he knows the ins and outs of the numbers. this is what we need in an economic crisis and it can probably deliver a ohio, which you can't win without ohio. the downside to hand, and lysol about trade-offs. there is no perfect candidate. the downside to him as he is vanilla ice cream. he's a good man, decent man and very smart, that sort of vanilla ice cream. you went to scoops of vanilla ice cream on your ticket, especially if -- no sameness to someone close to governor romney yesterday, especially a barack obama thursday hail marys and dumps joe biden and switches that with hillary. ..

is absolutely and totally plugged into the union. and because obama did not going to wisconsin and campaign for the union for the union candidate. the unions now are going to campaign for him but they are not totally invested in him in a obama any more so if you were to pull joe biden of the ticket they would go bananas and they wouldn't mobilize and to the grassroots getting out the vote to the extent that they would if

he is still on the ticket. i'm not sure that is going to happen that in terms of the romney thing, either romney or portman or paul ryan, i could be wrong. could be somebody off the wall of i haven't even thought of that he is cautious enough to choose one of the three. to answer the second part of your question about obamacare, i predicted on my radio show a couple days ago exactly what's happened is the we were getting arizona today and that come thursday the supreme court would take the obamacare decision like a grenade, threw it on to america let it explode and then they go away for three months. keep that in america. here is the obamacare decision. we are out of here. it will come in the morning on thursday and i tend to elieve the wisdom they are going to kick out the mandate, strike that down and view a lot of the rest of the law to stand to make

it look like the court has integrity and it's not totally political. i think the whole thing should be thrown out. the whole thing is unconstitutional and a race for the constitution. we will have to see if the supreme court feels the same. [applause] >> for more information visit the author web site, monicamemo.typepad.com. >> james man talks of the president obama's policy decisions and profiles the people that advise them now one booktv. this is about an hour. >> thanks to brad and lissa and every one of politics and prose. this is actually the sixth book i talk about at politics and prose, six out of six going back to a book called, my first book in 1989 when politics and prose

just opened and i had brown hair and newspapers were thriving, and barack obama was a second year law student. they asked me how to write a book and i say at this is all true yospend a couple years on research coming you spend a couple years writing, then you spend time thinking about what you're going to say about it at politics and prose. [laughter] as brad mentioned, the book grew naturally out of my previous book rise of the balkans about george bush's foreign policy team. lots of people think now understandably, but not quite accurately that the book was about neoconservatives or hawks like chaney and rumsfeld. it's not exactly true. it was up about all of the people in the george w. bush

administration. cheney, rumsfeld and colin powell and richard r. medish who had risen with them in sight of the republican party. despite all the differences among the members of the previous administration, they shared some common traits and beliefs. all of them had backgrounds in the military or in the pentagon and this was true of the secretary of state who had been the chairman of that joint chiefs of staff. richard r. medish as it was of cheney and rumsfeld. it's rare to have an administration with the former secretary of defense. and they also shared some common beliefs. america was unquestionably a force for good in the world. a military power was of supreme importance and in fact the disagreements among them were

halgand win force should be used for the united states should be saved for the big war were used for house it was in iraq. immediately after obama's election in 2008i decided i wanted to take a look at the democrats over the same time period. many of my books have covered the same time period from the 60's through the present day. and i kind of come across democratic policy and passing it on and i wanted to unify it and look at the obama administration. and since the 1970's, the democratic parties have a strong grass-roots base growing out of the entire war movement of the vietnam era. they have far fewer people particularly in the obama administration with a pentagon our defense background recall that bill clinton's last defense secretary was a republican and

sure enough when obama took office, he appointed as his defense secretary robert gates, bush's final defense secretary and then a couple of the other leading job as in the obama administration went to the career military people, general jones who was the national security adviser, dennis blair who was in charge of the intelligence for the top jobs in his attic ministration. so you have a democratic president but without the same kind of colewort the republicans represented and the democrats over the years since vietnam have been struggling with issues precisely the ones the republicans took for granted. in america force for and the

