i say before you go down that expensive path reproducing the budget imbalances, show me evidence because for some reason, i can't see it. >> the 10 minutes are over. [applause] >> david could go on, and he does in the book. buy it, and he'll sign it. thank you very much for coming, and, please, fold up the chairs to help our staff. ..

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> we got started because there were a lot of conservative thinking that work across agencies but there have been no single progressive organization, progressive thinking at work on economic and divisive policy. you know we think they are has been an ideology behind arguments that are made in washington with very little facts behind them and part of our job is to make the argument and the factual argument and the evidence-based arguments between our own views and i do think that sometimes you know when the facts don't argue for our position we re-examine those positions because we often fundamentally believe the most important thing is to be right about what your views are.

spain and now author jodi kantor examines the relationship between president obama and his wife, michelle. the book looks at the role the first lady place in the obama administration. jodi kantor who is a washington correspondent for "the new york times," sat down with her colleague, david brooks last month to discuss her book, "the obamas." it's just over an hour. >> welcome. i just want to say especially for the c-span audience one minute about where we are. we are at sixth and history synagogue which is one of the oldest conservative synagogues in washington. it was a synagogue for a long time and then the congregation moved to the park a few miles northwest of here and became a baptist church i believe. it was a baptist church for quite a long time and then it was the congregation decided they would move it so they were going to sell this building and

it was going to become a nightclub. and it was immediately, to great philanthropist said we cannot let it become a nightclub. let's make it a synagogue again and they refurbished it too literally to some old photographs and we were fortunate because my son, my oldest son who is now 20 was the first boy in 50 years -- and was the first person in since world war ii to use one of the -- since then. this is meaningful to us and worth celebrating for those two gentlemen all the folks that brought this back to life. from the sublime to the polemical, let's start with today. you have written a book about the obamas.

i think i like most people find it on the whole a very admiring book. the administration has i guess disagreed. they have come out with some comments about you. a what's it like to be in the middle of a political firefight. and what you make of what is happening? >> well, it is a little strange because i have been covering the obamas for five years for "the new york times" that it really started with a series we do at the paper called the long run. it's about trying to capture the lives of the candidates and especially because candidates are so restricted now and it's so hard to get access to them. one of the ways we learn about them is through their biographies. we delve deeply into their past and their characters and we really look at the whole person, and so this book in a way as an outgrowth of those stories which i have been doing for years and years. so the goal of this book was to

really write about what i would call the big change. when i started covering barack and michelle obama they really were a rock and michelle and the extraordinary thing that i was watching happened was, watching these two regular people become president and first lady of the united states and what i was seeing was that there wasn't a process that happened on inauguration day. when somebody takes an oath, is a as a huge learning curve. made all the more dramatic in the obama story because of their freshness to national political life and also because of the fact that they are the first african-american president and first lady so we really see a couple of things happening in this book. we see two people learning to take their partnership which used to be this private thing and turn it into a white house partnership. we see michelle obama have a really tough landing initially in the white house and then actually turn it around. in the third thing in the book is really about the most

fascinating thing that i find about barack obama which is his struggle with politics. after all these years i still can't get over the fact that the top politician in the country has a really complicated relationship with the business that he is then. anyway i worked on this book for two years and i published it. the white house cooperated. i have been working with all of these folks for years. lots of people in the obama inner circle gave me interviews. they knew exactly what they were getting into. i never misrepresent what i was doing and also i fact checked the book with an assistant before publication. we publish an excerpt in the times on saturday. then a really, i guess to really interesting things happened. the first thing is that people started discussing the book without having read the book and that has never really happened to me before because a newspaper

reporter -- and the other thing is that the white house did start pushing back and some really interesting ways. they haven't really challenge the reporting in the book, like i haven't gotten a phonecall from david axelrod saying you got it all the wrong and a lot of the off the record quotes are in the book is something that really surprise me happened yesterday which is that michelle obama went on tv and she said, i am paraphrasing, she said i am really tired of depictions of myself as an angry black woman. she also protested portrayals of her fighting directly with rahm emanuel. so that was kind of fascinating to me because the book definitely does not portray her in any stereotypical way and also i am very clear to mention that the clashes between her and emanuel were really philosophical in nature. maybe i shouldn't undercut my own reporting and talk about their differences in approach to

political life but that is really what they were. she did acknowledge that she didn't read the book so i have to imagine that she is responding maybe to the coverage of the book instead of the book itself. but part of the reason really i decided to be here tonight is to talk about the actual thing with you and with all of you. >> let's go to that political thing because that is one of the themes running through the book. he reminded me when theodore roosevelt ran and everyone around him said you don't want to be in politics. that is beneath people like us. what are the qualms about politics that the obamas have? >> part of the reason i think they're qualms are important and not to just be dismissed as that they are similar to the qualms that a lot of us have about politics, right? we all see what is wrong with the political system, what is ugly about it, whether it can address social needs and what not.

but you know, this is one of the many things about obama that was such a big asset in the campaign that ends up being somewhat intimidating in the presidency. time and time again in my reporting sometimes in very simple ways and sometimes in very complicated ways i found that he had kind of trouble acting like a politician. a small story in the book is about the first super bowl party in the white house. he is kind to everybody and he greets everybody but he does not want to walk the room. he has this principled rejection. he doesn't want to be the guy who is spending the entire super bowl schmoozing and he has this idea that he wants to still hang on to a normal life in the presidency. in my reporting i just watch that idea get tested again and again and again. >> there is another story in the book where he is having dinner -- he insists on having dinner at 6:30 every night so he

cannot schmooze and that is an admiral will thing. is that a constant theme? >> not only, while certainly wanting to preserve domestic life. part of the drum of the situation is that barack obama gets to washington and not only does he have got so much managerial or executive or our national security or economic experience but he has also never lived in the same house as his family in. the house they are going to live in for the first time is the white house, which is not in any way, shape or form like a normal life. let you know i think the 6:30 rom by the way he is obviously willing to miss dinner with his family form pertinent situations and willing to miss the two nights a week. i just find it my reporting that the obamas are constantly seeking ways to kind of limit and protect themselves from political life. >> so why do you think he rand?

if he is ambivalent about politics? >> i think it was a rushed decision and i think it was a hard decision. his aides say that you know the summer of 2006 he was still really dismissive of it and it was only, you know they began to sort of test the waters then but when you think about it, their decision-making process only went from maybe december of 2006 through the fall. what people kept telling him was you know, your time is now. if you miss this window of opportunity you may never get it again. part of the drama of the situation is michelle obama is initially very opposed in part because of the family issues but in part because she thinks, she is worried about attacks from the clintons, withstanding attacks and she thinks a couple of years may benefit him. what her chief of staff said to me is the decision just really weighed on her and i find your her situation at that time so

dramatic to cause the way people describe it is she really did husband would be an exceptional president and yet she really wasn't sure if it was the best thing for her family. so how do you choose between what you think might be good for the country and might be good for you? >> mitch daniels didn't run for president because his wife had veto power. do you think they have the same kinds of arguments back and forth? well yeah, the president and first lady have talked about it and also the physical white house is almost a character in this book. i spent a lot of time describing what it is actually like to live there and what the structures like in all of the restrictions that come with that life. i will admit that is fun to report on and read and that there is a little bit of you know exploratory pleasure in getting sucked inside the house but i think there are also two very substantive things about it. this to me is sort of the

argument of the book which is that the isolation of the presidency has two important effects on our system. one in is that it really limits the number of people who are willing to run for office along with all the other factors but you know the number of people who are willing to a go through presidential campaign and then live this incredibly restrictive life. it is pretty small and then the other thing is in no we consistently see these presidents get cut off in the white house and they'll say it's not going to happen to them and it happens to all of them. >> michelle obama is one of the first, well she is certainly the youngest person to have served as first lady since the central revolution. just because of the generation she is from gucci have a more difficult time than other ladies >> it's funny because she is

such a pupil of hillary clinton's in that way. in my reporting i found again and again that she and kind of everybody else in the white house have one eye on the hillary clinton situations and also the attack she went through in the 2008 campaign were really pretty painful for her and everybody around her. to be that new to public life and to watch yourself caricature that way was really, really hard. you know, they twist i think to it though is that you know what the aides talked about was that the traditional nature of the first lady said which was so confining at first and stop protecting her because political life is so scabrous in so difficult. it's another way of limiting. it's another way of saying i don't do policy, don't have to be having this kind of

discussion. i'm not going to get engaged in these kinds of debates. i think there is something you now very protective about the traditionalism of that role. now of course she is playing a much more prominent role in the presidential message which is what she wanted in the first place. >> there are moments of toughness that she displays but there are moments of sort of real vulnerability. there's one episode you describe where she is wearing normal shorts to go to the grand canyon and i guess the post made fun of them saying that they were, i don't know, peasant shorts are normal shorts and she wondered if she let the team down. how do you weigh the balance between vulnerability and fierceness that alternate in the book? >> that is part of what i think is so fascinating. part of the reason i think, i mean let's just banish the phrase angry black woman from

the culture, not only from this book at part of the reason i think the caricature of her is so wrong is it misses the vulnerability and it misses the anxiety. that is the words that are aides use. they don't call her angry. they call her anxious. the point of my report where i found her really fuming was after the scott brown loss, after the scott brown victory. scott around, a republican has devastating consequences for the president's legislative agenda. it is all in jeopardy now and she has two issues with her husband's team. one is that she doesn't understand how they could have let this happen, how they could've sort of dropped the ball on the race but the other issue, which is so, is more interesting and goes i think to the heart of the role she plays in the presidency is that she has always had this idea that

her husband is going to be a transformative president. she has never liked politics. if you are going to go into politics, you know, you have this lofty vision of who you are going to be and the administration had made these health care deals like the nebraska law that were very unpopular and barack obama starting to look like a more ordinary politician, and that is really what she was reacting to. so that is part of why i think the partnership is so interesting. it's not that we are delving into the secrets of their marriage. we are looking at her vision of the presidency and what she stakes in two and the standards that she has and whether he can make them. >> is her influence, does it have a philosophical or ideological direction? if she left are not? >> well you know, i'm so glad you asked that because it goes

to something you have written a lot about. i think you and michelle obama have a little bit of something in common. i think you know based on my reading of your work, you both have, neither of you put all of your faith in government. you know, michelle, to me, the philosophical difference between michelle and barack obama is that he has always ultimately put stock in the legislative process to get things done. that has been his political career at very early on in this goes back to springfield, she looked at what was going on in springfield and she said, i don't believe that the legislative process can actually produce the kind of systemic change we need in our society. you know, there are a lot of stories i have heard of her, looking at good legislation that

got loaded with political garbage or was defeated for bad reasons and so the interesting thing is she always took it non-governmental approach, working with the community more, working on sort of partnerships and business is. so part of the really, i think this contrast comes back to the presidency because the president is doing health care reform in the fall of 2009 and he is obviously having a really hard time. it's not as popular as he wanted to be. at his legislative torture and she starts her own initiative. what did she start? a childhood obesity initiative, and really what is the end result of a dominating childhood obesity in america? you would have a much healthier population and you would lower health care costs because you would diminish these diseases like diabetes and heart disease,

you know, that really bog down our health care system. to me she has got this kind of non-governmental answer to the problem. >> do you think she is the sort of person who in the middle of that fight, when they are upstairs together saying you have to keep the public option going. >> what are aides say is she does not back down on policy details. she is not fluent in the language of washington and policy detail. what they do say in this is where i think liberals and progressives can take heart with her is that she really keeps him focused on the reasons he ran in the first place, to do big things in the two issues that come up in my reporting where she really backed him against political advisers are health care reform and also immigration reform. >> now i once was interviewing someone in the white house and the president was leaving at the

moment ago on the helicopter in my interview was interrupted as i stood at the window just to watch the president for 15 seconds and then he came back and finish. that story typifies to me the love affair that staffers have. they just want to see the guide. has this love affair changed them? has the process that they have gone through, do you think it is change them? >> well, absolutely. the book is really a story of transformation, and i think there is a lot of political education in -- involved in that and there is a lot of them becoming more sure in their roles in more sophisticated and better attuned to the ways of washington and then i think there is a kind of loss too because part of the reason that the obama's were so interesting in 2008 were all the ways they resisted political culture and

