i say my god they could never afford all of the new flags. [laughter] it would be problematic.

but it is a privilege to be here this morning and i will speak fellow from the work i am doing at the bill and melinda gates foundation and the role that i serve as the deputy director of education by a much more interested in talking about the work that i really believe we are about i like to share a approach but not the approach as to how we accomplish pieces of this work. i want to talk about the consequences of being successful and pieces of this work when redo that and sometimes for you to push back i hope he will do that around some of the things i but like to say and talk about. for me, had always been around

the moral imperative that our schools do not violate the fundamental civil rights when they come to be in front of us and also the most significant social justice issues we face in our communities. i do not want to bring people down this morning but i went to begin to reflect on pieces of data which we should be mindful about with the work that we do with the youth. i know that i was. prince george's county about two-thirds of the district of colombia at about 135,000 youth and 90 percent are african-american and about 8% were latino, 1% were white, anglo and 1% of the

youth were of pay and asian. the county is this a really tough place a very tough plays the piano d.c. we bordered north east and southeast a huge chunk of the county inside the beltway is where kids live daily in communities that experience high degrees of violence and high degrees of abject apathy about what we expected of them and what we could do for them. so i was taken several months ago when i was reading the editorial that conformed the things that i worried about that as an economist who writes for the economist he pointed out that america no longer has the largest ferris wheel in the world anymore and we no longer have the tallest

building in the world we do not have the largest shopping mall in the world but there is one thing that we take first place that is it the incarceration of its population. while the u.s. has 5% of the world's population we incarcerate 25% of the world's prisoners. one of 30 adults are on probation or incarcerated. and some states 14% cannot vote because of conviction in. one out of three african-american males in alabama cannot exercise the right to vote because of a pass conviction. 1.7 million do to show up in public schools every morning where one or both parents or guardians are incarcerated i refer to them as the present or fence they come to school every single day.

on average for african americans today family and come as 74% for white families in the united states. nearly one-third of african-american families have zero or negative net wealth. in 1865 african-americans owned o.5% of the total u.s. wealth. 1990, 135 years later, african americans own 1% of total u.s. wells fargo -- wealth. almost half of latino families are too poor to qualify for the full child tax credit that united states government allows.

on any given day, this morning in the cook county prison in chicago there are 10,000 inmates, a 76 percent are african-american, a 20 percent are latino. so and our schools african-americans, make up 16% of the you to come to our front door, they are 20% of the two filer brass. 30% of the referrals to the court. many straight out of the front doors of our schools. 37% are incarcerated. 33 8% of all youth today are in lock up which is different than incarceration and there are 50% of all of the youth currently housed in adult correctional facilities in this country and another 24% of the youth of art latino.

i do really believe in that it is graduation or incarceration for some minivan for the places where i worked, this is dead serious. it is not that we really need to get kids at 100% or 90%. i really considered myself an ineffective superintendent i can manage a calendar like there is no tomorrow i am remarkably rude and make lots of mistakes but i can manage a calendar i think one of the saddest moments of my eight superintendency was a morning that i realized i am unable to physically attended every kid's funeral i was unable to keep that schedule. youth get shot on the subway they get shot at home. they are murdered at parties they are shot after graduation

parties, they overdose that they die, it is mind-boggling around this piece. so the realization that that is our collective work, i think at times needs to be called out because that is the moral underpinning that really want to talk about. it is sobering. but it is easily forgotten when we're trying to get high school schedules in order when we tried to do with layoffs are hirings it is easily forgotten when we try to manage 1.8 million dollar budget, it is instantaneously forgotten when we tried to get through negotiations but the reality is every single one of those things is a lever that we can or cannot choose to poll. so i keep that data very

present and i think it is important to talk about that and have a center of courage to talk about that. for me that center comes from the realization no big shock. i am a white male and the reality with that comes all sorts of invisible privilege and understanding that when you walk into, or in my case or any case that i trace along this invisible privilege to maturity committees to do not look like me, is that i see you have two choices for you can work to try to move at the edges of this issue of race and poverty, or you can summon

the unearned privilege and do everything in your power to actually address the three issues that were central to the work i do that is agency, access and acquisition and that is the only question that matters when you join my team because if you don't believe that every kid can acquire the question end of acquisition and the same rigorous course work that they can do that at the same level of their privileged brothers and sisters then this is like nothing personal but i know what you anywhere near my kids. if you do not believe that your fundamental role is to build ency and others who do not have that so they participate in this democratic thing we call the united

states society and can earn a living wage and have health-care and of the roof over the kid's head and that is the purpose, nothing personal you may be a spectacular human being i cannot just have you in this job. the last piece of course, is access. if you have any qualms whatsoever of what it will take to be really clear that he is to have been historical a marginalized either deliberately or unconsciously but marginalized from access from public-school as you will not call that out then i do really need to say not here. there are a lot of other counties you can work can. go. because i cannot have you here i cannot afford that around this work. that is how we fundamentally

higher negative 132 do this work. i was blessed i will be even a couple of pieces around the success which is great. it is awesome. in your comment about double digit gains in schools where 90 percent of kids were proficient we leave three years later and then they have 67 1% who have proficiency relatively high standard is really good but but the trap door is to think that is successful but it is not. because i wanted to return to the data point* that i started with but i am told the present industrial complex pipeline is fundamentally disrupted do not call ourselves into thinking that was a big success. that disrupts days that disruption is very much around

the two lovers i would like to share a little about in terms of thinking which is human capital and capacity for us it was really clear whether that was in places i worked in los angeles's *dais dais h* los angeles are merrill lynch or rhode island being crystal clear about the belief system or access and agency were central to trying to get to what can be a pretty daunting task-- task to move forward why human capital or instructional capacity? i guess that is because nothing else really matters with all due respect it is not that i am saying one has less value but it does not matter if what matters those issues

for you, i mean you if everybody had been marginalized everybody is a party so it was all and in many situations it is the majority, human capital is said to single levers we can pull and we spend so little time deliberately trying to disturb the system. i know that we know this, but the dirty little secret around this is the central office, i call it to the beast, it is perfectly designed, masterfully crafted to prevent any of those things from happening. it is not designed to do that.