world and is it everything that the united states does over these sees and at the grassroots of the party you get the debates about whether the use of the force is ever justified. so i tend to think of the obama administration when it took office in 2009 as confronting what i call the legacy of the first george of course george w. bush. obama needed to figure out what he was going to do in the wake of the bush presidency. the other george, less obvious, would be mcgovern. the republicans ever since the george mcgovern campaign of 1972 has been kind of a republican truth that the republicans can fall back on election time even when it isn't necessarily true

that the democrats are weak on defense. and the fact that this isn't true shows up over and over again at the time of the persian gulf war the shock and awe of american high-tech weaponry that we saw at the beginning of the war actually was developed in the late 1970's in the pentagon of jimmy carter under a guy with a high-tech background named william perry. democrats and repblicans have both been familiar with issues and the use of force, and it's not a black and white democrats weak on defense issue. so the problem in writing this book was the had all worked aside one another in one

administration after another. when i began talking to the obama foreign policy team, one of the most surprising things i found was the underlining generational tensions to be specific "obamaians" thought of themselves as a new generation. when i stepped back, i realized that in the obama administration there are three different generations of democrats, each with its own formative experiences come each with its own background, and with different generational perspectives. let me look for a moment of the three generations. the first is the post vietnam generation of officials and political leaders who came of age in the 70's and 80's and even the 60's in the case of the late richard holbrooke but it's people like holbrooke, joe biden

the secretary of defense, george mitchell who was the middle east peace envoy, i would call john kerry who wasn't in the committee but certainly in the administration's strong supporter of congress certainly a charter member of the vietnam generation. this doesn't mean that all of the members of this administration or the entire war democrats. holbrooke in particular had repeatedly at each juncture where there was an antiwar candidate he tended to be with the centrists to finance the the to denounce the candidate. that was true of mcgovern and of obama and so on. the more than any other generation, these members of this first generation have seen

firsthand how the use of force can go disastrously wrong and it's something that they keep in mind regularly. this is a dominant issue for the democrats right through until the persian gulf war mack of 1991. when the democrats predict inaccurately as it turns out that there are going to be tens of thousands of casualties, that wasn't some flippant thing by a minor politician. the senate majority leader george mitchell presented george h. dole you wish with a petition by the leading members of commerce saying don't go to joe war because there could be tens of thousands of casualties. soon bill clinn takes office and to get what amounts to a

second generation of technocrats on the clinton generation live called them the trout fisher's because after clinton left office, some of the officials began spending time with each other like they like to go trout fishing together. these are officials liked tom donilon, now the national security adviser, jim steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, kurt campbell who use the state department and hillary clinton's point man for asia and a whole wave of other officials. they had a different perspective. they came of age after the collapse of the soviet union. the united states was the unchanged power in the world particularly in the late clinton years increasingly prosperous

and the main kind of problems they face with the internal disagreements were when the united states should intervene for humanitarian purposes the would be bosnia, kosovo and rwanda would be the prime examples and the members of this administration serve for eight years and when they leave, the democrats think in 2001 that ey know where they are on american foreign policy. a spokesman for the democrats within the first year or so or first six months of the bush administration, democrats are out of office and it's the same people who served at the top of the clinton administration. madeleine albright, strobe

talbott and then we run into the iraq war. this time the democrats try to correct the mistakes that they made politically at the time of the gulf war to authorize the use of force in iraq and that experience of 2002, 2003 gives rise to the "obaaians," democrats who really didn't get involved working in the executive branch of foreign policy until 2009. they really rose to the prominence and opposition. to bush they had the experience of the disaster of the iraq war. they also had the experience of the financial crisis of 2008. they have a different

perspective than i think classic clinton and dmocrats. and who are these people? well, people like dennis mcdonough, who's now the deputy national secury adviser, who has been over the last three years the guy who sees through out the administration what obama wants, obama gets. ben rose, the speechwriter wordsmith for the administration whose job it is to figure out obama's message. some and the power who jokingly calls herself the conscience mascot. she's in charge, has been the main person for human-rights, multilateralism, and then i would include someone who did in fact served in the clinton administration but was younger than most others.