all the reasons they wanted to do things their own way. there was once a barack obama who refuse to wear the little flag repel -- lapel pin because he said, never in these words, this is kind of cheesy, right? that barack obama is you know, that was several versions ago. your question about whether the insular nature of the white house and the deference that step has for them, that i think is an interesting question. you know what the first lady, people in the white house to say that people can be very hesitant to confront her. but then there are people who say you know, that is completely wrong and as long as you approach things in a logical way, that is fine. >> there is a pattern in every white house i have ever covered at the president is always

afraid of confrontation and firing people and the first lady is not. is that a pattern that adheres here? >> so much so and i agree with you that the history is so consistent that it is beginning to seem to me that, and there are exceptions here but it seems like you almost cannot be president without a spouse who is willing, right, to be vigilant, tough and to really watch your back. >> one of the great mysteries of american media was held barbara bush got the reputation of a kindly old grandmother. >> i have to tell you, think one of the greatest profiles ever written, this is really sending you guys back to the archives but i have to give a shout-out to marjorie williams because her profile of barbara bush in "vanity fair" that she wrote, this was in the first bush administration, is one of the great great classics and lyrical

journalism. >> marjorie williams, think she is passed away but she had two collections of books which are available. definitely work worth reading if you care about this stuff. they grow profile where she walked around the house, and certain parts of the house were on the record and certain parts were off the record. that table is off the record in that table is on the record. fantastic. let's continue with this theme of the insularity which you mentioned. the rule but i think you said she had, no new friends. >> i think you belong to both of them and they establish their rule in 2004 when he became famous and reiterated that. >> is that a good rule? >> well, we see its benefits and its harm. on the one hand, they have this really close nurturing group of friends from very similar

backgrounds. african-americans from chicago, very similar pattern coming from working-class families, all went to elite universities and did extremely well and all these people ended up in hyde park together and really bonded together. on the one hand, they have had the smart recently detected function for the obamas. i love hearing the descriptions of the obama's around their friends because the obama's are different. they let their guard down and they are relaxed and they are loose and they are funny and they say the things you can't say in public any more. it does become an issue in the presidency because, you know when i interviewed lots of members of this group, first of all they are really, they don't want to talk to the president about his job. they say that they only raised when he does, and they'd also,

they have such a perfect understanding amongst each other. they are from these really, they are from these really special backgrounds and they have had a unique set of life experiences but it's almost like the understanding among that group is so perfect that sometimes has a journalist when i have talked to them it was almost like they couldn't believe that in outsider you know, could understand them. and it does become an issue in the presidency that the president and the first lady are not reaching out a little bit more in washington. one thing i found a little surprising is that they have never had the clintons to dinner. at least a couple of months ago when i last checked and you know that is obviously a confiscated relationship for a lot of reasons. but it speaks to a fairly introverted approach to the presidency.

>> well, what is the relationship between barack obama and hillary clinton? you mentioned at the 50th birthday party you have a phrase that they had become warmer. warmer from what? >> you know the way most people in the white house describe that relationship is kind of two professionals on their best behavior. but you know there is always this sense too that it the fraught relationship is between barack obama and bill clinton. the philosophic and especially if you are going to talk about barack obama's objections to politics. some of those are his objections to clintonism which he, starting back in the '90s in chicago, you know he is a critic of clintonism and a critic of the ways of doing things. i think that is part of by the way their relationship with rahm emanuel is difficult. it would be tempting do you know

just describe it as these two totally different guys who of course work very well in some ways together and then had some real complexities to their relationship. but i think part of it is that a manual was in the clinton white house and that is how it does business and it is not how barack obama does business. >> if you want to see someone in the administration's farm say, who's smarter? and they will answer, i can tell you what they think. what about valerie jarrett? what was her role? >> her role was really complicated and fascinating. valerie jarrett is an old friend of the obamas from chicago. she is there mentor. she really helped them get started politically in chicago, and she made in a way a transition as a real estate executive in chicago.

she did have some city government experience to going and being a senior aide in the white house. you know, the theme of this book in a way is what is public and what is private in the presidency? valerie is a great -- her role there really captures how complicated it is because on the one hand she is a senior adviser in the west wing and she has got this outreach portfolio of her on and on the other hand she is one of the president and first lady's closest friends. she often represents michelle obama's views in the west wing. she is also the highest level african-american in the obama senior circle so she is often responsible for matters of race. and you know, this was true in the presidential campaign and still true in the white house, she was kind of a newcomer to national politics and came from a very different perspective.

in my reporting i have seen the tremendous, it's funny because some people in washington talk about valerie as a hanger on and i don't see her that way because i think she has given the president and first lady so much. she would run in front of a truck for them and she almost seems necessary to this transition they are going through. from 2004 to 2008, you know their daily decisions are more than two people can deal with and she is helping them transition. but at the same time, in the west wing she is sort of constantly under suspicion because she is such a close friend and people are afraid that she is reporting back to the obamas and some aides say she does and some aides say she doesn't. it's not clear where she fits in the system and the thing though i think about valerie's story that is important to remember is that the president chose to

bring her there so there is this very intent low up with robert gibbs and he is frustrated with michelle obama and the leader said he misdirected his rage and it was really at valerie. but i think the real significance of that story is the president that he could have a very nontraditional management structure, and not really a traditional, untraditional management structure but brought his best friend into the equation and that becomes very complicated for all of them. >> you mentioned how ambivalent they are about politics and mary b. valerie jarrett is too. some people in the white house or complete political creatures. do you think there is an invisible wall or is there a tension or ambivalence between the ambivalent political creatures and the political animals they have hired just to do the job? >> well, i guess part of the

answer to me is the change you have also written about which is that after the midterm elections, we suddenly see this white house become so much more overtly political. not that they have ever not been political. we don't want to be naïve about it, but the president who early in the presidency is much, wants to be authentic and do things his own way and has this kind of vision for how he is going to be different from other residents in some ways becomes a much more conventional politician and you know, and some of it comes out in such outward ways, like we talked about the super bowl party where he does not want to schmooze. by the end of 2010 he is no longer watching the game during these kind of watching the sporting social events they have in the other thing is even the team that he roots for change.

early in the presidency the first super bowl after they got to the white house, the pittsburgh steelers were playing and he always loved the steelers because of all of those great stories about the glory days of the 70s and the roomies, the family that owns the steelers in pennsylvania and it's an important time for him. he is a real sports fan and he is not going to find a neutrality. then we see two years later in the white house after he has been beaten up in the midterms, that totally changes. he says he is going to remain neutral in the super bowl and there is a game and a lost there. on the one hand he really understands that this is what it means to be president. you don't want to trash an entire state's football team and on the other hand, you know, there's something very appealing about the old barack obama who does not want to give himself over entirely to this.

>> i was in a session and there were a bunch of us sitting with senior administrative officials and obama comes in the middle sort of as a surprise, though it's a routine now it's not a surprise and we are having this high-minded discussion about some policy and he comes in like he is vince lombardi. he's a very competitive, one of the most competitive persons i've ever met. another thing i've wanted to ask you about is he is almost one of the most confident people. do you think that has maintained or do you observe the same thing? >> well, part of the change, i think we have seen is that there are moments pretty recently read that confidence seems to have diminished.

i'm thinking of the debt limit crisis. you know there are some insight reporting said the book about this phone for president was in but you saw it on tv. he is at these press conferences and the guy is just so incredibly frustrated with what is happening. the aides say that in meetings, he was upset about what had happened with the triumph of the tea party and also about, and i think things have changed now but over the summer i think it was really hard for him to deal with the loss of support from 2008 and beginning a campaign that felt so very different. he did say that he seemed kind of sad and that he felt really misunderstood. part of the question for 2012 that we are all watching is assimilating this and rebooting

the original vision for what he was supposed to be is gone now. he has to come up with a kind of affirmative vision of where he wants to take the country that still is realistic. realistic enough to be persuasive. >> do you see a process, i can't remember when you stop reporting this but do you see a process of that happening? >> well, i definitely think that the whole, we can't wait strategy, has restored some morale to the white house and they are also telling a much more coherent story than they were, especially economically and it was clear that they were very void by weakness and confusion in the republican field. the hits that romney has taken in the fact that they were kind of beating up from the behind-the-scenes seems to have contributed to that, but i haven't yet heard, haven't yet

heard him, and tell me if you have, barely articulate why he he wants another four years in a way that is truly stirring and convincing? >> they are thinking about it. but i agree. you have i would almost call it poetry and i mean that as a compliment. i don't think they have achieved a message the same hope and change message that they have been as finished reading the book they can do that. we will have questions on the floor florida we have microphones here. one remarkable one is their kids come everyone who has any contact with their kids say they are absolutely tremendous kids, completely untouched by all of this. how have they done that? >> well, i think that the sheer force of michelle obama's protective power does have a lot

to do with it. she was always intensely committed to motherhood and an intense mother. even back in chicago, the chicago friends say this is not the mom who was like sitting in the soccer stands with a latte gossiping. this is the mom who stood on the sidelines and said, this is what is going on with malia's defensive footwork. you know, so we are talking about, i may just remember almost everybody who runs for president and their spouses, these people are much more competitive than the rest of us generally and i think she has always been a pretty intense mom but then i think when they won the senate campaign and also the presidency, she poured the full force of her conviction and personality into making sure

their lives were structured normally and this is where marion robinson comes then, her mother. marion robinson has refused every media request. oprah wanted to have her on and she said no, no, no, i like being able to anonymously go to the basement on connecticut avenue just north of the white house and she said, everybody there just thinks i'm another little old lady who works in the mansion. [laughter] meaning like everybody thinks i am the housekeeper and in fact she is the first lady's mom. what i found in my reporting is that in a way, she has to do that because she is malia and sasha's ticket to freedom. their parents can't like take them to go get a cupcake in georgetown after school or whatever. she is the person who can do that. >> i should say that it has

closed in connecticut. actually now that we are in the subject one of the themes running especially through michelle obama's story is luxury. so there's the question of whether she should appear on the cover of vogue. there is the story you tell where she is at a soup kitchen and she is handing out things and she is wearing a 500-dollar sneakers from france. who buys 500-dollar sneakers and what is that about? does she have a genuine taste for luxury or is it just something that is fun? >> she says a couple of things. you know, what she said to neighbors in chicago when her husband was starting to become famous and she was starting to come to washington, she would basically say if i have to go on and getting a new dress out of it.

and you know, and so i think it's a compensatory pleasure she has to do this. this is one of the fun parts. i think it's armor. she has said looking good gives me confidence to go out in public life and also you know, she is so aware of the power of the image in a way that i'm not even sure that her husband is. she is highly attuned to both the pressures in the possibilities of being the first african-american first lady and what she is up against is so big. when she had image problems in the 2008 campaign when she was -- is an angry black woman, the advisers to do a little image makeover on her and in a way one of them described to me later was that we are just going to make her more like the mom on the cosby show. that line really struck me as i said to myself, wait a second,

in this country are we so low on positive, warm, loving accomplished images of africa net american women, do we have so few famous african-american women who are not sports or entertainment celebrities that they have got to haul mrs. cosby, who is a a fictional character and b hasn't been on television for 25 years or something, like this is the model they have to turn to. so anyway, so mrs. obama, the vogue story is really about her wanting to represent for young girls to see an african-american woman on the cover of vogue. the fascinating thing is that, not specifically the folk thing but other areas like that, robert gibson was so concerned about that because he saw the economy and bonuses and he

really became concerned about that. >> two more topics and then we will go to questions. this is equally shallow but this is something i've always wondered about. when you get this close to somebody as i have read in this is about barack obama's actual basketball abilities. [laughter] you describe a game, in fact it was his 49th birthday where he invites like all these nba stars. they put the different all-stars on different teams, combination of pro-athletes and hangers on and lebron james is on the third, the c team and he is saying i am on the seib team? who is on a and b? he allegedly, barack obama allegedly wants his people to play as hard as they can. did he really keep up at that level, a 50-year-old guy? >> he wins the entire tournament [laughter] >> that is not an answer.