i will give two examples about why that is the case. it requires will fold disruption around practices sell staffing of schools usually has a guideline a majority application minions of people somewhere on some four who are responsible for getting teachers in front of youth they do that and hopefully well most times they can get that done in terms meaning customers to have a person in front of them but no thought to the idea that it matters tremendously who was in front of which use?

so some gyrating examples of that come to the piece when we first came to the county what we first wanted to do was to understand my number one responsibility was the youth is the one my second day i said then i wanted a school to every high school by wind them polled from a ran them social security number so we called them and the press can be there but you cannot participate the teachers yes you can watch you cannot open your mouth we began a conversation i really want to know what i need to do well for you. i was really prepared like most of us would be we need better sports teams, better band uniforms, i need a far better lunch, i was completely

blown away that the conversation included none of that it started right off by it akin said you can get me a teacher price said what do you mean by that? he said i did not have a single teacher all last year i said can you explain that? i am a high school sophomore at central high school i will use actual examples. i have seven glasses and my day and i did not have a single teacher in the entire year i had nothing but substitutes the entire year i never had a teacher. silvery is says you think that is bad? i have the advanced placement spanish teacher who does not speak spanish. she does not speak spanish as

a right now we learn spanish by watching spanish now spread out all i could think is i am going to have a nervous breakdown this is an insane way to teach advanced placement spanish he says yes i have a physics teacher who does not know physics but we can look it up on the website to figure out. and encourage us to use our phones and class to access the web site. i am saying this is pretty bad. it was without a doubt they silenced may and a lead of this work for as long as we are there then one said what is the ap class? then what was very apparent only seven high clot day's

high schools had the advanced placement glasses so you can imagine what the next morning cabinet meeting was like they were very hard hitting and very day 10 driven i want the roster of one to understand who is teaching and how many courses. people look at you like large you worry about bus picked up? i am not remote a word about bus pick up the kids take the bus or the subway or the train i want to know who was teaching them this district had a historic guideline it was not written anywhere the majority white community and the seven committees of privilege study the course is the remainder which is the overwhelming rest of the worst-- high schools had no ap courses that will change immediately we will do the ap course is in every single high

school next year and they said it is not possible, you have lost your mind you will destroy academic fervor they're not ready for this and the response was simple but if you don't believe it then you have got to leave but the deliverable is there is to be a college board trained teacher who knows spanish you can teach advanced placement and every high school next year that was a task that we laid out there and the team was spectacular. college board did it for free, we have them trained, hundreds of teachers and i am sliding into the dreaded notion this will be great so now it is july 15 of the next year all of these courses have been run there in the schools i am doing rosters i want to see overflow. i am visualizing parents and

coming and protesting the kid cannot be in in the ap class but 17% of the class's had been canceled in june for no enrollment price said what are you talking about no enrollment? what of course, have happened, this system did not allow the youth to know the courses had been put on the books and counsel kids out of taking them because you will not be successful you will fail. this over your gpa. you are not prepared i love you but it is just not good for you. if i heard that one more time i think i will comment about how much i love the kid and how bad it is for the kid to do that. this began find forget the schools you have 15 days to

schedule 10 percent of every kid into the ap courses you will massively override any guidance counselor says otherwise is terminated on the spot. we lost a lot of guidance counselors in july of that year. [laughter] [applause] these are good people. they're not committing crimes but they just did not believe it agency access and acquisitions of they could not be around our kids. and we do what most people do you build a bridge courses and double periods so you get the same kind of privileges that parents who know how to manipulate the system and we build tutorial such shins and we taught kids how to supplemental texaco the data is coming and it is coming in the tester coming we

underwrote all the test the board did at and teachers are lined up at every board meeting you will see this is terrible mass education destruction and it came in and we had a 47% increase in the youth who were taking ap courses no kidding? i can do the math if you do and put them in there that is not astonishing but the percentage of those who got a 67% i should not have been surprised because all we did was failed to include them we denied the access then be understood the prerequisite and counseling session you have to go through we eliminated that. the story is not that kids do well which is fabulous but the system is designed to prevent

this from happening. the other story which is critical around this we were building construction all capacity this very nice person did not speak spanish would not have been no help but this the liberal ability to have to build instructional capacity was the central. we do not have that we could have pretended we had it and created a whole division to do that but the reality was we did not all that. are not because i have not worked unless i have agreed you would partner with us that if i have to begin by having an external partners help rebuild the instructional capacity. we had this deliberately around the end of the day you have to own it and the teachers have to actually own

the knowledge and ability and it has to be delivered and systemic but it cannot be one of as much as that is difficult and it cannot just be those who want to go. when you choose to do that a lot of times our partners would say people are coming then you have to go out and say they must do that or we will not build and the literacy block the principal will not build than men because there for ceramics will not happen and we promised the ceramic teachers who sometimes you have to say you cannot be principle here anymore. you cannot. it is over. the first year 47% of the principals had to change careers. they just cannot be leaders around that these. we had to face that. every time that happened we had to talk about the data i

begin with this is not about you. you have the agency they don't. i take money off of people's kitchen table every day from tax money and converted into a salary there is a moral obligation to deliver it is not to keep you employed it is for the purpose of this organization which i wanted to be highly reliable is advance achievement and opportunity for those who have not have that our core do that through employment and through valued employment and phenomenal people but is that the primary purpose? when we talked about the idea of building instructional capacity in human capital, one of the things we had to be clear how schools were staff. school's historic the underperforming were the last to be filled, the vacancies had no one to go there.