she served under clinton and was fer obama all the way through the bitter primaries of 07 and 08. just as a mix sample of the kind of generational tensions from day to day, i'm going to read a couple passages for you, but this is in 2,009 within a couple of months after obama takes office and he's decided he wants to give a major speech to the muslim world in cairo and it is up to been rhodes to draft the speech. the director of national intelligence visited him seeking to offer his thoughts on what obama might see in a speech. blair had been an adderall command enough for u.s. forces in the pacific. he had been a road scholar and

white house fellow and at your earliest times a senior military aid for the national sycophant council, joint chiefs of staff and the intelligence committee. he was the military version of a renaissance man but for obama's aides, he was more of a figure from ancient history and and graduated from the naval academy and went off for his first assignment on a guided missile destroyer in 68 before dennis mcdonough was ever born. a player goes on to tell the speechwriter they think about the strategy for the speech. what message with a speech sent to the leaders of the governments with which the united states worked most closely such as saudi arabia and jordan. what what obama's speech convey to a palestinian leader? he suggested that he didn't understand the larger purpose. the speech wasn't aimed at the middle east rulers of was meant

to communicate with ordinary people in the middle east. blair left and found himself cut out of the process. that's the kind of generational disputes and tensions that have underlaid this administration since the beginning. at the ultimate of course is obama himself. what can we say about him? first, i need to dispel the idea that he was in some way fundamentally different from other presidents and so i will give you a couple of paragraphs from the book. over the years, far too much has been made of ho obama's ressa and upbringings supposedly affected his thinking about the world. political opponents, diplomats and journalists have sometimes speculated about the impact on

obama of his father's roots in kenya or his childhood in indonesia. some the arise that obama had somehow with a colonial perspective and was tossed loyal order of least not sympathetic to british and european traditions. there is little if any evidence to support the theory and it represents an extremely selective interpretation of obama's youth. his post primary education included a prep school in hawaii, private colleges and los angeles and new york city law school at harvard. the secondary higher education and other words wasn't radically different from that of saint john f. kennedy krepp school in harvard, franklin roosevelt put school and columbia law school, bill clinton, georgetown and yale law school. if obama's world view was influenced by his upbringing and even this is an open question than surely the years of the lead american schooling us have

accounted for far more than the father he barely knew or his four years and elementary school overseas. so that is point number one about obama. the second point is that he's not a dove and was never of at least in the 1970's sese. i noticed as i've been writing this book i have similar conversations for the last three years dinner table conversations that go like this at least among the many people in washington that our liberal the subject is afghanistan and you get obama doesn't really believe what he's doing. he has compelled to do what he's doing which was to increase the troops in afghanistan because he's scared of republican attacks were scared of the military and so on.

this is understandable but not quite right. i think people are not paying attention to his whole career and his campaign in 2007, 20. this is a guy that came to prominence on the national scene as a state senator who appeared in an anti-war mac rally in 2002 and said all i am not opposed to all of the war i'm just opposed to the dumb or mac. he campaigned in 2007 and 2008 by saying iraq was the wrong war and the bush administration should have be focusing on afghanistan. it is a guy that within a year after taking office he's awarded the nobel peace prize and chooses the occasion to say on an different from martin luther king oregon be. i'm the president of the united states and i have to protect american security.

so i think that the people wh think that obama on this count somehow betrayed the people voted for him didn't pay close enough attention to what he was saying. there was no guarantee on that score. there were other issues in which obama has taken the position is contrary to the campaign position. for a simple, he specifically promised to follow the procedures of the war powers act in the case of libya he did nothing of the kind. several other examples like that the charge he is a hawk and didn't say that doesn't bear out having said that, obama is a guy but also changes his opinions and positions from time to time and as a matter of fact, he and his team are pretty skill about being able to do that.