>> while exactly but i think he goes, remember the story he told a couple of minutes ago about the time he ran the white house in the guy stood by the president for 15 seconds just that he could have the proximity? it's the same issue because our people treating the president like a normal human being and forgot he was president and about that birthday party i asked michael who helped organize the game, i said well if you know, what is the deal with him winning this and higher thing, because we know he is a good basketball player. but i mean come on, lebron james. so he said, look, it was the president's birthday, nobody is really playing their hardest defense on him etc., etc.. >> this reminds me of a story when he was running maybe for the first time, he was from north carolina obviously and north carolina won the national

championship one year and the next year the point guard for the teams the tar heels played in one-on-one and he told me, and you know i beat him. no you didn't. you cannot beat that guy. he always believed him and that always disturbed me. [laughter] that is a segue into the final subject which is really a summation which is really about the souls of people who art in this freakish or come stance and i want to start with edwards because i think you and i met on a bus on jan at short -- john edwards bus and elizabeth in their two kids who were doing a similar story to this really. there was a case and what was weird about that episode, and i guess it was the second time we -- he rand was that the parents disappeared in the middle of the day and the kids were sort of laughed. i went bullying with them, but there is a case where you would say the marriage was all about the public.

maybe you disagree. this seems to me, this is what the obamas are trying not to do. and so if you could just have some thoughts and then we will go to questions for the floor. the soul with people under the brutality of politics, the glare of publicity, the falseness of universal love. do you think their spiritual lives are still healthy? is there any religion in their spiritual lives we should ask in this room? how do you evaluate that? >> it's a great question because you know, religion, like marriage, is something that, there has been kind of this context about whether it is a public or private thing for them. when barack obama first ran for president he really put his religiosity out there. june 2006 he is making this call to renewal speech and telling people he is going to be the democrat who can win over evangelicals. how is he going to do that?

he is going to write this book and title it after a sermon by his pastor named jeremiah wright and we all know what happened, how that story and so religion is after the jeremiah wright affair something the obamas try to take back into the private sphere, something they discuss a little bit now but not that much any more. they don't want to showcase the washington church that they are going to join. i guess, you know if i'd have saved once said something that really stayed with me and what he said was, once you put some part of your personal life like religiosity, out there for people, and what he meant was when you market it a little bit politically, can you ever take it back? can you ever truly put it back into the private sphere? and what is so interesting about what is happening now with the

obama marriage is they are really putting it out in the public sphere because the president's personal ratings are much higher than his ratings on the handling of the economy. one of the things that his advisers are resting in and 2012 on is the appeal of the obama union and the obamas have learned how to go out there together in public and you know do this kind of public political performance together that has an authenticity. you saw the meeting in the oval office and in this book where they discuss it. it is designed to earn votes and so i think i don't know that i can answer it definitively for them. but you are asking i think exactly the right question, which is sino can something be shared with the world so totally and used for political gain and then can you take it back and make a private, entirely private

again? >> if i if i could add to max and simon opinion, i've personally believe that his upper peril and the second and thing i will say -- >> what his upper peril? >> putting anything up for -- what happens when reticence is surrendered? finally i will say it white eisenhower his last day in office he was asked, do you think the press corps has been fair to you and dwight eisenhower said, i don't think there is anything a reporter could do to hurt me. that is absolutely the right attitude. and i'm not sure for this president who is the first president who surfs the web at night and the reaction to this book i'm not sure that is the attitude they have taken but it is certainly one they should take. quite an admiring and complicated portrayal of the obamas. let's go to the floor. one of the mics in the aisles.

>> hi jody. how are you? >> i am great. >> what do you think michelle will about barack to do after the presidency? >> that is a fantastic question and i think a real source of suspense because, as she has discussed and there is more reporting in the book on that, the quality has been a real issue in the obama marriage. the best question i have ever a see there than by far is -- and my colleague helped me write this question. it said how is it possible to have an equal marriage when one person is president and you can go read the answer in "the new york times magazine." but basically the president could not answer the question and he ended up saying, my advisers care a lot or about what michelle thinks than what i think. so, you know i think that there is a real question, especially

since, you know this is the clinton history too, right? that bill clinton after his presidency decided it was sort of hillary's turn. i don't think michelle obama will ever run for public office. i'm on record saying if she ever runs for public office i'm going to eat every page of this book, but i do wonder whether in some sense it will be her turn to decide on the next step in their future. >> if i could interject, i'm reminded of one story in the bush a senior staffer who are on his state visit to england and george w. bush was bored. he wanted to sneak around the palace just to check it out. [laughter] and he said to this guy, let's get out of here. i want to sneak around in laura said don't you dare move. he had to decide, do i obey the president or the first lady? [laughter] he said he stayed there. >> i was wondering if you could talk more about barack obama's

relationship with rahm emanuel and how that affected his presidency and now he is starting on his third chief of staff's inability to find a chief of staff that he can clearly relate to has that affected his ability to accomplish things? >> i'm glad you asked partly in fact because david probably has his own perspective on his -- this issue. it would be interesting to contrast it. so, what i would say is that the partnership with the manual was always strategic from the beginning. there was never any pretense that these two men were exactly alike or have the same philosophies, but the president had a very ambitious legislative agenda and -- so the first, for the first yearly, maybe nine months of the presidency when the legislation is really moving

ahead, it works pretty well. there are some managerial problems that rahm emanuel has. he can be quite abusive and that has a real affect on the white house. a lot of white house aides told me there were things that just did not come to him on because they were worried he would low up at them so it had an inhibiting fat on him as a manager. also in fairness there was not a clear management structure where everybody reported exactly to him, but the real stress comes around the time that scott brown wins that seat betsy because even though they squeak health care through the obama presidency becomes less of like this forward legislative drive and it becomes something else and at the same time the midterm elections are coming up. that puts tremendous stress on the relationship because emanuel had been the chair of the dccc

and his life's mission before becoming chief of staff was getting democrats in congress, especially in these kind of competitive districts, and keeping these people in congress and yet you know in the presidency kind of have a different agenda. you have got to make members of congress take really hard but for example i mention immigration is a sore subject. one of the really sore subjects between them was that the president really wanted to push for immigration reform even though there was no legislation on the table. that was a really big problem for emanuel in the summer of 2010 because he was acutely feeling his vulnerable democratr states. so the relationship did eventually become quite complicated and quite strained. david axelrod even by the summer of 2010 felt that roman,

interestingly once emanuel started to run for mayor of chicago the relationship improved. was almost like the burden and the strains of the relationship lifted somewhat. >> i would just add that i wrong national nightmare of having a non-jewish chief of staff is over. [laughter] going back to josh bolten. >> given this setting i have a confession. i've not read your book yet. >> it is for sale. >> i'd like you to comment on something i read or heard and that is that you did not interview barack or michelle. >> every journalist for every story -- the. >> is that true? >> well yeah. i've interviewed them over the course of writing about them in and i had an interview with him in 2009 and when i started this project, i was there with my publisher. i didn't know exactly how much

access we were going to get and i pushed for interviews throughout. they eventually said no, but what i really found in the reporting is that their friends and aides were able to tell all kinds of stories that the president and first ladies just don't tell. if you have seen the way michelle obama gave interviews. yesterday was a real exception. usually she does a limited interview on a subject of childhood obesity for 20 minutes at a time etc., etc. and one thing i feel basically i write profiles for living for the times in one thing i do believe in very strongly is that you can't practice access journalism, meaning you can't wet weather or not some people talk to you govern whether or not you are going to write about them because none of these candidates were these leaders really want to talk to journalists that much any more. if you are with him giving

interviews -- max you you are giving interviews and they are giving interviews that are less and less in depth than they used to be so you can't let the question of whether or not somebody will sit down with you for 20 minutes control the entire story. >> i know you touched on this earlier about how you were surprised about the white house reaction, and you know i saw you on "the today show" and he said that they had not really disputed any of the facts, but since then they have, especially with the halloween party saying that they didn't try to cover it up. they point to all the media coverage of the party and what not. what is your response to that? >> so the halloween party situation is this and "the washington post" actually did a great story about this a day or two ago that is entirely correct. just to give everybody the context, this was in the fall of

2009, the first halloween in the white house. and so there was an outside component to the party. it was a lot of washington area schoolkids who were trick-or-treating and the president and first lady were there and there was a reporter. the king -- thing they kept quiet was the party inside the white house and it was a pretty flashy party. they had tim burton and johnny depp there. they were doing their "alice in wonderland" thing. you know i think this is an area where the coverage in a way has been very distorted as the "new york post" made it sound like it was this you know, for kids or something. they were actually doing a pretty nice thing. the kids were people since serving in the military but the white house was very nervous about anything that was seen as to hollywood into flashy so they kept the inside party very

quiet. they did not distribute photos of that. .. that's what they've said and what people have told me they are worried. a couple of white house people told me they are worried about my book itself and sort of sensationalized coverage of

stuff that i've described accurately. >> i want to announce we have time for three more, so one here -- >> okay. great. >> you spoke about the transformation that obama made to accepting it a little bit more and operating in that style more, which is kind of the same moment his legislative agenda kind of stalled because scott brown and everything else if he is reelected did he see this continue the transformation continuing to happen and on the political side of things do you think that that can contribute to him maybe being more effective publicly? she's been seen as the kind of weak competitive to the

congress, so do you think that that transformation can -- >> i think you are asking the right question because i think a very big question i have the president is procreative his conception of the presidential power is both because of legislative and economic circumstances and so more expensive sense of personal power - and that is why it is an unexpected contrast i think that is developing in my reporting with the first lady because the first lady doesn't have any officials power because he has to be extremely creative in a way in terms of establishing influence over the public.

so i can't answer for you how he's going to do that but i think you are asking the right questions. >> with this transformation that you are talking about from being very personal and authentic to being more politicized and more political as a person do you think voters as they are today are going to be turned on by the ability to kind of take control or the seeming ability to take control and make change or is it going to sort of alienate the young and maybe the a political voters that came to the forefront in his first time are now? >> that's a good question because i remember you wrote a column around the spring of 2010 when he was becoming much more overtly political, and i can't remember the specific example but i remember him giving the

st. patrick's day thing where he went to meet with john boehner and he actually went over to capitol hill for the st. patrick's day luncheon and tells this jolly st. patrick's day story about how out might we are such good friends and i was like whoa, you know, i've been covering this guy for a long time and it doesn't sound like him, and so i think part of what he has to do is find a way to satisfy the political requirements but in a way that is authentic to him and like you say appeals to the people who found him to be an original and unique place in american political life. >> thank you both for coming. i feel like everyone is almost asking the question i wanted to ask. i also wanted to ask about

obama's political instincts because my impression of him is he's very intellectual like a law professor in how he approaches policy issues, and i was wondering -- you also see some stories in the news questioning what is the obama doctrine kind of looking for the common thread policy wise and so i was wondering if you could just talk about how he approaches policy issues and in particular his relationship with very publicized aids like rahm emanuel who might be looking more towards the political affect. >> the thing i saw in the story about immigration reform is about how frustrating the kind of irrationality of politics can be for him because the story in the book is that he wants to

give immigration reform a push around june, 2010. he gets the speech in july and emanuel thinks it is a terrible idea for the reason mentioned but he really wants it to happen, and it seems not only with this but with a series of problems with him there is a series of problems in the world that have very rational solutions on the table, but those things are not -- the solutions and are not happening for the political reasons like immigration reform there's been a consensus in the country for pretty much in years about what is basically a reasonable solution to fixing our immigration system, basically revamp the system so it is more fair and less capricious, using better enforcement but you also allow people a legal way in and republicans have agreed on that in the past as well, but it's not happening for public of

reasons. another example that is totally different is the israeli-palestinian conflict because the same way there has been a road map for peace in the israeli palestinian conflict for ten, 20 years now. maybe the border goes here and maybe the border goes here but everybody basically knows what a potential deal would look like and it's not happening and it can happen for political reasons and, you know, talking to the white house aides and watching the president even talk about that on tv i think that it's hard for him because he's such an analytical person and he sees the solution to these problems is no mystery, and yet somehow we can't make it happen. >> thank you. the book is the obamas. the author is judy kantor.