and they were pretty scrappy areas. be clear about that but overall no one wanted to go into the school and the schools that were high performing or moderately performing counted as high performing they would have 10 applications for every vacancy it was very clear that h.r. officials will literally say you wanted to be a rose about you do not want to be there it is a better match for you to be there. so we had to be delivered and disruptive so then we said to the whole h.r. department and said here is the game plan let's be clear how you are kept employed there are three deliver balls we will measure every two weeks if you hit those you remain employed if you don't, you do not remain employed this is very simple. that is we are going to have

this all schools and other schools also the most difficult they have to be staffed before memorial day everyone with a highly effective and qualified teacher. then use stapp the rest to have the whole summer to do that piece. those schools were posted all over the district walls and people were raised about it. you are doing this on the backs of people who support the tax is and i said you will. do not worry about that but what we will do is we will be applicable about how we treat the kids. this was not going to be = o we have a huge question about equity and equality equity is everybody gets treated the same old inequality but equity those who have the least get

the most i was unabashed about that. which meant no money is distributed personnel and howled decisions internally went out into the system. so what was amazing was the difference alone about actually asking people to make choices about how they would do their work against the district standard that was pretty clear to fill these slots first we did lose a bunch of a jar it did not work out for those employees over that period of time. what was really clear we have every single classroom filled with credentialed and if they taught before had a history of student achievement over time it was significantly better than the counterpart. when we say the organization in much the deliberately moved

that is our responsibility around this. america's choice is not an expense them. it is expensive. most good things usually are. it does not go everywhere. when we tend to put it in place since that this sum of money has to be approved by a board will be placed in front of you to do not have stuff there is a lot and the chattering class' why this is a terrible thing. the reality is that is our principal. equity, and not the quality. . .

the reality is we don't really know what else to do or what else we would be giving it. we assume it is a hard conversation to have with faculty because everybody wants to say i know what i'm doing but we don't or we would have done it. i actually don't know how to teach the acquisition of reading. i don't know how to teach set pherae in mathematics.

i actually can to get people to understand the equations and chemistry. and just calling that out saying so there it is that wasn't so bad. but we can find out. and we had to find out collectively. and we work with colleagues many of whom are in this room and who i have tremendous respect for putting up with less as we pushed really hard to more of the place to be more receptive to this difficult work and as we thought about this, i had to somehow frame why i the people who teach us. and i thought about this and eventually can out and said it and makes a lot of sense to me and me not to you and don't use this if it doesn't sit with you well. i don't pay people because to come into the school system with a credential or degree and or a certain age in the salary

schedule. and because you have the ability to do the job. that's great. but it's not why if we are a group of teachers in the school always right. everyone knows garate is the most effective math teacher in northwestern high school. parents know it, they lie, steal and cheat and they know that i'm right and they don't want that. and the system is this constant tug-of-war about protecting me and my incompetence of this issue and not making more superior than anybody else on the team and we know how that goes. and so we can either continue to protect that kind of perverse notion or we can simply say you're right, you have got it, i don't. and so has a system of pay zero to make me as smart as she is around this work.

and i pay myself who has some capacity in biology to make the teachers as smart as i am at what i do so that they can do that. and the notion of one-off and assistance who hired the best person there for the kids are lucky to get in front of that one person, that's great for the small lottery we have but bad for large system and the idea i had responsibility and was paid for the responsible if building the capacity meant that all i had a stake in the ground and the improvement of the general human capital of my building and when the whole team was involved in that learning which means i had to seek the models of good instruction i had to have time to question not what they did about what they were thinking while they were doing that. i needed folks to come and build content knowledge and content expertise and then for me to show how i was struggling with

it and how i was improving with it that is an escalator. that is stepping on the same set of problems in the school but i get this left and the left occurs when a group of us actually begin to build our capacity because if i can do that, the money i have invested in the salary gets spread across the system and used for better treated about the peace. that was one of the things i learned from watching a close that there is a jalabert system to do to make sure it is not isolated to make sure that the fight to get the system to be receptive around this is cleared and to make sure that the adults in the system need to own both the knowledge and process of gaining this knowledge. and it was a good lesson are around that. so we were clear about what we have to do and we were clear what we were trying to do and we were also clear what it would look like if we were succeeding and we needed to be clear about the support when we were not so

successful at around those places and i tried to do that by publicly writing to the organization and so, i didn't do weekly newsletters or the superintendent corner and i didn't have a blog and i didn't do any of that stuff. i wrote in ways i try to model what was good, professional, collegial riding which is in frequent the best quality i could make and with a message about what we were about. so we would write to the organization and then ask the organization to read it and discuss it, so making the case for high-performance organization understanding the difference between autonomy and in power meant. we rode on a with fury of action which was managed performance in parliament not a given state. we talked about distribution of money and side budgets and from the system to the schools on the idea that it was an equity principle. we talked about the notion that

the school was the center of change and central office was a surface institute. not leadership institute and believe leadership exists in the principle and in the teacher and our goal was to raise that, build that expect that, hold them accountable and serve that. around those places. so, it was a way to the public on our end about where we were falling down because and we knew we had to do better because of your input around this place so i'm going to throw nine quick things and they are just the things i believe were leveraged at helpless. one was being clear on accountability and leadership. there was nothing -- does not in private about a youth who doesn't graduate.