they do have swift of foot when it comes to political issues. the best way to see that is to lookback now at the 2,078 with hillary clinton and joe biden and others. some of you may recall and is a youtube question. will you meet with the leaders of countries like iran and north korea in the first year of your presidency? it goes to obama and she says yes. and he is then hillary clinton and a couple of the other candidates say no, that's wrong that they would not do that. and obama afterwards skillfully takes that to say i think that he called everyone else members of eight washington salon foreign policy.

then what did the obama people do? they quickly realized that by leaving out the leaders. so after that, they would say we want to talk with -- we said we were going to talk with iran and north korea and we are volunteering to do that, and they backtrack the diplomacy. they leave out the word meeting that specifically in that case, it is a important case where obama said he would do something. he obviously hasn't met with them in three years. i'm not saying he should. in fact i think clinton is right on that debate but one way or another he hasn't done it so he got away with the mistake. how many times has clinton -- how many times has obama changed course over the past three years? she has changed his military strategy in the first year.

he was the essentially adopted the policy of counterinsurgency and then discovered belatedly with the reading of history would have told him which is counter insurgency takes a huge amount of time, troops and money and they shifted to what vice president biden recommended in the first place which was counterterrorism. they shifted in 2011. they shifted on the issue of whether the united states should espouse democracy overseas. i have a chapter in the book i called the scowcroft democrats because in fact brent scowcroft who represented the administration's that the democrats campaigned against policies of realism and in '91,

'92. he was their open, he was the model of what they wanted to be which was brent scowcroft is the first to say this in his belief is what happens inside of the country's border is none of our business. it's a coherent school of thought but it's not one the democrats always embrace. first year obama and essentially embraced those beliefs and kept his hands off completely as there are hundreds of people in the streets of tehran. a couple years later you get the error of the spring and he sees the value of promoting space change, and oddly enough to years later it's all but encouraging people to take the streets of tehran as they had in egypt. then he changed his policies from his first day in office

counterterrorism that means he was going to close guantanamo. he didn't. counterterrorism are nowhere near voters expected and as he suggested they spend a good part of the campaign denouncing the idea of a global war on terror and they've called it a war and acknowledges in fact they've widened the scope the definition of terrorism al qaeda but there's been less difference than people thought, and i have a chapter in the book about the way the central intelligence agency or some of the officials

sought to undermine the desired to change during the transition as obama took office. it's something that is called in the book because a cia officials acknowledged it was called the aw shit can be because the idea that new officials to come to office and see the underlying realities and go we felt we could do this but we can't. in the long run it failed in the first weeks i would submit to you that in the long run that campaign succeeded, so a couple of other passages i want to move to question first why is it the democratic presidential candidates hold out the prospect of the new american foreign policy yet often wind up with ones that are not fundamentally

different? it's worth keeping in mind that during presidential campaigns both democrats and republicans always have an interest in emphasizing the differences between the two parties. both parties seek to screen foreign policy issues and simplistic ways that will arouse their own supporters but this sounds like a commentary on of the 2012 campaign so be it. the candidates tend to talk less about the policies of their opponents they will continue moreover people tend to remember the parts of the candidate's message that they like and ignore the parts they don't come and the personnel don't always change from administration to administration as much as it is fought. the viewpoint of the administration that has changed don't necessarily reflect a dramatic difference, so i point out that bush's outgoing national security adviser and

secretary of state stephen hadley and condoleezza rice and their successor james jones and hillary clinton that would be hard to say that there was a profound difference in the views of the world among them. hadley and clinton had known themselves for years and had gone to wall and so one. in short they appointed the assumption they carried with them into office were far less conducive to the far-reaching change than the rhetoric of the obama presidential campaign lead people to anticipate. nevertheless, on some issues, the multilateralism is a change since the bush years and we do find for example but one reason that the obama administration is able to get support for economic sanctions against iran now is that he has managed to restore relations with allies from where

they were certainly in 2004 but also in 2008 so it's not to say that the obama administration is completely the same as the bush administration. i don't buy that at all. finally there's the question where is the swing of the pendulum? when at the end of the book on the republicans, which was written in 04, i asked whether they represent to the outer limits of the expansion of american power, and i answered that question yes. so the question is this the other end of the pendulum? and i don't think so. the balkans of the bushehr raviv an overwhelming american power wanda was linked to the years immediately after the end of the cold war. the "obamaians" couldn't revive that believe even if they wanted to do so and neither will obama's successors.