[applause] >> more about the presidency of barack obama coming up on c-span2 booktv

mal eli saslow discusses his book on the letters that are sent to president obama from the american public. mr. saslow is a writer for "washington post" and he spoke in arlington virginia last november. [applause]

thanks. appreciate it. i hope nobody here is brill's reading because if you are it is going to be a total disappointment. he sings, take requests, you will all leave immediately if i tried to do that for ten seconds. i appreciate you all coming. there are a lot of people here who have been supportive of me during the whole process of writing the book, and people who edited and travel back to montana to read pages on the couch out there and people who helped in my reporting so i appreciate you being here and sharing your support here again tonight. so, the idea of this book actually was sort of born of frustration and the idea was the first and only time i flew on air force one. i'd taken this job for the "washington post," so i'd been working for a while where it was my assignment to write sort of more personal intimate stories about the presidency and with the president's life is like fun

and it only took me like maybe a week of doing the job to realize the president doesn't really have personal intimate moments, certainly none that i was going to get access to. everything about his life is outsourced in this really crazy way. he has 94 but words and maids in the white house, six calligraphers write anything he wants written, 78 people make his schedule every day and it's a huge army that sort of helps him operate in this day-to-day way and his schedule is subdivided into these 15 men and chunks and there is a secretary that sits outside of the oval office which actually has a reverse people so she can look in through the door at him and make sure things are running on schedule. he calls it the bubble but sometimes it really drives him crazy. in a few weeks i had been doing this job had been driving me crazy and often my editors crazy because i wasn't writing as many stories as they were hoping i was going to write and not getting to those really sort of

personal moments in obama's life. so, finally, after doing this for, you know, it had probably been a few months at this point, might turn came up to fly on air force one, and the way flying on air force one works as everyone who pretty much covers the president, like your name is put into this huge database, and every time the president goes on a trip they move through this database and eight more people get their chance to fly on air force one. so my name came up and i finally felt okay this is a moment on going to see something. i'm going to be up close and i will have a chance to sort of experience with this is like a little bit for him. as a, got dressed up. obama flies out of a private air force base in virginia. got dressed up, rented a car to drive over there because rachel and i had the time we had a battered pontiac grand am that we managed to keep function.

it didn't feel appropriate to blunt the tarmac on air force one. so rented a car. i am sure they gave me a volkswagen bug but rented a car, drove over there. weighted with these eight other reporters as we waited for our turn to board the plane. we beat it for maybe, i don't know, an hour and then they let us up. there are two entrances on air force one. they let us up the back one. it's kind of up by the rear of the airplane. we walked up the stairs, sat down and they said okay. we are waiting for the president to a right to the airport. so we waited for maybe a half hour. then we heard the president has arrived at the airport. he had never seen reporters moved this fast. there was a mad scramble to get back off the plane to watch the motorcade a right and then we watched him walk six steps from the entrance of the plan to the front of the plane and those six steps were illuminating. we saw what he was wearing and

what he was doing and we all were frantically taking notes about it really got back on the plane. we flew to new hampshire. we scrambled off the plan as fast as we could to watch the president watch those six steps again back into his motorcade. we followed behind separately in a different car. this event actually there was not enough time or space for the press to go into the event with him so we were off site in a satellite location where we watched the event on a closed-circuit tv and we were taking notes off of the event that way so i was sitting their feeling frustrated with writing of the presidency of any kind of meaningful way. they talked about before he took devotees ten letters every night rich or sampling of the 20,000 letters that come into the white house every day and he talked about how these wonders what he

felt like for his only direct connection left to be allowed in the country and the letters were the same that sometimes kept him sane when he felt he was barricaded from so many other things and that is something that seemed personal and real and genuine and that is something i wanted to try to write about. so, that's what i did. it started with a story from the post. i wrote a longer piece about the process of getting the letters to his desk. in the paper was generous enough to give me leave for a year where i did go out to montana and probably eliminated the distinguished title now but so went out there and wrote, and at the end of this year, finally did get time on the president's schedule where that secretary was looking into the reverse for people while we talked about the letters. and i will read a brief part of the book now that's from that

half hour i had about what this means to him. >> the president said the hardest letters were the ones that made him feel remote, even powerless. people tend to write to their president when circumstances turned buyer. it is a matter of last resort. what resulted each day inside obama's purple folder was an intimate view of part shipping personal struggle, a way of desperation capable of overwhelming the senses. some of you writers need urgent help, obama said, and yet the act of governing was so slow sometimes it took years before legislation could improve people's lives. a few times during his presidency, obama had been so moved by a letter that he'd written a personal check or made a phone call on the writers behalf believing was the only way to ensure fast results. it's not something i should advertise but it has happened. many other times he had forwarded letters to the

government agencies and cabinet secretaries as they are catching the standard handwritten note that read can you please take care of this? these can be heartbreaking, just heartbreaking. i may not have the tools to help them right now and then you start thinking about the fact for every one person who wrote describing their story there might be another 100,000 going through the same things there's times and reading the letters and feel pain i can't do more faster to make a difference in their lives. he said his lively reading in the white house sometimes made him pine for his days as a community organizer back in the 1980's when he was making $10,000 a year and working on the south side of chicago. he purchased the car and spent his days driving around the projects to speak with residents about their lives. he became familiar with many of the same issues that flooded 25 years later. housing calamities, chronic unemployment and struggling schools.

obama's fellow organizers in chicago consider him a master of hands on granular problem solving. he was skinny and polish them a good listener come still my eve and some of the older women in the housing project is made a habit of inviting him into their home and cooking for him. he looked around their apartments, keeping a lot of maintenance issues and then delivering that list to the landlord. he helped arrange meetings with city housing officials to talk about asbestos problems. he established the tenants' rights organizations, found a job training program by and lead a touring group that prepared students for college. when he left for the harvard law school after three years in chicago, obama said his path for his future. he wanted to become a politician, a job that would allow him to listen to people's problems and enjoy the simple satisfaction of solving them. now, he's the most powerful hold petition of all and fixing problems seems more difficult and the satisfaction more elusive. the people were right there in front of me and i could say let's go to the office or let me be an advocate in some fashion,

obama said. and here, just because the nature of the office and the scope of the issue we moved in ways that are frustrating. sometimes we want to do is pick up the phone and say tell me more about what's going on and let me see if i can be your social worker, br f. paquette, your mortgage advisor, your unemployment counselor. what i have to constantly reconcile in my mind is that i have a very specific role to play in this office, and i've got to make a bunch of big decisions that the of the aggregate having a positive effect for this many lives that you can't always be certain. that is one of the reasons obama had taken responding by hand to a few letters each night. he still liked satisfaction of providing at least one thing, immediate and concrete. so, what i would do when i pick a letter i was going to write about in the part of the book i enjoy the most is i would go and spend with these people who'd written to the president and received back responses from

them and that is by far i guess the biggest privilege and for me was getting the chance. the mail that comes into him and comes a muffled roar of the ten letters every night is so remarkably diverse. it comes from all kinds of people, people who despise him, people who love him, mostly just from people who are writing about what is going on in their lives. they're sort of like these journal entries. they are so personal because people don't necessarily expect he is ever going to read them and then, for me to be able to go and spend time with those people and be there with their while they are trying to reform a school or filing for bankruptcy or making these decisions in their lives with a huge privilege to see how that works on a small scale while watching how the president is trying to deal with the problems

so for the bulk of the book is the stories of these people's lives and narrative journalism of watching how things for these people go so the other passage i'm going to read before i hope taking some questions is a slightly longer passage, and i think it will just give you a feel for what this book really is like. this is a couple that read a letter to the president when they were just going through the brutal stretch. it's a woman and her husband that lived in michigan which is in a really bleak town in michigan halfway through, halfway from toledo and detroit and actually in the toledo or detroit than either of these places, and the woman had lost her job, her husband ran a poor business and he lost that job. she had then been diagnosed with cancer and wrote a note to the president, just sort of kind of telling him what things were like there. he wrote back a pretty sort of inspirational note to her and

decided once they got this note to president told her things could get better and take steps to make things better and what they decided to do, the only way they could think things would be better is they decided to file for bankruptcy and get a fresh start on this tremendous debt that amount in their lives and this passage i am going to read is the scene of their bankruptcy to this day. they awoke at six on the morning of the bankruptcy hearings as if they had never slept. janet had broken her ankle the day before and another stroke of bad luck when she tripped going down the stairs and now all she could think about was the dwight gooden and cigarette. he had a headache that was threatening to become a migraine. he walked out of their bedroom to discover three loads of on folded laundry spread across the living room floor, dishes on the kitchen table, and their youngest son much-year-old

awakened wailing because of an earache. he checked on the e-rate and this was their latest concession to the economic collapse to smoke each marlboro medium into shifts but was meant to cut their consumption in half but instead they were smoking twice as often still burning $13 a day on two packs and wasting gas to drive ten minutes to wal-mart but offered the best cigarette prices. he smoked his half cigarette down to the edge of the filter and flicked into the air. i don't know if i can do this, he said. you have to come she said. i've got five hours of work left to finish, jset. i have the late shift tonight at the airport. we have one kid screaming and another on a field trip i have to drop everything to go to ann arbor's we can prove we are broke? i'm sorry, jen said, there is no choice. he went back inside and searched through his closet for an outfit. the last time he dressed up was for their wedding, five months

and 15 pounds ago. and now the slacks refused to attend. he found another pair of rankled khakis in the back of the closet and smoot did them with an iron. they fit but he couldn't find a belt to match. he walked to the bathroom mirror and tried to not that i once, twice, three times and still it ended up dangling above his belly button. dammit, he said. he threw the tide back in the closet and went into the living room to show jen his parcel outfit. you look good, she said. i feel like an idiot, he said. jen went outside to smoke and mother have cigarette and jay disappeared in the closet again. this time when he came out he didn't ask for feedback. he was wearing shoes, jeans, a belt and an oversized the detroit t-shirt and a baseball hat with sweat marks. he took a cigarette behind each year and grabbed his car keys. this will have to work he said and then he kissed jen goodbye before she could object.

he drove across the street for a coffee with three creams and three sugars and he pulled onto the highway and headed for an arbor. jay get the review of while he drove and thought about the other times he traveled this high rate. he lived in ann arbor for a few years in his early 20s. he worked on swimming pools when the economy was booming. customers often paid him in cash so he traveled with a stack of 20-dollar bills in his pocket. he celebrated a friend's birthday the steak house in town where waiters refloated the napkin when he went to the back room and he ate salad. now he drove past that restaurant and parked in front of the courthouse and the vice president biden on the wall on the entrance just a mittal metal detectors was the printed sign bankruptcy proceeding, he read with an arrow pointing at the courthouse stairs. he followed this line to the second floor lounge where the bankruptcy hearings have taken

place every other wednesday from a year because the court room was always overbooked. the bankruptcy lounge looked like the waiting room at a doctor's office for if the flowers of the entrance, four televisions hanging from the ceiling and the issues of fortune magazine, an ironic choice spread across the coffee tables. chairs were arranged around the room and the bankruptcy essentially the judge sat with a white folding table. he found a chair near the back of the room and surveyed the people sitting around him. there was an elderly black man wearing mismatched television tv to tennis shoes one black and white. another in a harley-davidson shirt with a grizzly beard, an obese woman whose genes have flesh in plain view in the leader jay woodworth that many of these people had been advised by their lawyers to look as distant as possible and reinforcing the bankruptcy. there was the unspoken bankruptcy court to the press, not to impress and baseball hats

jay is the most by year in the room. the lawyer was around 20 minutes late and mumbled an apology and out of bankruptcy traffic and pulled him into the hallway for a consultation. thanks for coming, jay said. the lawyer had his hair slicked back and he casually talked with a pen in the air with his right hand. sure, sure, he said. glad to help. it was a good day for the lawyer who would represent the of the people filing for bankruptcy urning 1300 per case. jay and jen already started sending checks as part of a payment plan incurring one new debt in the attempt to erase all the others. succumb to remind me again why you are filing, the lawyer asked. lots of reasons, jay said, but mainly because my pull business went under. really? i thought you made a lot of money. my brother just got in in ground pool and its cost him 30 grand. we didn't get any orders like that, jay said. the lawyer shrugged and handed

jay a forum to hand out. jay grabbed the hand and started to write. under a 2008 income he wrote 14,302,009 income, 23,000. he checked to boxes, the bottom of the form and can detect the lawyer. okay, the lawyer said come here is how this is going to go. they will call us up and ask you a few questions. keep your answers short and polite. there shouldn't be anything confusing. if all goes well, you will be granted your bankruptcy. don't be nervous. i do this all the time. trust me. this is a piece of cake. jay nodded and they went back into the lounge where they stood to announce the beginning of the proceedings. the room fell silent. jay leaned forward in his seat to listen. one by one, people filing for bankruptcy watched of the front of the room and sat across the white table. they raised their right hand, swore under oath, and offered their testimony, the soundtrack of a recession. case one. the primary reason i'm filing

for bankruptcy is the real owner, operator of a truck business. that went bad. now i have no truck and no business. case two. i'm in sales and there is no commission. i sell copiers and printers. it's a full-time job and, sir, i need only 11,000 last year. case three. my son is on welfare and not doing so good, so now i'm supporting all five of the grand kids. 30 minutes into the hearing of the bankruptcy of fishy it stood up from the table and called for jason stanley klein. jay walked to the front of the room with his lawyer and they sat side by side at the white folding table. the official yet, doug elving, stood back at them. he was a muscular man with a crewcut and dark circles under his eyes. he'd been processing bankruptcy cases every other wednesday for 21 years supervising what he called the nonstop parade of misery from eight a.m. to 4 p.m.. it had always been a hard job. but later he started to wonder to was becoming unbearable. bankruptcy cases was at an all-time high with more than