in the auditorium and there is nothing in my opinion any taxpayer based organization that is private about the achievement of my kids. so everybody achievement, quarterly assessments of its projections and the understanding, graduation rates were all public. and in the current leaders to make and talking about accountability down to the level, so it was very much an issue of consequence as opposed to punishment and people come and accountability thinking a lot about punishment and we try to help people think about this in terms of accountability. and we try to be really clear that was a fundamental notion of

leadership, teachers worked esteems and principals were responsible for building the structural capacity and performance review. two most important things they could do if they couldn't do that and we couldn't build that over time and we were kind of unabashed about that. project management act we how do you get all this stuff, on a daily basis? if you say you're going to bring america's choice in someone is going to run it. every day. every weekend you get a weekly report to me if that is the case. what actually happens on wednesday, who is accountable for thursday etc., etc., etc., who gets the material purchased and delivered? if you don't do performance management he will run into the stuff i ran into which was kind of amazing, two examples of the system that doesn't work well if

you don't have performance management. we would run a summer school for 10,000 kids and the first time i came at the school year no one would come to summer school. like how could that be, no one is passing. but get loads of failure and everybody's like you see, the parents don't support us, apathy, look what we are against. and it just didn't make sense. i don't see kids in school that way. i did exeat. with a minor bit of scratching was the meal report card because no one ordered eink to post the report cards so in august i wandered through the warehouse and there were thousands of report cards and letters not stamped one might get mailed. that is a problem. that is a problem. so we were overdrawn when the parent actually got the report

card. seems a simple but that actually is a part of this notion of execution and performance management. if teachers are going to sit there and experience a type of professional development they are uncomfortable with and haven't done before the need the material so someone has to order it? and someone has to unpack and deliver it and that is -- it seems so elegantly simple lost art in most of our places about that. the whole idea of these kind of leverage point for change not everything is a leverage point for change. you have to choose them inspection of a dirty word. i absolutely do inspect schools every single day. every single leadership official had to be in schools. not going and see how it is going, okay? these are your schools, tuesdays and thursdays, this is the five page that comes back on every one of those places.

this is the conversations that take place is and these are the general learnings and problems we solve next week. issues of inspection. feels heavy handed. nothing is more heavy-handed than having to go to the county prison and import more teachers. that's heavy handed. the whole idea being clear that for me the central office had to be far less of a regulatory organization and far more of an auditing organization. one of our roles was to remove the rules. we had binder's like colossal, collections how not to get anything done basically. and the idea was to strip as much of that away and simply go to the things that make most sense, don't violate the law, don't violate the right, don't break symbol cofids and audit results all the time and choose

those, a teacher attendance, student attendance. if a kid was held to a standard of the adult was held to a standard. if there's student absenteeism, there is a teacher absenteeism. we went to is being paid and what is the achievement and it led to the awful things about paid for performance on this place. and being public about those pieces as well but being persistent is important as well. communication, you can't over communicate. if you are going to launch an initiative like we did with america's streets, trust me, the memo that announces it is one of i would honestly say 50 you need to send out, not five but 53 it cannot over communicate on the important stuff. i think people actually read what i stand out, and they don't.

i don't have the time to do that, and so it is knowing the communication inside the system, hu principal [inaudible] , who they talk to, parent groups, churches, every weekend i was offered the opportunity to preach and our places i mean, i am a man of faith. i have no problem of talking about that but they give you -- they give you a podium and you are up there with an audience. yes, i am definitely going to be talking about, you know, the on named miracles of the bible and how everyone can actually be but i am going to talk about standards and accountability and i am going to have an opportunity to do that and it is a place where people listen and understand and all of those places matter in a community. it's not just the letter of routt that piece. being clear about timetables it is dawn on thursday. the only thing i would ever quote from reagan was trust but

verify. the notion of their fighting is really important because it allows an durham milestones. it doesn't allow you to just run down the car a decrease in person because it didn't get done. it gives you the points to show people progress is being made because if they can't feel that they can't handle, what are the better systems to the? people joke a lot about montgomery but at the end of the day there was the tally sheet, how better are they banaa us, how better of the top 100, how better than the top 20? so benchmarking was important. progress reporting was also important, too cingular to benchmark against a standard of quality for with the budget looks like and then how we are comparatively to the others so if you're benchmarking is against the lowest you're the top of the barrel if you are

benchmarking against an absolute standard it is daunting. last comment i will make and then i would be glad to open this up. i want to close by saying guerra had some spectacular failure are now the work in hindsight my most common mistakes because if we were not public about this as often as possible, i couldn't expect teachers to see by the way i actually don't know how to do this because it is too frightening. it is to smothering for the people to be honest about growth. one was to be really clear that complacency is lethal and the organization and the little of it is every place has some complacency. it's okay. minute speck of it is toxic so i think of complacency in the key

work as the idea of its radioactive, it doesn't matter how much it still can't tell you. a lot of it will kill you quicker circling of complacency is important. sometimes you are too tired so lesson learned get other people to do it for you. so truth tellers and we will create this little thing of the end of the meeting we would go in quietly as a team and shut the door and to he rose and zeros, who had zero moment today, who had a hero moment today and being clear if you couldn't call out izzie romo went for yourself or another team member, you actually were the zero met at the day. you have a responsibility to call without. it builds commodity and honest conversation. failure to create strong