rather obama's time and offices are to the beginning of a new era in the relations in a era when american privacy is no longer taken for granted. thanks very much. happy to take your questions. [applause] >> congratulations. there was terrific. as a charter member of the vietnam federation, i am perplexed by the strikes and the fact that obama has stepped up. tom friedman talked about the same policy of the assassination in israel, hamas and hezbollah and said that was like mowing the lawn for every one that felt that someone replaced him -- i'm sorry. yeah, there is. there we go.

can you hear me now? okay. there is the theory that when you assess any terrorists, other terrorists come in and you have also been tyrannized the family and in this case we are antagonizing pakistan which is far more important than the missiles it is a much bigger country. it's strategically located and they have objected, hillary has objected, the ambassador to pakistan, for while the american ambassador and yet obama seems to go ahead with it. >> really as i see it, there are two separate questions and i want separate that out. the substance of 1i don't agree with. there is a longstanding debate over the decade about what to do

about terrorism and what you are referring to is one approach that is called the swamps of terrorism as a swamp of economic conditions and so on. if we go after the leaders of an organization, ultimately the problem will -- >> in fact, we are -- we have seen it seems to be i will get to pakistan and a second, but it seems to be reasonably effective, and i think people miss this. they see the drones as the alternative to counterinsurgency , and it's terrible to think of killings as a cost benefit term but i think

they see it as far less expensive and more training of the u.s. military. but they haven't changed the goal of the war against al qaeda so this is the way they've chosen. so when we get to the democrats, the democrats have tended to favor high-tech solutions. it's not something we think of to military issues, so we now forget but if clinton -- there was a wonderful critique of the clinton administration the was called diplomacy by the cruise missiles, and that was his approach. i want to get to other questions that pakistan i actually agree with the substance of what you are saying. my chapter on bin laden in the book and i know the people have written about him i have a different slant of the account, which is -- it is more than a

obama ll in it. the stories are correct. he was leading the administration's thinking on this. no one is focused on exactly how many choices obama meeting to say we don't care what pakistan by the pakistanis even if you told them for 30 minutes in advance the fear was a would be ticked off its more hawkish than bush in the go ahead the bush policy was to work with pakistan the plan in which obama was leading to take when a sample, one of the questions was what happens to counterfactual, what

happens if the team gets surrounded. all of the military -- there's only a handful of people so sooner or later one of the original first solutions which called talk your way out meant the pakistanis have them. they are in prison or whatever, and either obama or hillary clinton will get on the phone and they will talk to zardari or isi in the military and get the release and clinton -- i'm sorry, obama rejected that in favor of fight your way out. fight your way out was called in the reinforcement no matter how many units it takes. not saying this is wrong but if you go through all the steps

with more of an affront to pakistan then i think people realize, certainly reflects their view now that they didn't have the cause to be upset but if in 50 years it turns out that pakistan and set using nuclear weapons and obama's decision is part of that we may think differently. >> thank you. >> by congressional journalist and i've been covering the foreign policy committee. i was curious if you of any insight in doing this book why obama was given a place on foreign relations committee. he had no experience and he seemed very uninterested in it when i covered the committee he never attended except for

questions he was even given the subcommittee nato and he never called the meeting. i'm just curious if he ever had any insight into that. the second question has been coming up this week one reason the supreme court argument is arizona shouldn't deal with immigration is because it deals with foreign policy coming yet i know you don't include immigration in your book. i don't think anyone really in the obamiams have experience. do you consider immigration a part of the foreign policy agenda, or is that just -- >> first on the committee, certainly within a year after obama comes to washington he's running for president, and so, he never really takes hold as