1.87 million people filing for it nationally during the 12 month period ending at the end of 2010. he had processed 7000 become season to thousand nine his biggest year ever and he was on casework 50% more in 2010. the preparation for each case required 60 pages of paperwork. the amount of ground work made the face-to-face meetings even easier. people filing for bankruptcy seemed more desperate than ever, he thought, and more likely to snap. they shouted, they cried, the slam their fists on the table. lately he had been forced to call in the court-martial to handle a violent outburst about once a month. he thought his job as a mother to that of an emergency room physician. after a while, you've seen a lot of the same pain and suffering, he said. you knew the stories. people are sick, unemployed, homeless. i don't want to say you become jaded necessarily, but you have to look at the problems subjectively and move forward in an efficient manner to the next

case. now elmen looked at the next case, jason stanley klein, case number 104-5682. so, elmen said, what caused the bankruptcy? i went into business at a bad time and in a bad location and a lot of my debt stemmed from that, jay replied. elmen looked down and studied his bankruptcy filing. not long ago elmen believed most bankruptcies resulted from avoidable mistakes. now he wasn't so sure. he's all on jay's peter were a familiar combination of bad luck, declining wages, housing for closure and unemployment, the story of michigan's economy at the beginning of 2010. some time, elmen studied a case and not immediately if one of his favorite expressions. by the grace of god. he continued to do his job, he said because the paycheck kept him on the right side of the white table. he looked across at jay. is everything you filed accurate, elmen asked? yes, sir, jay said. and i have no further questions. that completes your exam.

jay stood up and walked out of the classroom. the lawyer followed him into the hall and squeezed his shoulder. no further questions means they're going to grant to the bankruptcy. jay nodded and shook the lawyer's hand and walked to his car and drove back. he called from the road. it's done, he said. let's celebrate. the aid of a mexican a restaurant in monroe with the entrée cost $4.95 and was big enough to split. jen li and her crutches against the wall and wrapped her arms around him in the parking lot. they smoked a cigarette and went inside to order. a year from him and a margarita for her. it is 11:15 a.m.. she had to work at the airport and have to take him to the doctor to check on the earache. the restaurant was empty. mariachi music in the background. they sat on the same side of the booze holding hands. jay took off his hat and raised his glass. to bankruptcy, he said. to a fresh start, she said. to 2010, he said.

it reveals a lot of what was going on in the country over the course of the year the white was reporting and for jay and jen one of the heavier stories in the book over the course of the year the final for bankruptcy and got bankruptcy and continue to mount because things did not get better and at the end of the year, and at the end of the book a heartbreaking moment they decided they were going to take their first trip to new york city i had been writing them again and again, a dealer that knew they got a letter from the president and eventually jen and jay drove to new york and sold this letter for $10,000 so they could pay off their debt so that was one very direct case where this exchange had a pretty profound impact on these people's lives. other stories and hear or more hopeful and the mix of the envelope ranges from this kind

of devastation to kids that are inspired by obama and in that running for class president and doing well because of it. but one of the things i find just astounding about the process every day and the fact that the president reads the east and letters every day, for me, reading that for a year and having no control over everything. i mean, it's -- it's pretty humbling in terms of just what people are going through in their lives in the country, and people tend to write when things are difficult for them and as a journalist i know that usually most of the feedback i get is people that right because they are upset about something and i think that his -- what he reads reflect that and so i also think it is a fixture of what he does and will continue to read all ten as long as he is an office. so far the mix of letters hasn't got any easier to read. it's gotten more difficult. and so we will see how that changes in the time to come.

i would love to talk, questions on anything? if you want more uplifting stories. >> you see he gets 20,000 a day or a week? >> a day. >> how does it get down to ten? >> it is a crazy process the requires an army. mail used to be handled inside the white house itself before the anthrax scare and then they decided it was too big a risk to have all this stuff coming in there, so they took over this office building in downtown where on the ninth floor of this building, 50 employees, like 100 in terms and 1500 volunteers sort through this deluge of mail that comes in every day. and they are very specific about measuring the the metrics of the mail. so e-mails are like automatically categorized into one of 75 folders that people like we are likely to write about. and they measure every day okay today we got 20% of the mail

about occupy wall street and half of it was negative and half of it was positive. and they take these metrics and they make sure that the ten that they give to obama reflect the general feel of what is coming in. so, pretty much the people who select the letters for him are these staffers in that office, it's people who it's their first job in d.c.. they may be worked on the campaign. they go and read 300 of these letters a day to the tax fight over the course of the day that a representative of the main issues that are coming in but also stand out in some -- that stick with them and then those letters go to the director of the office who looks at 100 of these potential lenders to go to his desk and takes ten that he feels like represents what came in at that day. it requires an army. >> how did you pick your ten? were you looking for ten representatives or were you just looking for the really amazing

stories? >> luckily i could kind of do both because there were -- it was sort of a reporter's dream. you could take one day and by the fact 20,000 letters have already been reduced to ten those are going to be ten really compelling stories, and so to then be able to pick i was able to read hundreds of letters over the course of the year and so to be able to pick from this huge wealth of letters, it was hard to pick it and i wanted to follow. i did -- the few things for me i wanted to pick i wanted a mix. i wanted stories like jen and jay but letters that were fahmy or fun or so that was one thing. also i was looking for letters that impacted his presidency in a profound way. and some of these letters in the book really have been transformed it for him and also the people that wrote. letters that he has used to pass major bits of legislation by

talking about the letter again and again and again were times where he's responded to a letter and then gone to that person's home town to give a major speech. so looking for things like that. also, and this is a little bit like maybe inside the general, but i was looking for stories i could still go and watch things unfold. the book i think would be a very static if i was just going back and reporting on this person wrote because of this and this person wrote because of this to rely wanted the letters to be a beginning point for me where somebody is writing about something they are going through and then i can watch and be there while they are going through it. other questions? faults, criticisms? yes. >> i read the book. >> cool. spec i thought it was excellent. i thought it was something that should be read in school because i think it was a very -- i think that was one of the messages

that came out of it is you can connect, you can make your voice heard, but i saw this story about the health care, about a woman in ohio that was so ill and the fact her story was kind of clenched in that health care deal and was absolutely amazing. >> the story that she is referencing in the book which probably is the letter that over the last three years has had the most profound impact on the president it came from a cleaning woman in ohio that wrote a letter to say basically why health care premiums skyrocketed. i can't afford to pay them any more. i've had to choose between being able to keep my house or pay my health insurance but i'm giving up my health insurance. the president immediately recognized the potential of the letter he was just beginning to

pass as health care reform and so at the white house they talked about well maybe we should bring this woman here and have her talk to some major health insurance companies so they called her to see if she would be doing that. at that .2 weeks had passed and during the two weeks right after she had given a per health care she had been diagnosed with leukemia in given a 35% chance to live. so it was this really sort of impact for a moment for both the president and this woman and instead of having her to come here i will go there. he gave a major speech there and this major icon for the reform bill they rode back-and-forth more than once the hard part is the hardest chapter in the look to report because i was there with natoma canfield while her

immune system was so fragile she was barricaded in her own house and her sister and i stopped over there and went to chemotherapy with her while she was just scrubbing to the and nail for her life and really what fortified her during that stretch is not only the letters that she was getting from the president also because she has become this icon of health care reform she then was getting letters from all across the country to the people writing to the director people sending checks and for her during this incredibly the time they go in and out of the hospital it impact of the president and her in a pretty profound way. >> i was really struck by what people give you to their lives at the breakfast table for all

these moments -- spec is a privilege and what i do so in this case i'm always amazed just as a journalist in general by hal willing people are to open up their lives to a writer which is not an easy thing to do to have me go to your bankruptcy hearing with you it's like a very it's a lot to ask somebody and in this case i think people write to the president oftentimes because they want their stories, and if somebody is listening to them and so then in these cases when i called and said the president did read this letter, but you are going through does matter and i want to come in and write about it because it's -- i want to write about it in this up close and honest way across-the-board so

just in terms of all the trips usually go and other people in the room who do them, my experience with them is a first day of a trip like that can be a little bit awkward or hard. people are nervous and those days are the hardest. usually by the second or third day you kind of stop being a writer with a reporter and start being you or i or joe and that is when i think you get to that stuff because you are at this level of intimacy and you need to be there which is why i knew i wanted bidders like to go and spend time with these people because just going back and reporting on why people wrote, you can get to a certain level of debt but it's a different kind of thing and helps you to the next level. >> before i finished the book i was looking at the internet.

>> sure, thanks. >> honestly that made it harder to take the letters i was going to write about. usually in taking a letter warned is looking for is there were some big issues over the course of the year that i knew i wanted about the oil spill to read as a finding sometimes i would say here are ten letters i can pick about immigration, and then i would call ten of the people and have these initial sort of half hour 45 minute conversations to get a feel for how it was going to work and sometimes narrowing those ten to one was brutal and i felt like i could have written 100 letters and nobody would have dreaded after the first. but it was hard to narrow it down to that number.

>> did you take ten trips or send people who didn't make it into the book? >> i never went out of town for a trip and then said this is granted be on the cutting room floor. i made more than ten trips because of what were people going through. i would go for a few days and then come back to be there for a bankruptcy hearing on the first day of college so it ended up being more than ten trips in that way but i never went somewhere and felt this isn't going to work. my job for the paper where i do the same kind of thing that doesn't happen very often and i don't think it's because i get there and i getting incredible material. i think a lot of is that people are just really interesting and if you get to that level you can

write about them in these ways there are very few people whose lives go. if you're at that way it is a very surface level. >> to the white house approve the letters that you selected? >> they did not come to know. i had to battle with them for access to do this book and we need to work it out so leggitt to read the letters you read, and that was the process in a long process, but once i had that access, they were not -- i picked whatever i wanted to pick which i think that works for them because one the president likes to talk about these letters and why they like to talk about these letters so much as they want to show that he's listening to everybody. so the fact that i wanted to

write about one of the letters in the book is a republican in texas who writes this really angry e-mail lead at night. i knew i wanted something like that in the book but also, like i did for them they wanted to share that yeah he reads whatever comes in. so i made a workout. >> it seems like this book was for teaching journalism. [inaudible] >> i don't know if it is. i hope it will be. maybe i can pull some strings in montana but that's probably the extent. thank you. >> has the president read the book? >> he has gotten a copy to i doubt he reads the book just in terms of how much he has going on and also i was just thinking

everything he reads is very public and the release, the white house occasionally releases and it would look really weird if he's reading this book about the mail he reads and it would look ill-conceived and somehow. i'm sure he does but yeah i sent him a copy and a handwritten note and i don't know if it got through the mail room. >> i haven't read the book but i plan on reading it. i'm just wondering where you in contact with the president throughout when you were writing? i knew you had an interview that -- >> i was on the staff and some people, very few people work in his administration and who i know it at this point i could sort of -- if i was writing part of the book was an education for me because these tractors are

about different issues to learn about for instance education policy and learn about unef and then you can write about education policy and an interesting way is hard. so, during that i would be talking to people, you know, arne duncan and people on his staff and chongging to learn about what they were trying to do with education and learn in that way. i wasn't talking with the president about any of it until the end. and then i went in and had 30 or 40 minutes to sort of talk in general about the letters and also talk specifically about the letters in the book. >> did you ever get to the office? >> i did, yes. which is just a crazy and really cool place. i mean it's like this building is a filter between the public and the president and so, if you send an e-mail it lands on one of the computers there. if you send a letter that goes. if you call the white house comment line there are 35 people

in the phone bank and you pick up the phone and try to keep all the calls to ten minutes. there is by far the most fascinating, there is a room i guess where hundreds and hundreds of people send the president gifts which is a strange instinct and they said really weird things. sometimes like, you know, just like when he was interested in getting a doll but the white house received a handful of different puppies. in reading about the history of the mail room, there were precedents for big game hunters that sometimes received gifts from across the world, tigers, they would land at the white house and so the gift room is probably the coolest place. it's strange. yeah, the gift room. spend some time with a tiger. [laughter] could be a book. it's really cool. >> i have a question with this.