coalition of believe in a large community. sometimes you assume they are with you and they are not and sometimes you just assume people think this is a good thing and they don't. and building the coalition is deliberate and it is necessary. with the understanding the power that vision matters you can't repeat. i get nauseous like ten times a day giving the same speech but it's like, you know, it's like the junior prom, that one dance means everything to the person who gets to hear it first. i have it all the time. this is their first time and the proximity to the leadership matters a great deal right up front next to them inside of the faculty from no matter how big the place is a tickets are now. so i think the other thing is declaring victory quickly and declaring it quickly on things

that don't really matter. everyone wants to feel good about some things otherwise we don't know if we can continue around this soak 38 of the things we will say is a victory when we get there and don't hold yourself like i did say i didn't get there but this is good to is we ought to separate this. and then as deadly as complacency in the system and it was an interesting notion. i think the neglect at times to anchor this change in the transformation work deep inside the culture. people talk about all the time in anchoring transformation inside the culture is i don't don't know what that means. you read these papers and books around the stuff life come to realize is i may not know what it means but when it is present it is deadly to continuing the work so if it isn't anchored, if

people cannot tell you about the system, can't tell you what it looks like when we get there, can't tell you what we are going to do to improve it when we don't get there isn't in the system. it's just not. we kind of created that and to build it down and test all the time. it was the way to think about that and of course you just can't overdo that i think. last fall is as you all know as well as i do people are not going to like you for this stuff, they are just not. they are going to despise you most of the time. the best part is that the dewitt silently the most painful part is they tend to do it publicly. you can either just do what i do and say they love me but they don't know me enough. it's their problem, not mine, which is a good defense mechanism being pummeled to death at a faculty meeting or board meeting but the reality is people are not going to like you

for some of the stuff and you need to set about being very deliberate of a support structure to help through this. you make decisions in this work like we all do that are mightily on popular and you make decisions but our mistakes. it serves me well to the public about both. that was a decision that was a mistake. that is a decision that is on a popular and there is a big difference are now both of those. and being clear about those is incredibly disarming. if you have a room of 500 parents like that was a huge mess up. i take full responsibility for that and we try to correct that. 500 parents saying school is closing because it persistently feels your kids and this is an on the popular thing to do. of really on popular and if i

were you i would be really angry my kid is being cast out. i'm going to explain what we are going to do to execute this decision and to support your child and there's a big difference between the two pretending that i know it's bad to close the school, yes of course it is and this is why we close the school than the buses do not come on time that one is me and there is a difference between the two of those and trying to be public about that i think has happened but where you can be vulnerable. the ability to be vulnerable is more important in my opinion and the ability to feel good about a victory because full portability is where we grow as leaders you know, i think a lot about frederick douglass. he lives a portion of his life in my county and men who favor

progress but deprecate agitation on men who want crops without plowing the ground. they want rain without thunder and the majestic ocean without it's terrible roar. progress always comes at a price, and the ability for you to guide the system towards that gives me places to learn and other places to learn. it is a big collective so i hope the faults were helpful and i thank you for the work a great deal. thanks. [applause] >> questions or her thoughts? like that was ridiculous, i don't agree with that at all, that is a good provocation. yes?

>> [inaudible] [laughter] what's going on at the gates foundation? >> the foundation has a college ready strategy which was redesigned two years ago and pushed very hard to bring a group of people and i absolutely acknowledge that i was felt in the recruitment and it has been very exciting about the work. the work that all i believe is the effective teaching work, and it is working to build measures, teacher effectiveness, a basket of them of which one is student achievement over time, and to help systems use those measures to fundamentally rethink how we hire and fire, how we award tenure, what is tenure, how we promote, how we place and how we compensate teachers and leaders in a system and then my other colleagues work to build the

tools a lot of the stuff that we heard about this morning around the common american higher clearer standards it is a big piece of our investment, how we will provide support to teachers in the field. how we provide the support for students. another one of my colleagues is endeavoring on nothing short of probably the largest scientific study that i have ever been aware of in public education and around the research of measures teacher effectiveness so we do lots of measures of studies but certainly one of the things that hasn't been done at this scale we are proposing a 15 million-dollar, 4,000 classroom study one of the things so we act like lots of things matter so we act like seniority matters. does it actually matter? like master's degree, we pay lots of money come $8 billion a

year in this country to get people's master's degree steichen's. does it have any relationship whatsoever with effectiveness? most of us use one of three or so instruments. we have the danielson instrument they are about the same. is what we are reading teachers all naturally linked to the teacher effectiveness? we should know that and of course value added and the part that makes the study uniquely different is its experimental design for lottery in the second year so we should get our hands are around the malaise in sight of the value added and the purpose then and toss this back and say here is what we know what should we do about that. and then we have a colleague who works on state and district networks. it is a little bit about the work that is happening, and i do know people it is an amazing foundation and i always for the people i work for, for bill and

melinda and warren and that is this education is absolutely amazing and, you know, there is $2.5 billion in the next eight years we are putting into this. it is a fraction of the work of eradicating malaria, global health, global agriculture, global development. it is a huge place with many facets around trying to alter the global aspect of poverty >> [inaudible] >> all of the work on the teacher effectiveness peace which is working in some very concentrated places, intensive partnership sites, working in a group of other districts for funding the kind of deep streams of work around what i just spoke about, trying to think about how we think of the national level of the teacher voice which is very important, how we think

about distribution of effective teachers across this country and then another piece is thinking about how do teachers consume knowledge and research at a kind of national level and one of the projects we are thinking about is going to be teacher tv. most people can't tell you the germ theory but they know that washing your hands is a good thing without ever having studied that. most people think class size reduction is a good thing, that no motion, is it or is it not? so the idea is to try to get research consumable for teachers as well as mastered practices across the country and we hope to be able to launch that shortly. yes?