someone who's interested in spending a long time in the senate. >> why was he appointed? that's what i was curious. >> i don't know specifically. i think he wanted one of the foreign policy committees. he would have been just as happy with the armed services that it's harder to get. then on immigration i think the fall on that is mine. there are only so many issues i can cover in the book. in the administration -- >> it's sort of a two-part question. there's a circumstance under which the obama administration would use force against ian and whether or not you think they

would. >> whether the u.s. administration was under any circumstance and then the second is are there differences among these factions on the policies. >> first i take obama at his word which is that in the end if diplomacy doesn't work - for all kind of reasons it would be a united states operation and is really operation that they don't want it and in fact a lot of what you see now serve on the inside pages are all the current diplomacy with iran has a subtext we want to be sure that we have done everything we can to avoid the use of force and iran does nothing to turnaround on its weapons programs i

actually think yes. the only political -- i doubt for both policy reasons political reasons this will happen before november, i hope it doesn't happen at all, but i think that if iran really is going to call the bluff, i think something might happen. yes. >> what was the second one, i forget. >> among the three factions could they have differences that are significant? >> i think they did in the first year. >> the other obamiams were eager to go ahead with diplomacy with overtures and iran but the kind of hope they would come in and this wasn't just going through the motions. dennis rauf whose experience in the notion was quickly brought from the state department where it was first appointed to the

white house to take charge of seeing if there is some diplomacy that they can get going with iran on its nuclear program. they hold back on support for the iranian opposition in 2009 because that's their point of view. the clinton people they are more instinctively favored support for space movements than the obamiams did in that first year. >> i am a retired cia analyst who published a book on henry kissinger intellectual journeys and so i appreciate your study of the attractions in the

foreign policy the game of musical chairs when you go from one administration to another i just want to make a couple of observations. joan i wasn't given a job as the obama administration and the paradigm that took hold in the democratic party in particular in the 60's and 70's against the realism which was economic interdependence, globalization and it was an element of that in the carter years and clinton have ron brown running around assigning all kind of trade agreement. that seems to be absent. they have a down side is we are not -- >> i think you are pointing to something that is in the book that i haven't mentioned today.

the clinton era democrats and the obamiams, and it shows particularly on china policies because it was the democrats that had already done nafta world trade organization all of this on their watch and they really wanted to succeeding in getting china into the world trade organization if a lot of thought, time and effort but they also made a lot of compromises. they didn't get all of the kind of enforcement mechanisms. the find that obama as he is trying to deal with the economy as it becomes increasingly protectionist on its own he turnto the clinton democrats

and says -- and there are four or five working with them and he says did we screw this up, how come you didn't leave me with a lot of leverage and the best one liner about obama's frame of mind dealing with them is to say he is no adam smith. [laughter] up to vietnam which was walter lippmann, i think we can include george kennon, and that tradition with third within the space culture, democratic party culture. you still have less michael mandelbaum but i believe i read somewhere that obama may be

because of the chicago connection he has read the writings he's a huge name and intellectual history but in passing where he was given writing for that west point. >> this is for the speech on the nobel peace prize. do you know more about whether you could call obama and a realist mode and then he moves away from that depending on circumstances? >> i think that's fair. i think he's fundamentally day in and day out a realist and when faced with issues like the arab spring he begins to moderate himself. >> my question is on the much

talked-about pivot to asia which could be set exec we sure about that but there is also a pivot away from the middle east some people have commented and another's arguments for that but my question is more a personal question about the obama administration handling the middle east and specifically handling of the israeli-palestinian question which i think in the last years he's backed away from a large degree. it seems at least from the outside there has never really been sort of ran obamiam personnel and in the middle east and owning -- >> you still people like dennis ross and dennis mitchell around. and i'm wondering if -- forgive me if this is in the book and i will read it but i'm sort of wondering if that's true on the advisers that have come around to own or present a different vision on the middle east of the palestinian issue is specifically. if no one has a reason sort of what factors play into that and

is that in the area east deferred to an older generation. >> i think he's deferred to an older generation. i mean, he went through a first year or year and a half of efforts on the middle east and it didn't work so in interviewing people after three years they admit they didn't do right in the middle east. they pushed an initiative without seeing it was going to work and e of the questions in part because the region in my mind if there is a second term life would be interested in the first few months. either he's going to -- the middle east is in israel and palestinians are hugely taking a lot of effort.