i'm sure there were letters of threat that he would receive. what did he do with those letters? >> the first thing that happens with any mail is it goes through a week-long screening process where it is scanned for chemical threats, radiological threats, and so that happens first. then it comes into this office and the reason that they have a huge staff is there is a rule that every single letter has to be read because, who knows them. in one of these could be some kind of a credible threat, so that's why they've decided we need to make sure that a person reads every single one of these letters and letters that our friends are flagged immediately and go places much higher than me. but also, like all the comment line, even people calling in to the white house, all of them are automatically transferred both suicide calls and threats, which is astounding to me that enough people call the white house with either because they are going to commit suicide or because they

have a button on every phone that automatically transfers it and so yeah it is said. people call for all kinds of things. crazy place. it's just i think the whole building is like this window and both the fact that things get to him which is great and also what it takes to get things which is eliminating in this other way too. any other questions? >> has the volume increased with obama because i know, you know, there is a system because he has talked about the letters and he has complained about not being able to have that kind of thing and so my guess would be that people feel as though he is somehow more accessible. >> i think definitely the

volume, at first the volume was more than they had ever seen. like right when he was into office of any president. i think that is partly like the historic nature of the election and partly the letters especially e-mails are much easier to send. people can go. letters are one thing to the e-mails, like you can go to the white house web site and send e-mail very quickly, and people do. thousands of people a day. the volume at the beginning was like a skyrocketing and stayed. it came down a little bit, but it stayed very steady and i had coffee with a director in the mail room today that said that they've noticed that it's already climbing again and she thinks for the next year before the election it's going to be crazy in there. people write i think probably more when politics are big in the news and there - but obviously it ebbs and flows.

>> thanks so much for coming of liberty. i appreciate you being here. thanks for all the support. thanks to all of you that have already read it. appreciate it. [applause] justin frank on his book obama on the couch inside the mind of a president. dr. frank is a practicing psychiatrist and also the author of bush on the couch. this event was held at politics and prose in washington. >> let's get started. on one of the founders of politics and prose, and this evening we are going to have an interesting evening. we have here dr. justin frank who is a widely known expert on psychoanalysis. he practices psychoanalysis. and he previously has a book

called bush on the couch which he came here for, so now he is to make things balanced he's got obama on the couch this time and i want to emphasize first of all dr. frank is a psychoanalyst. he's not a political analyst and a second of all he had neither president bush or president obama maudine on his couch. dr. frank is a critical professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral medicine, beagle science at george washington university. after studying obama very

closely, the public face of obama dr. frank has reached the conclusion president obama has obsessive bipartisan disorder, and is a neurosis of his. his dream of bipartisan unity. but i just want to be consensus this evening and bring one other perspective into the discussion. i just happen to be reading last night a new biography of eisenhower because the author is coming in all of a sudden on eight ran across what they are saying about eisenhower that the quest for balance was a feature of the eisenhower administration

and in the bill when saudi merely mean -- he is quoting eisenhower here when i referred to the male way to beat -- mittal way i mean as it represents a practical working basis between extremists, both of whose doctrines are flatly rejected. so, as i said, i want to find out this evening might eisenhower's strength is obama's neurosis. [applause] succumb here is dr. frank to tell us all about it. [applause] >> into very much for this lovely introduction and first of

all, since i am a psychoanalyst and not a political analyst, i will not predict who is going to win in 2012. but i will say that what makes obsessive bipartisan disorder a disorder is pre-empting discussion of the book in a way but what makes it a disorder is that it becomes the driving factor in everything he thinks and does so he ends up, obama incipit negotiating with himself before he even negotiates with republicans. that's one reason it is a problem and the second reason is he thinks and we will get into this a little bit later today, he thinks that he can reason with people who actually are not interested in reasoning with him. they are only interested in defeating with him and making him a one-term president said he has a fantasy that he can reason

with them and if he gives them what they want a will be doubled to get along and that is what makes it a neurosis. the thing about eisenhower reminds me of something i wasn't prepared to talk about eisenhower in particular but in the 1956 during the second election, they were talking a lot about segregation and integration if you remember all that or if you have read about all that, and stevenson said he thought integration and the south should take place gradually. and a southern democrat said he thought it should take place moderately and eisenhower proposed a compromise between the extremes. [laughter]

so that's my view on the eisenhower. i wrote this book really because obama was a man who blazed across the national scene in 2004. i had heard of him before 2004 because my son was a student at the university of chicago and he called me up one night after a speech when obama was still a state senator. ..

everybody who is elected will be different from how they are when they run for office but, and you can't keep all your promises but in his case it seemed like he was even more different than that, especially when it came to issues about negotiations. issues about appointments. issues about backing down on guantanamo closing et cetera. and also people he hired to work before him at the beginning which were a lot of wall street experts who worked for the clinton administration and part of

the economic disaster that had been happening. so i dieded i would -- decided try to figure out what that is about and what that came from so i started reading and one of the things that happened actually during the primary when i was not thinking about a book at all, a colleague of mine suggested i read, "dreams from my father". it is one of the great books. i adored it. it was a good being book about coming of age as adolescent ever, certainly, as a nonfiction book although some people might think it is fiction. and so i decided that not only would i work by studying obama as a president, his behavior and look into his past and i would try to do a more intensive textual analysis of the book. i spent a lot of time

reading the book, rereading the book, going over differentñi segues from one scene to another. things that i thought were blind spots in the book that were left out of the a lot of times i thought something was left out and three pages later there it was and it wasn't left out and what i decided to do really was look very closely at who he is and who he thinks he is and what his efforts are to understand himself and basically in the simplest ofçó terms there's a couple of things that people just already know. one of them is that he is, was a biracial child of a mother who was a child herself. she was 18, who had a black face and was raised in a sea of white faces. his father left the home very early on in his life. was never really lived with them and then he also lived in several places.

he lived in jakarta from the ages of six to 10. so he was back and forth. he was abandoned by a father. he was then taken away from a stepfather who was very involved in, an indonesian man who the mother also met in hawaii graduate school and obamañr himself was called barry. he was extremely close to lolo and even talked about him in his autobiography was somebody like the ground. he was always there. there was something elemental and earth think about him. he was essentially someone who came from mixed race. came from two broken homes and then the thing that really struck me more than those things which sort of most people know a little bit was how absent his mother was from his growing up life and at the same time how present she was. so she was really intensely present when she was with him and intensely absent and not because she was a working mother but because

she was really away. she was away for a long time. sometimes a year or two during his growing up years. so he really had this experience of this intense relationship and then abandonment. he in a way had to deal with abandonment throughout his growing up in one form or another. and because of that he was extremely sensitive to ban don'tment and belonging to groups -- abandonment. he wrote about it fairly honestly. he wrote in a poignant moment how he shoved away a fourth grade girl classmate because people were saying, oh, she is barry's girlfriend and he said no, she is not. and dissed her and disconnected from her and he able to talk about that even talked about fear when he was older. he said he was never really afraid of being physically hurt even when he was in the middle of the projects in chicago. he talked about being afraid

of not belonging to a group. that was his biggest fear, of not being connected. and row man sized families. so here is a person who wanted to be in a family, who roman sized families and wanted to find ways for people to get along. he wanted to heal his internal self. we all do. why do you think a lot of people become psychoanalysts whatever we do, we try to heal things from our lives and past. he is not different from anybody else in that sense but he was dedicated to healing his internal self and he was very focused on communities. so he was a community organizer because he wanted to bring disparate communities together. it was very important to him. it was fundamental to him and he felt he could do it and that was his goal. he also wanted to marry into a, with a woman who had a real devotion to family. who would not ever leave her

children. i thinkñi that he would never do to his children what his father and was done to him by his stepfather but what his father did to him. so he made real vows inside himself to be different. to really make a difference both in his other than personal life and to make the difference in the world because he felt that people could get along much better than they did. one of the reasons he felt that people could get along better than they did started from early on in his childhood. and that is, that his mother wanted to make sure that he was proud of his black heritage and she wanted to make sure since his father was absent to know there was a lot to be proud of historically about the american civil rights movement and all of that. and so she spent a lot of

time talking about these things. picture books. telling him stories. they talked about the civil rights movement, et cetera, et cetera but there was a story in particular that was important that was told to him by her father and then corroborated by her. he calls his father gramps, grandfather gramps. and barack,, sr. were in a bar in hawaii and at that bar barack, sr. was the only black face in the whole bar and one of the people at theñr barmaid a racial slur and the entire bar became silent. barack, sr. walked over to the guy. everybody was frightened there was going to be a fight. you know how in like a western movie or something and, and, instead of having a fight barack, sr. started talking to this man about the dangers and of racism and how terrible it is to be

racist. and that it is hurtful to the person who is the victim of the racism and it is also demeaning in the long run to the racist himself. they become dehumanized themselves, they dehumanize themselves and he was very clear about that. in fact it was so convincing that at the end of this like half hour lecture, if you will the guy was so moved that he bought everybody a round of drinks and that was a story that young barack was told regularly growing up by his mother. and the interesting thing was that even though it is a myth because, you know, we don't know about it, after his father died about a year later he writes that he got a phone call from somebody who was at that bar and he said i have been trying to locate you and find out

where you are. i just wanted to tell you this story how amazing your father was. he told him the exact same story the grandfather had said. now as a psychoanalyst i think that may really corroborate things. as a scientist we have n of two but i think that might be enough in this case and it was convincing enough to him that the triumph of reason over hate and that hate is based on ignorance in not knowing the other person that the triumph of reason over hate is so great and so possible if you just stick with it long enough and, i think he really firmly believes that. and he still does. that a he is his strength and his downfall. i think that there's some chapters in here about that problem. i call them the a accommodate tore in chief. i table talk about him having obsession with bipartisan disorder. those are all qualities of

his but he has other qualities that are, those qualities themselves are really, could be very strikingly powerful but the other thing that is very important that he also seems to be uncomfortable having direct confrontation. one of the things that happens why fathers are important, there is a lot of different reasons but one of them is fathers help their sons in particular learn to modify and moderate their owning a aggression. they help them learn the limits of aggression. the usefulness of aggression. they can model various behavior for them and they can help them. one of the findings that the psychoanalysts in boston jim herzog who has written a book called, father hunger found that children who are two, three, four, five, without a father at home, have more trouble modulating their aggression and managing it and what happens if you can't managing a aggression you become anxious or you, kind of split off and become

disconnected internally from your aggression. i think that is something that may have also happened to him. one of the things that is striking also is that all of us, when we are developing have an either/or experience in life. you're a good guy or a bad guy. my kids used to say to me, do we like that person on television or is he a bad guy? who is better, barry bond or mark mcgwire. whatever it is it is always comparing. is this the better thing or is that the better thing. comparing and contrast. almost like opposites and when you're an infant the theory goes, at least i ascribe to is that when you have a bat, your experiences are segmental. they're really like digital. so a baby when they're crying has never been happy and a baby when he is happy

has never been crying. i mean that is sort of the feeling you're with a baby who is totally miserable or totally joyful and that, but if the baby only has one mother they may link their image of that mother with both the crying and the happy. in order to manage their world they have two mothers almost, a good mother and a bad mother. it is an either/or. are you good or bad? eventually as they grow older they realize something woody allen called ambivalence. they learn that they can love and hate the same person and be angry and also need them that is something that obama learned very deeply in one way and inñi fact gave one of the most moving speeches i ever heard on his grandmother in the famous speech on race in philadelphia in 2008. but the problem is in politics most nations are basically paranoid and most nations are either/or. and many leaders are

paranoid, especially in particular in the last 30 years, ronald reagan and george bush, george w. bush, would be with us or against us. you're the evil empire or we're good. it is like either/or. and is a both/and person, not a either/or person. very hard for a both/and person to lead a either/or nation and it is a great difficulty. and i think that is one of his major difficulties, which how do you lead an either --/or nation but you have to recognize that it is either/or. there is lot more in the book. i'm not just going to go through everything in the book but basically those are some of the main ideas in the book. the, the technique of applied psychoanalysis is very old. started with freud. almost as old as clinical psychoanalysis because it is