>> go easy on me. [laughter] >> john i always do. question, i understand some money went to the states, and for teacher effectiveness and there were a few states selected and we thought it was one, so the question for me is what are the expectations for the foundation for the states to do and then how can we ask leaders influence with this state is going to do because it is scary when you see the money going to the state and another research will go on and here we are again. >> so, just a bit of clarification. the foundation at the moment is working to identify 15 states that it will make an investment. that hasn't been decided yet, and i think it will probably be less than ten at the end of the process and that will be about a

year away before that money goes. i think you are referring to money that just went out to help a group of states for one purpose only and that was to write their face to the top application for the state which was a small investment for 14 to 15 states and it's on the deliverable is to write a competitive application for the race to the top read the other piece more significant has not been done yet and when those states are chosen and announced i would strongly encourage superintendents' to work with chiefs on the issue because it is point to be like we did in the partnerships and that is sleeper if it exists, governments, leadership, and schools like leadership are going to have to collaborative flee work on the plan we've before any funding gets distributed. all right, thanks. [applause]

>> okay. we are ready for the last session. next, a special presentation of all book tv series, "in depth."

author alice walker discusses her life, career and body of writings. ms. walker was interviewed at her berkeley california home where she responded to viewer phone calls and e-mails. this is two hours and 50 minutes. >> host: on your screen is the front garden of author alice walker's, in berkeley california. we have invaded her space for this weekends in debt and we are live the next three hours with alice walker. thank you for inviting book tv and letting us come to your space this weekend. we appreciate this. >> i hope i won't regret it. [laughter] >> host: you write a lot about gardening through your essays in your books. why? >> guest: my mother was a great gardner, a great influence on my life. we always have gardens. i can't imagine living without a garden. i wish everyone honor of had a guard and especially to grow food but also flowers because

food feeds us and our bodies and you know, flowers lift our spirits. postcode do you do a lot of the gardening yourself? >> guest: i do and i also have wonderful people helping me. >> host: why do you live in berkeley? >> guest: i was living in san francisco in a very famous district and the tourists got to me so i decided i couldn't bear having people photograph in my neighborhood, and it's going to be very hard to bear having people looking at my garden, but i thought i would move to berkeley which is much more quiet and more private and far fewer tourists. >> host: as an author do you get recognized on the street a lot? >> guest: you know i never notice. i only notice of people come up and ask me something or if they saw or make some other audible sound. i fink in berkeley people are so into their own lives they've

really don't pay much attention to who is walking down the street. >> host: is that a good thing? >> guest: it's a very good thing. i like living with people full of their own struggles, their own jolie and celebration, craziness, and it leaves much more piece for the rest of us. >> host: where were you born? >> guest: i was born in georgia in the countryside in putnam county. >> host: eatonton georgia. >> guest: yes but we moved there when i was 13 so i only lived there about three years, maybe four. >> guest: so you grew up in the country? >> guest: y growth in the countryside and that is where i feel i was routed. >> host: who are your parents? >> guest: what were they? >> host: what can you tell about them? >> guest: well my father was probably the first black man to vote in my county, a very brave man. he walked past the many angry people to vote.

he voted for roosevelt said he was very political. my parents also build a school for small and was burned to the ground. they built another one. so this is to say they were people who truly believe in office and believe in education. >> host: sharecropper's? >> guest: yes and farmers. i say farmers rather than sharecropper's because at this point not many people know what you're talking about but i say that my parents were farmers and i think they grow anything, cotton beans, anything that you have some idea these are people very capable. >> host: who was made pool? >> guest: my great, great, great grandmother who lived to be 125 so the legend goes, which means she lived from 1795 right through the next century and she died when my father was 11. so, this was told to us as a

wonderful story because she apparently got off the boat house and enslaved person in virginia and there were two children who had no one to take care of them and she apparently put one child on one hit and one child on the other and walked in a sleeve koppel which means she was chained by the neck to the person in front of her and behind her and she carried these children all of those miles, and that is why i when i have to decide whether i wanted to be alice walker i decided that in honor of her walk i would remain alice walker. postcode the first book you ever published, 1968, once, a book of poems. you have written several poetry books. how should one read poetry? >> guest: one should read poetry as often as possible and especially now because poetry is so connective.

the outer world is connected to the inner world in a way that is holistic so that it is almost like homeopathy. you can have one of little column and it goes so directly to the source of your sadness and anger and frustration that it begins to heal. utterly necessary. >> host: what was the first book you ever remember reading? >> guest: the first book i ever remember reading was probably goal of first novels, but i must have read many before that because as you know, caller for straddles isn't an easy book, it is a fun book but not necessarily easy. >> host: how old were you and how did you get a hold it? >> guest: birthday present from my teacher. everyone understood i loved books and i just devoured them and so this teacher gave me that for i think my 11th birthday, so i don't know what i was reading before. >> host: what kind of effect

did it have on you? >> guest: wonderful expansion of my imagination to think that people could be really huge that there could be a nation of forces all of this was great. it fit well with my own sense of the infinite possibilities of life on earth and elsewhere. >> host: i want to read one pullen if i could from once published in 1968. by the beau dedicated dustin howard zinn. >> guest: hoard xin was my teacher at spelman college. he was a radical even than and radical historian, wonderful person he was from the school. >> host: why? >> guest: it was political. he was an advocate of the students and the administration was an advocate of the status quo so they butted heads quite frequently and he was fired. >> host: did you leave spellman because howard st. left?