is he going to make this one of his priorities or not, and i'm not sure he will. he may just leave it on i wouldn't call it the back burner. >> what we expect the same figures if there is a second term? >> first of all, it's a good question. personnel in the second term hillary clinton most definitely stepping down and i don't know that leon panetta -- i doubt that he's going to stay on as defense secretary for four years, and other people will come up, and as the secretary of state, you've got susan rice as the ambassador and donley may want to do that himself and got john kerry again generational issues it's quite a few.

>> kind of a softball question i guess. [laughter] >> foreign affairs is getting sufficient attention or will get sufficient attention in this campaign, and it's kind of who's to blame and are you concerned about that. >> i have to be a realist. it does not surprise me that the economy is the main issue in the campaign a version a book about foreign policy, but i have to say this campaign will not focus on foreign policy unless there is a major development which could be terrorist incident something in iran with those exceptions i focus on. what i am concerned about is the level of sloganeering and the campaign pitted so far it may be because republicans kind of don't know which, from which

direction to attack obama. you take terrorism for excel, sometimes it's weak on terrorism and sometimes he is failing to acknowledge he's doing the same thing george bush did and sort of which is at. the of trouble delivering a consistent message that is sent the slogan of the old fall back the on defense american exceptional was some apology to our without going through the whole thing. i apologize and second of all if we are going to use apology and a loose way, than george bush apologized. i can give you the date for abu

ghraib a polis for slavery and africa and apologized to the chinese. so this isn't unusual for the american presidents to express' for something. >> you elude it to the question i was going to ask what is the second term for obama? >> how does it change of the deputies, where does rice ago, the national security adviser, what happens? >> i think i touched on the personnel. i don't know the details beyond that within the intresting question is what are they going to do in the second term. there are parts of the policy you would have thought they would have acted on. it to take one example, obama

promised in the spring of 2009 that he was going to move quickly to get the approval of the country as a test ban treaty and a different tree, the new s.t.a.r.t. treaty took so much effort the the kind of gave up and just kind of an abandoned the promises that they had made overseas. i would expect -- people have been saying this every four years -- but i would expect some action on the cuba policy to take one small and specific area china policy guy think is probably kind of a trying to maintain the status quo. but there is a vivid to be committed. they began talking about in the administration, and they didn't announce until really they could say that the united states was withdrawing the troops from iraq and afghanistan and now we are

going to concentrate on asia, but there will be major priority of the second term. >> i'm sure this is in bed in your book but in terms of your interviews and are around washington, what can you say oh barack obama had in terms of his own priorities? in colombia he wrote about nuclear disarmament. the was an interest of his as a young man. we haven't talked about latin america, about africa, about development. from what you kolyma what did he deeply care about? the fall of the foreign policy agendas that have to be integrated but what did he personally sees as things that he deeply cared about and wanted to have happen? >> if you look in those terms

the results were not great. he did care about the anti-nuclear issues. he did care at the beginning about the middle east and in israel and palestinians but didn't do it right. and he came to care about terrorism issues but finally he did want to sort of phased out american military involvement in iraq which was kind of again bush himself have already committed withdraw from iraq. there were remaining issues without was one thing. finally, afghanistan where he increased forces but i think we will see in the second term if the military says we need to lead more forces than we have said, i think they a not going to get very far.

people say you mentioned development issues people say they are going to get the development issues in the second term and it's always true that people say that and you're not really sure what's going to happen. then we are going to see -- who would have thought that he would turn towards the close of gorbachev. i like to think they are going to get into a process with iran. but wewill find out pretty soon i think. thanks. [applause] recently booktv asked our tour follows with a plan on reading this summer. here are some of their tweets.

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