essentially an experience analytically of treating people who you can never get into your consulting room because they're either public figures or they're dead or sometimes even fictitious figures like hamlet had a lot of analysts over the years. [laughter] probably still does and but it involves reading everything about them. looking at everything you can about them. looking for patterns in their behavior. looking for different feelings that they repeat. looking for feelingsçó that get aroused in you when you read about them and thinking about those things. so it's a very extensive exploration. the and the difference with obama is, he actually did write essentially two autobiographyes so it made it much more compelling to read them and think about him in a psychoanalytic way. then i would compare the difficult things that i read with various behaviors that he exhibited as president

and also comparing a lot of the things that he said versus the things that he did and i've looked at that extensively. and that's essentially a lot of the book. i felt that the last couple of chapters, what were very important was that, i wrote a chapter called, our obama and another one called their obama and the reason i did that was because i really think that there are not just two different obamas, one candidate, and one president, there is at least two different perceptions of obama and i was very interested in the dynamics of those perceptions. the unconscious factors that go into into making those perceptions and how people on the left or liberal people see him. people on the right, how they see him. and there is chapters on each of those. i was really thinking very much about hisñi accommodation and his accommodating and i will stop in a second but what happened was, i was going to send in the book on a monday morning to the

publisher to get printed and on sunday he made announcement that he had killed bin laden. i thought, oh, my god, you know. here i am talking about this bipartisan, neurotic president who's tough and, and i called the publisher and i said, editor, i said you know what? i think we need another chapter on this book. and it became a very interesting project to do that chapter. he agreed and essentially it reallyxd is about, the chapter is entitled "mission accomplished" but basically it just had something to do with, worries me a little bit as a psychoanalyst but basically, i felt that he was comfortable being aggressive and being absolutely dead on tough when it's clear to him that everybody will support him.

and when he is not attacking anybody except when he is a candidate then it is okay to attack people in the other camp or the other party but basically it's okay to do it this time but not okay any other time and it was very hard for him still i think to do it but i'm worried about that conclusion or that tentative conclusion because i was reminded of sir carl popper whoñi i happen to have the fortune of spent an evening with many years ago and he hated sky coanalysis and -- psychoanalysis, probably for him good reason sometimes. he said to me, look, if this glass suddenly started going up and there was nobody lifting it up all science would have to throw out the theory of gravity. they would start questioning the theory of gravity but a psychoanalyst would find a way to fold that into their theory [laughing] so i hope that chapter did not just do that but, you know, but it may have.

there is one other theoretical thing that is very important about psychoanalysis i think in general and we all know about and that is something called repetition compulsion. repetition compulsion is an unconscious act whereby you repeat early problems that you had, patterns of behavior that you had in relation to certain people, probably in the effort, in an attempt to solve them, have them come out differently. and, i was struck by thatñi, you know in my own life. everybody has that in their lifes in one form or another. obama wrote something that just absolutely shocked me. even though i know about repetition compulsion. he wrote, in "dreams for my father", so he wrote this in 19, oh, yeah, 1955 i guess. 1995. 55. 1995. he writes this in one sentence. i had grown tired of trying

to untangle a mess that wasn't of my own making. isn't that an amazing thing to write, given the fact that he inherited the biggest mess that he sought it out to untangle the biggest mess in the history of anybody's lifetime, to untangle? it's stunning. anyway, why don't we just stop there. there is lots to talk about. people may have lots of thoughts and i think this is a good point to stop? okay. >> yes, okay. we've got a question right here. >> okay. that sound absolutely spot on. it confirms, sort of what i thought. my question is, politically it has been disasterous for him. the deficit argument this summer where they just backed him up. each time he agreed to something, they really did, keep moving the goalpost until he finally said no. do you think he can learn

anything or do you think he and we are compelled to repeat this until 2012? >> i think he is much better than mark twain's cat. mark twain said that he didn't believe in learning from experience. he said that a cat who jumps on a hot stove will never doñi it again but of course it will never jump on a cold stove either. i think that in obama's case, i think he actually is learning from his experience and i think he can. i mean my, i think that, in fact i said in one interview that felt his single best therapist at this point would be john boehner because he would finally recognize that this man is only out to get him, and the idea of a grand bargain is an idea that was initiated maybe even by boehner but that it is about a seduction and abandonment. this is a pattern in obama's

life of seduction and abandonment also i really didn't get into in this discussion but is in the book. his mother would be very close with him and go away. there is seduction and ban donement pattern. if he can see people are fundamentally out to get him, okay to be a little paranoid especially if you're president [laughing] in fact if you weren't, it's, so i think he can learn from experience but right now we're seeing somebody who is not clear yet to me. he is either candidate obama coming back, or he is actually the president who we wanted him to be in the first place. it is not clear yet but i do think he can learn from experience. i actually was so moved by that possibility in fact after i finished the book that i decided, i wanted to get him a copy. so on friday morning, the book came out on a tuesday last week an on friday i went to the white house and i went to the gate and i tried to get, get the guard to take the book into him and it is a whole long story

but was pretty amazing. the guard said no, and blah, blah, but i had to mail it. so i had learned earlier that day somebody from the white house communications office had actually rung up the person who did the interview of me in "huffington post" and said to her, is this for real? and she, to her credit wrote back, and said, yes, and how is your mother? [laughter] so, i like that. so i decided to find that guy's name and i called him up and i called the white house up and the white house was giving me all this rage ma role and wouldn't talk to me. and i talked to her, the secretary of this guy and she said that the book would get there, i still have to mail it in, i said i was really concerned if people like, sean hannity and everybody, maybe i was being grandiose because i don't think they were paying much attention to this book but

if they were could make hay of it got a hold of it would be a bad thing and he should know about it. look, it will get here in timely manner. so send it in. i said i've been living in washington too long, what do you mean timely manner? [laughter] and she said, well, a week, two weeks. i said, i don'tñi know what timely is to you or timely to me but what do you mean. finally i got so fed up i'm going to go to the phone book and look up the guy's address and just give him the book. he was director of communications at the white house. so, i hung up and about 10 minutes later the white house called me and they said this is the white house. i got really scared. [laughter] and they said, somebody is going to be calling you from the white house. so a few minutes later this woman called me back and said she changed her afternoon schedule and she will meet with me and will let me giver her the book so i can give it to him in the afternoon at lafayette park. i said, okay.

lafayette is fairly book park. >> wasn't in a garage. >> wasn't in a garage. that's right. i'm glad it wasn't in the garage. it was in lafayette park. i said lafayette, park, let's find a better place. she will meet at this coffee place on pennsylvania. and said, you will recognize me. i'm old, bald man with a big white moustache and how i will recognize you? she said, i will bewaring a black trench coat? [laughter] sure enough she was and anyway she got the book. i hope he can learn from this. he is really great in lots of ways and is maddening in others. >> thank you. >> obama from his family history and everything that we know and, you described, had many, many reasons to not turn out well. i mean we know people who have very early dismantling

in their lives. they don't ever quite make it or they're not quite full citizens you might say in society. and i have known a couple people who i think like obama, have made, you know, very well out of their life and i think certainly he has. i'm wondering what your perspective is on the factor of tell against? because people i know all seem to be of a high intelligence, that were able to see what was the reality and be able to go beyond? >> i think high intelligence is very important especially in his, especially because in something, you know, i don't want to sound too freudian, but some ways freud wrote about delayed gratification and the thought is trial action. so if you can learn to think before you act, and that usually takes somewhat higher intelligence, then, you can actually move into

action in a very different way in a much more mature way. obama, from his earliest days was able to think. he read a lot. he was interested in myths. he did have very good mothering in the first few years of his life. even though he came from two broken homes essentially and mixed race thing he also had a lot of really positive things. his grandmother adored him. she worked very hard to make sure he would do his studies. so he was really, in that sense, he got a lot but intelligence plays a huge huge role. one of the things he wrote about as an aside, it wasn't, when he looks at a picture in a magazine, before he reads the cap fun he likes to figure out what the caption would say. and that is somebody who has got a playful mind and who is smart. he likes to think like that. i think it does play a role. there is microphone over there for those who want to talk to but yeah. >> i need your help in making sense of something.

big obama supporter. but i have been stopped in my tracks on the issue of the, i won't even name names because the names inflammatory but, on the issue of the extra judicial of two american citizens overseas. there are always going to be bad people in this country who threaten people. this is the first timeñi in our nation's history that the second testify branch in a secret proceeding has tried, presented evidence to itself and determined that an american citizen is worthy of being killed without presenting any formal charges against that person or even revealing what the processes are for putting that person on a list to be killed. and i can not square this with the candidate i supported in the election who seemed to be the beneficiary of some of the best that our legal

education has to offer. who seemed to be himself a beneficiary of the 14th amendment and i feel like i have missed something very profound about his background that needs explanation. >> well i do think that is a very important question, first of all, and something that has troubled me also. i think that his, if he can somewhat anonymously expressing a aggression and murder russness and at a distance he is somewhat comfortable doing that and does override his sense of law because it is doing the right thing. one of the things that i didn't mention in this discussion but i think if you read the book you will see, is that he talks about how at times he would withdraw into a tight coil of rage and he used that term. and i think that the tight coil of rain is really aimed

unconsciously at both of his parents, not just at his father for abandoning the family but for, at his mother. and i think that the rain at his mother is just so unacceptable that it has to be denied or repressed or something and so he mocks people who think the way she did as his way of getting back at her. but as far as the rain that is there i think it really is there and i think that bill maher has been made anxious by that rage enough that he actually said something about it. he said, you know, he essentially said that obama is telling people don't mess with me. i'll, you know, i can look you right in the eye and be very friendly and then i will have you killed. and i think that is a message that is coming out. now i think that i don't know where else to go with that but i do think the source of it is he is able

to do that as long as the person is anonymous because as a both/and person you can never know the person you want to kill. once he plays golf with john boehner he can't kill him. [laughter] that's too bad. not that want to kill john boehner but it is too bad he can't just do what needs to be done which is make clear what the problems are and name them. >> i had a question that was very much related to the last comment and, has to do with osama bin laden and these drone killings, use of secret war. david ignatius wrote how he is one of the presidents who has taken most quickly into understanding our intelligence system and all this secret stuff that is out there and we have all the secret armies. and he is also what is interesting been one of the presidents who has been most vociferious about shutting down and badly treating whistle-blowers and not tolerating any kind,

wikileaks, any kind of attacks of someone coming at him. so i'm, wondering if he put all this together of someone who can't brook criticism? who can't brook having an alternative view of out there and, and on top of this being willing to take, to be a law unto himself regardless of of what the law is? >> this is always where i like to come to politics & prose. this is so good and so important. i think in his unconscience, again this is my reading of him, whistle-blowers are whiners, are complainers. they're not really responsible, healthy people in his mind. just the way he treated the congressional black caucus a couple weeks ago, heñi said, get out of your slippers and all that stuff. i think that it's because he was never allowed to whine.

my kids whine. some of them are here even and they know [laughing] i hope they don't whine so much now but i think he never was allowed to whine, ever. his mother would not allow it. i think he has learned to not accept it. there is one vignette to say as part of the answer that is important. he talks about how he, when i was telling you before how he would look at pictures and try to figure what they were about, he was talking about a guy in life magazine who had, a black man who tried to bleach his skin and he started reading about it. he was nine years old at that time and he said that he was horrified that somebody could hate themselves so much that they want to change their skin color. and it is a horrific thing to discover and he discovered it at nine. he was horrified but the thing that is the secret thing that impressed me in the book is, not the horror of it and not his rage. he wanted to run and tell his mother about it. he wanted to ask his

mother's boss who was an african-american. he wanted to ask him if he knew about this. wanted to ask her if she knew about this. instead he read it. he was horrified. over a period of 10 or 15 minutes he put the book back, "life" magazine back. put it in a pile. smile on his face and acted if nothing ever happened that is where that stuff goes. >> killing john boehner would not gain him any votes. >> no, it would not.ñi >> the point i want -- >> i will vote for him anyway. >> is, obama is a politician and i think it is very important, i write also about psychology of leaders and i think you have to look at what a leader like obama is a strategist. he is constantly thinking of what will work, what will

win. he has had a vision from the start about what would make the country stronger in terms of infrastructure, education, science, so on. health care. and if you look at the nature of the voting public, there is 20% really determine an election. you have probably 40% democrats, 40% republicans and tend to vote that way and 20%çó independents. those independents elected him because they believed he would bring people together. >> yes. >> so the strengths that he developed, as you point out from childhood and so forth were exactly what they wanted to see. >> yes. >> if he didn't try he would have lost immediately. any support from this group. what he has been able to do now is to be able to say, as he attacks the congress and republicans, i did everything.