>> guest: partly but not entirely. i left because it was too small for my spirit and i wanted to be a writer and i was writing poetry and no one seemed to care, plus we were arrested demonstrating against segregation we could be expelled and i was on scholarship, so i had to try to find a place where i could be politically active, study and not worry about being either on will be arrested or lose my scholarship. >> host: in one of your books you read about the fact that the first protest you went to was in 1962i believe cuba protest. how did you get involved in that? >> guest: sorry i took you away from the point of view, how do i get involved? another radical professor was at spellman and i started studying about cuba and of course it was

in the news and it seemed so on a fair. if you looked at the map is a very small country. our country is huge and powerful, and the intention to just obliterate cuba which means, you know, of course millions of people, 11 million people call their children and all of their various relatives i couldn't stand it, and so i joined this demonstration against any kind of violence and i have been a defender of cuba since. >> host: and you consider fidel castro a friend of yours? >> guest: i do consider fidel castro a friend of the poor and all people who struggle to make a difference in the world and to change this horrible situation where the rich and powerful have so much power and so much money and the rest of us have so little. >> host: and you've met him on occasion? >> guest: i've met him twice. >> host: in cuba? >> guest: in cuba.

>> host: what was that like? >> guest: i like camelot. he's very funny. of course he does talk a lot and while he was talking one time i just went and sat down and he still likes an audience that he kept wondering why we were sitting down way across the room trying to get us back. he seemed to know something essential about almost everything. there wasn't one subject we discussed that he was ignorant of except for female genital mutilation. he had never heard of it but all of the affairs about native americans, all of the controversies in africa, all of our difficulties in the united states he was very aware of and he had a very sympathetic ear. >> host: welcome to "in depth," but tv's monthly program, three hours, one author. this month we are with alice walker at her home in berkeley california, poetry, nonfiction,

fiction, pulitzer prize-winning author and we are grateful we are able to come to your home and do this program. if you'd like to participate, (202)737-0001 if you live in the east and central time zone, (202)737-0002 in the mountain and pacific time zones and unfortunately no e-mails since we are away from the studio in washington e-mails. we did bring some you sent earlier so we have those to read >> guest: this is the altar room. >> host: why? >> guest: because there is a big altar right behind me and this is a place of meditation and prayer, and we have gatherings where we show films and talk about things of the day. >> host: and in the room behind us is a large statue or

shrine. who and what is that? >> guest: that is buda and it is a beautiful buddha, and it's very helpful and meditation. i used to meditate facing it until i realized it was so beautiful i was being distracted so now i sit with my back to 13 >> host: how often do you meditate? >> guest: as often as i can. >> host: daily? >> guest: years and now is a different time of weakness and having the whole day just to look at what eckert and think about nothing. >> host: of all the books you've written, 25 or so do you have a favorite?

>> guest: i love the temple of my familiar. it is my thickest book and many people grown over it, but i think whenever i meet people who get i feel i found someone who will inhabit the new country we are building. >> guest: >> host: i wish i could pull that out but i can't. you're most recent was 06, "we are the one's we have been waiting for." barack obama has used that line. did he get it from you? >> guest: i like so. i like to think so. it's a wonderful fault but it isn't original with me. this is from a poem by june jordan writing about south african women who have had to carry on the struggle when their men were in prison and so we have to think about how we are the people we have been waiting for if we expect to change the world. >> host: use a one of your favorite authors is our earnest hemingway. why is that? >> guest: i love his short

stories. i feel love of compassion for his grief-stricken life. he committed suicide at the end of his life. i am not quite sure why he did that, but i loved his passion for living and interestingly in cuba of the people still adore him and they think of him not only as a great writer but as a wonderful fisherman and someone who hung out in the bars and was regular, just a regular person i think that is why he went to cuba to lift part of his life. >> host: have you ever considered living in cuba? >> guest: i would visit but i am very happy living where i live. >> host: let's take calls if we could. first call for alice walker comes from atlanta. go ahead atlanta. >> caller: good morning ms. walker it is a pleasure and honor to speak with you. as a woman of color in the film industry, and what a splendid

you to be as great as you are however i wonder where do you get your inspiration from and first steps into creating your art? >> guest: my inspiration comes from existence. i think we live in an absolute fascinating and less merkel and while we are not just all looking at everything that happens at all of the trees, the rivers, the flowers, just in all is beyond me. if you pay attention to what we actually have on this earth, inspiration will never falter. it will always be there. >> host: you also write in one of your books that an artist often comes from a place of pain and suffering. is that the case for you all so? >> guest: yes often. especially in the early period. i suffered a great deal as a

child growing up. we were quite poor. health care was nonexistent. dental care was totally non-existent. i can't begin to tell how many toothaches i've had just on the physical plane. but also the anxiety about not having housing. when you are a sharecropper this is one of the truths about sharecropping. you don't own a house so you are at the mercy of people basically force you to move after you have made the crop for them and they get the profit and you have the debt so this was my child with my parents moving every year and part of it i just recently got this i think because my father was political and because we were shunted about and left him to have very poor housing because of that. >> host: rays may montgomery? >> guest: may montgomery was the woman that don't the

plantation she had inherited the plantation that many of my ancestors had lived on and we lived on when i was a child and she was an older white woman. she had a huge house and we worked for her, all of last. maybe not me because i was little but i had seven brothers and sisters and at least four of them plus my parents worked for her and the story if you would like that story is that during the depression my father who by then had i seen seven of his children many of them working almost all the time and he was working -- he was the chauffeur, the dairyman, he did the garden, the fields along with my mother and so he asked for a raise from $10 a month to $12 a month, and