i tried everything. i went a distance. he has set himself up strategically to be able to really do a truman-type election. so i think it is very important, if you want to balance the understanding of obama to understand the fact that he is a very gifted politician and that has both from a human point of view and ethical point of view strengths and weaknesses. go back and read the excellent book about lincoln and slavery by eric foner. you see some of same kind of contradictions you're discussing. >> i agree with that and i do think -- that is why this is a very hard, freud said, don't ever write about a patient until the analysis is over. well, this is an ongoing situation. i think that had i more time and wanted a different publisher i would have spent more time with some of the5÷q6h%

issues that you raise. i think they're very important. i do think he is a strategist. i do think he thinks in the long run. from with that is until two years ago, until last year, until a few months ago, he seems to really deny the destructiveness and in fact, in 2010, he was getting people to vote against congress, not against republicans in congress. so the democrats lost the congress badly. but that was partly his fault in that he really didn't, wasn't explicit. one of the important things being aggressive have it being pointed and name what you're angry at and talk about it. as opposed to the do-nothing congress. his complaints about the congress are very similar to what the left has complained about him. it is interesting to think about it that way also, the do-nothing president who says one thing and doesn't get it done. now you're saying, but i was really, first of all

psychoanalysis is only one thing, one tool to understanding and to expand our thinking about a person. it is not really going to take into account all the political economic factors. he is a very smart strategist and people have always talked about, he plays chess when everybody else plays checkers. i think that is probably true and it's a daunting experience for me to be working with someone who is that smart and thinking about him in this way. so i appreciate the comment and i think we'll have to wait and see. >> we've got time for one last question. >> question about strategy. i don't know how many people saw the front line series, lost in detention but it was about the president's strategy on the immigration policy and in that it is about the large number of people who are being, larger number of people who are being deported from this country under him than were deported under george w. bush. >> yes. >> and the numeric goals that are being set for the number of people to be

deported, to the point where people are, families are being broken up and people who will come forward as witnesses or victims of crimes find themselves deported. there was one very chilling part of that, that show where a representative of the administration referred to those families as collateral damage. >> yes. >> and i'm sorry, i'm like the other gentleman having a hard time reconciling that with the principled person? >> i think that, i think that that's why i wrote the book too. i mean that really hard to reconcile that. let me say one thing. that if obama could have said something to his mother and i don't blame everything on this but i think if he could have said, instead of closing that book, can you believe that people do this? tell me about it. or if he could have said to his mother, what's more important, a boy or a remote

indonesian village? if he could have said some of those things i don't think he would necessarily be in the situation he is in now because i think he was collateral damage to his mother as research. and i think that that's makes it very difficult. there is a kind of attachment that some psychoanalysts talking about these days, more than ever before, really, called dismissive attachment. which is if you are, hurt in certain ways by a parent or, by a sibling or whatever, you instead of protesting and getting angry you shut yourself down and close off. that is a dismissive attachment. i think he does that and i think that his mother did that. and i think that's a problem because he can really see these people as collateral damage and it is very disturbing? >> [inaudible]. play golf with him [laughing] >> can i make a comment? >> sure. >> i don't have a question.

when you talk about a strategist, maybe he is a brilliant strategist but he is strategizing plaquemines and his involvementñi with -- black man and his involve with jeremiah wright had to understand about theñi power of politics in america. >> absolutely. >> delicate tightrope. flick after second, wink of an eye, you can go from benevolent to the blackmon sister that will devour us. >> yes. battling that all his life. >> and particularly now. >> the irony about that at that is, wright was the one real significant, in my view, father figure he ever had after he left hawaii. he was a person who married him and michelle. he baptized both their children. he went to that church. he really had intense substantive discussions with him and he was also torn

away from him in a certain way. and i agree with you. it is a very tough balance. thank you. so i'm going to, i'm going to do one last thing [applause] one last thing because i think this is important and that is something i ran across last week which is, a quote of rumy's which is only one sentence. it summarizes some of these issues. the out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. i'll meet you there. [applause] >> we will have more "book tv" tomorrow night on c-span2.

>> so let's move now to the macintosh era. so much is going on at apple at that point. there is so much growth and his personal courtship of john scully begins. can you talk a little bit about that, that on agains, off again, relationship. >> it was a bad mistake. it was almost like he saw john scully a bit as a father figure or a mentor. scully really wanted to be cool and hip and wanted steve's approval and it was for a while, you know the famous line i think it is at the sand remo apartment that steve is thinking of buying and he brings john scully up in new yorkñi and looking over central park park and scully is demuring. steve says do you want to spend the rest of your life,

scully was at pepsi, selling sugar water or do you want to change the world? so scully comes and, scully is a man of prep school sensibilities. great manners. very kind. but he is hard, it is hard for him to deal with conflict. steve felt the price, i say why were you so tough? well, the price of admission to being with me is that i have got to be able to tell you you're full of it, actually used a word with two more letters than it. >> yeah. >> you have to be able to tell me i'm full of it and we'll really duke it out and scully was not that way. secondly, scully was basically a marketer. you know, and having run pepsi u.s. he didn't sit there worrying about the product. he was not fiddling with the formula for doritos and saying i can make this insanely great, this dorito. it was shelf space

marketing. i think steve after a while felt that scully just didn't get into how awesome the mack was. it didn't help the mac was insanely great, scully priced it at almost 2500 bucks. it did not sell very well. microsoft started licensing out its copied version of the graphical user interface and started dominating the computer business. i think their relationship was doing fine as long as apple was doing fine. the apple ii was a workhorse. it was making money for the company but the mac didn't and so there was a horrible falling out that culminates on memorial day of 1985. >> before we talk a little bit more about the falling out and theñr post--'85 period let's talk about the invention of the macintosh itself, the design itself. this is the point in the book where you insert the great famous quote from jobs, good artists copy, great

artists steal which he took from picasso. he would add, we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas. that quote is often associated with the genesis of the macintosh because of xerox park and graphical interface. >> so they take two visits to xerox park and as you know, xerox had come up with the concept of the desktop metaphor. the graphical interface. more importantly sort of a bent nap design bit map design. each pixel could be mapped to bits in a microprocessor. so you could make a beautiful machine. you and i are old you have in to remember and go to museum where you have to do the green fossil letters, c prompt, c colon, whatever command. it was god awful. . .

it was a bad machine. what they did when they did that metaphor is say the will to click and drag and drop and double click an open things up with a limp and menus and bill atkinson and vince clippings you can have documents sort of looking like the top of other documents which it looks like a messy desk top none of that was

in the xerox original interface first of all they take the xerox metaphor and actually make it insanely great. there falls the shadow between the conception and the reality they were able to execute which the others were not, but it is true that part of these genius was looking at a thousand ideas saying that one is a great and we are going to ignore but pulling together the ideas from xerox park row. up next global affairs commentator david

there had been no single progressive organization, progressive and thinking that works on economic policy, domestic policy. we think that is often an ideologies behind the particular arguments that are made in washington with very little facts behind them and part of our job is, you know, to make the arguments and the factual arguments and the evidence based arguments behind hour own views, and i do think that sometimes, you know, when the facts are due for the position we reexamine the positions because we believe the most important thing is to be right about what your views are. now david unger's bouck "the emergency state americas pursuit

of absolute security at all costs." he is "the new york times" senior editorial writer on foreign affairs. he spoke of politics and prose in washington, d.c.. >> on behalf of the entire staff i'd like to welcome you to the store most to their regular here know how much we appreciate your presence and how much we gather like this. tonight's event is one of the nearly 500 author talks that we hosted the story each year. part of what we consider our central missions which is not just selling books but the literature and ideas were and that same spirit expanding the offerings in the recent months and we continue to support dozens of book clubs.

if you are new to the store and what find out more about what we do, you can sign up leader at the information desk back in the center of the store to receive our weekly newsletter that contains the calendar of events, listings of glasses and programs, staff favorites and other useful information. or you can go to our website, www.politics-prose.com. and please, keep in mind if you can purchase the books from online and if you have any reader you can even download evokes the from the web site. we are delighted to have as our guest this evening david unger. david is someone who makes a living by expressing opinions. the editorial opinion of "the new york times." he's been on the editorial board of the times for more than 30 years. and if you ever read a times editorial of the military,

foreign policy, or international finance, there is a good chance david had a hand in it. he got a historian's training to his journalism having earned a ph.d. from the university of texas at austin and his provocative new book "the emergency state americas pursuit of absolute security at all costs" offers a broad historical perspective that surveys 70 years of u.s. security policy to argue that the united states has gone terribly awry trying to make itself safe. david's basic point is that the institutions that we have built, and policies we have established to ensure our national security or our originally designed to fight nazi germany and wage the cold war against the soviet union. they were not conceived to protect us against today's

international terrorism and other 21st century threats. david argues that since the time of roosevelt and truman, we have slipped into what he calls, quote, permanent self renewing state of emergency marked by excess of lacy credit agencies and a kind of imperial presidency our constitution had never intended. the result has been an increasingly complicated, costly and intellectual security system that has damaged our democracy, undermined our economic strength, and ironically, david argues, left us more vulnerable. david doesn't just described, he also prescribes. the final part of his book contains a blueprint for the future, and as you might imagine from his steering critique, the solution for revitalizing american democracy would require

radical changes in our approach to national security. some of the things he recommends even have a kind of fact to be cut back to the future quality like requiring that the war we fight declares by congress and not by the white house and become much more selective about what the government information gets classified. david crites with a lot of passion in his book even if you don't accept all of its promise it will definitely make you think, and by encouraging walter reed it. david plans to speak for about 20 to 30 minutes and then he will take questions and then he will stick around to sign copies of his book. if you have a question with just step up to the microphone here in the center and of course tonight we have c-span cameras

here. please silence your cellphone and join me in welcoming david unger. [applause] to this great washington institution i'm really glad to be here. the most important part of the evening will be your questions and my responses but since the book just came out bradley gave an excellent summary i think i ought to tell you a little bit more about what is a net. first of all the title what is the emergency state, i live in europe most of the time the state of emergency isn't quite the same thing. the emergency state is a set of procedures, practices and institutions that we've developed, constitutional short cuts we've developed over the

last 70 years to fight world war ii, to fight the cold war, to fight the war of harvard without the intent of building a system parallel to the constitution but with the effect, under war is one of them budgets that can't be reported to the congress that the cia and come, as you can't exercise the power over classification of information if we are not allowed to know about them and even president obama can't tell us what happened with the jerome strike because presumably he's allowed to know what he's not allowed to tell us. we don't carry a the emergency stay all at once. it's been grown. it certainly didn't start under george w. bush, but i think the experience of the bush-cheney administration made us see in a clearer way or we've been doing. but as i did the research for this book, my feeling is the bush and administration invented

little but was new. it was built on practices and conditions into extraordinary conditions but nothing really new we can talk about that in the question and i answered the details of the recent past its but things we can do now to get ourselves back on track and the ideas i offered in the book and the purpose of the ideas i'm not qualified to give a blueprint of returning america to constitution, none of us is. it's a deliberate over four months by the educated elite of their day with popular input to the ratification conventions and we need the same kind of process. what i'm trying to do it here is stored in the discussion i'm being deliberately provocative with some of the proposals but the analysis is straight it's that it as carefully as if it were going to a "new york times" editorial where we never liked

to have to remember some corrections because be overstated our point and the changes we decide on the war and peace and changes that we recruit and configure our military forces, changes in the way that congress passes and deliberate military budgets and changes we deal with the world as a whole, changes that we reach and treated the agreements because the emergency state isn't just about foreign policy. it's about how our american democracy shapes or ought to shape our place in the new global economy. it's not - from the economy. it's facing away our constitutional democracy can and should with all the assets available to us in our system. it's not just about what we decided to do it's more important how we debate and decide mainly in daylight with information from our government cannot impose execute hearings.