she just went berserk and said to him i wouldn't pay that to a white person and i will never pay a speech that much money and before i would pay nigger that much money i would melt my own house. we could be dependent, you know, people, we live in a community of sharing so we didn't starve to death but we might have. >> host: a lot of your writing is spiritual. did you go to church as a child? >> guest: i went to church as a child and a sense of community that i love was fostered by my early visits to the church. i love the music a lot. i love wearing the dress is at easter and the issues and my first speech is when i was two and it was easter lilies pure

and white blossoms in the morning light but i had a problem with church even as a young child. i couldn't understand why the church had to be so narrow. i found nature always from the time i think i was crawling so much more attractive and so much more accepting and more mysterious so my mind often wandered so by the time i was 12 and my parents were too tired to discipline me i stopped going and i started my sunday morning when they would go to church by sunday morning would be sitting in a tree or running around the house looking at clouds coming and understanding might keep one this with all. >> host: next call for alice walker, brooklyn. you are on the air. >> caller: good morning. ms. walker, with respect to

fidel castro would you say he lives economically like the rest of the island? thank you. >> guest: you know, i haven't gone to his home but i have gone to his office where he works and that's where he spends most of his time in fact he does maybe he is no longer working because he has been sick but one of the things that moved me was he is so often working that he does his exercise basically jogging up and down his office, and that was very moving to me and yet i understood as a revolutionary someone who is dedicated to changing the society that you give up a lot. so i think that he is taking care of. i don't think that he is

starting buy any means i don't think that cubans are starting so i don't know if there is more to your question. >> host: another one of alice walker's's books. when was this published? >> guest: i think that is about ten, 15-years-old. >> host: next call fayetteville north carolina. >> caller: hello, my name is ralph and i was a captain in the army and your work when i left active duty the first time before i got called back i had read some of your work again and i used a line of yours in a point that i wrote that still hasn't been published and the line on used is alice wants to bomb the world with jolie --

jolie and jogging using your delusion to south america and the experience in south america of jogging -- >> guest: >> caller: and getting back to nature and mother earth and everything like that. something i've experienced though is it seems like it is more difficult now for those of my generation, generation x as well as upcoming generation coming generation y and now my children's generation generation b.c. for us to get published. have you thought about -- i've got this concept called grid of marginal position to have to leave your environment in order to appreciate your environment. >> hos thank you. ms. walker? response to what he was saying? >> guest: why don't quite get

the question. >> host: what is that? >> guest: is a drink like a medicine people use and a lot of central and south american countries to heal various things in the psyche primarily, and i studied this medicine for a year and he is referring to that. about publishing, i did found a publishing company called wild trees press. it's no longer working now because it was so successful that all i had to stop publishing other people because when you are a publisher this i hadn't realized i think you have to read everything and i just was overwhelmed by couldn't do my own work. my eyes were tired and so after having five or six books and five or six years we closed the publishing company, but i think for you and people who want to publish you should think about

getting together with two or three other people and founding your own company. >> host: as you can see we are going to show to alice walker has an extensive court in here in berkeley. you can see out there i want to show you these beautiful gardens as we take the next call from vancouver washington. >> caller: ms. walker it must have been around 1991 or to the national urban league suggested we use the peace dividend from to have a marshall plan for america and rebuild the nation's cities, and for stricter, hospitals, so on and so forth and tragically of course that isn't around we took and a full course our major cities resemble blood stain and shooting in chicago, philadelphia, baltimore. ms. walker, could you please talk about the importance i know you were a colleague of martin zandt, student of how words and.

could you talk about the importance of a marxist analysis and understanding the world today both domestically and in foreign policy? >> host: thank you, caller. ms. walker? >> guest: i can't because i cannot claim to be all that well versed in marxism and i don't know if i am a student of the person you mention but why can say is one of the things that amazed me about the communist manifesto from each according to his ability and his need was how much it is like christianity we're new taking your life you have what you can have but you also give an also don't take too much. so i think that one of the ways to balance the world is by sharing which is something i deeply believe in. >> host: is che guevara a hero

of yours? >> guest: yes. >> host: why? >> guest: j dub vara was someone who fought against asthma for instance and one of his daughters by the way i just met her a few years ago is a pediatrician and her specialty is treating children with asthma because she also has asthma, but i think that in his struggle to have a full life as someone who is afflicted he started to see and sometimes this is an affliction as for, to help us see when people are hard-pressed to exist and flourish and so he was able to take what he learned as a victim of asthma to become a revolutionary in defense of people who may not have had as much but they didn't have jobs, they didn't have work, the didn't have enough to eat, they didn't have medical care and i think this is also why he can

doctor. he was a doctor and one of the things that most wanted me about his life and death is after he died after they assassinated him and he was a doctor and they cut off his hands and to me this was so indicative of just the coldness of people and hatred of anyone who tries to use their abilities to help poor people. >> host: but take a vara was also a revolutionary and he hurt people were killed people. was it justified? >> guest:, i don't think that killing is justified. i don't care who he is doing it. for me i would say i will never do we if i have anything to say about but i am not speaking for him. i am saying that if you are watching a country of millions

of people suffer and millions of children starve, i think it is very natural to want to change that and if you find to talk yourself blue in the face as mandela did for instance, then the question is what do you do. the agency turned to violence. violence is something that is bad for us as a human species. we have to our great. we have to, you know, start in ourselves and try to root it out and control it at the very least if we can't root it out we can on, we have to think .. eath, but like -- i have not looked up the numbers but i would imagine in theee