dramatic differences that existed in the black student as some, including artists, decided to support the revolt while others elected to support the whites. >> then at 8:00 on lectures and histories, the university of maryland cat reena king and how consumer experiences changed during that time. >> instead of selling an automobile as a mens of transportation, from getting you from point a to point b, you can sell a car as prestige. >> just before 9:00, the historian discussed the post-world war ii career of cartoonist sergeant bill maul din. >> mauldin avoided ideological outbursts.

back home he jump into the political fray with both feet. >> and sunday at 6:00 p.m. on american artartifacts. >> this is a draft version of what became the bill of rights. and we usually refer to this as the senate markup. the senate took the 17 amendments passed by the house and changed them into 12 amendments that after a conference committee it was 12 amendments that were sent to the states for ratification. and ten of those 12 were ratified by the states. >> christine and jennifer take a tour of the national archives exhibit matching the 225 anniversary of the ratification of the bill of rights. for complete american history tv schedule, go to c-span.org. ♪ c-span student cam documentary contest is in full swing and this year we're asking students to tell us what's the

most important issue for the new president and the new congress to address in 2017. joining me is ashley lee, a former student cam winner of 2015 for if her documentary help for homeless heroes. tell us about your student documentary. >> my partner and i produced a documentary where we covered issues of homeless veterans on the streets of orange county, california. we decided these people who have help our country and the fact that they're living on the streets not having family or anyone that cared for them are not okay. we decided we're going to talk about this issue within our community and we decided to make a c-span documentary about it. i encourage seniors, juniors in high school and middle schoolers to use this platform to speak your voice, to raise your voice, to say that your generation

deserve to be heard in the government. and if there is a better place to speak these issues, this is it. i think my advice for the students who are on the fence of starting this documentary is to really look into your community and see what is affecting those who are around you. because they are the one who you love. they are the one who you see the most. they're the one who you're surrounded with every day. if there is an issue that you see happen every day on the street, that's probably where you can start. be a part of this documentary because you want to be a voice for your community. >> thank you, ashley, for all of your advice and tips on student cam. if you want more information on our student cam documentary contest, go to our website studentcam.or studentcam.org. the brookings institution and the university of virginia recently cohosted a conference about presidential transitions and the trump administration's

agenda for its first year. we'll hear from people who served in the transition teams for presidents clinton, george w. bush and barack obama. >> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to brookings. it's a pleasure to have you here for a very special event in two ways. first because brookings is very proud to cohost this event with the center and the university of virginia and secondly because of the topic, which is presidential leadership in the first year. believe it or not the first year has not begun yet for the trump administration. but i think we already have some of the flavor of what our life could well be like in the first year.

and there's nothing like a trip down memory lane to try to understand the kinds of challenges that any administration faces its first year but that the trump administration in particular is going to face come january 20th when president trump is sworn in. and so we have an action-packed program today that will deal with the various aspects of presidential leadership in the first year from domestic to foreign policy to bureaucratic and organizational challenges. i am very happy to have had the opportunity to partner both with darrel west and the government

studies scholars here at brookings, and in particular with bill antholis and the center at uva. and bill is well known to us here at brookings because for ten years he was the managing director of this institution before he became the ceo at the millicenter. i'm going to introduce him now and he's going to introduce the overall program, particularly the center's work on presidential transitions. bill, before he came to brookings and then to the center, worked at the white house where he was director of international economic affairs of the national security council and the national economic council. his responsibilities included planning and negotiating for the group of eight summits, the g 8

s summits before going to the state department where he was on the policy planning staff and the bureau of economic affairs. so bill is ar wellvery well equn terms of his own experience to lead us off this afternoon in terms of presidential first years. so bill antholis, welcome. it's wonderful to have you back here at brookings. thank you for this cooperation. >> it's wonderful to be here. great to see so many familiar faces in the crowds and in the hallways too. this is a home away from home. the first year is real. it is a real calendar driven period of time baked into our constitutional system because of an observation lyndon johnson

made which is, you get one year because after the first year congress stops thinking about you as president and starts thinking about their own reelection which comes one year later. and that drives two things in our political transition. first, it drives a domestic agenda. if you want to pass things legislatively, you have to work with the congress, whether that's the president of a different party of the congress or other outsider presidents from one party who have controlled both houses of congress. sometimes succeeded, sometimes struggled. johnson succeeded, jimmy cartercarter struggled in his first year. on the national security side it's a moment to do significant change in the country's approach to the world but also because of the relative inexperience of any team working with one another, it's often a moment of crisis

where other countries will test the united states. we saw that in 9/11 and in bill clinton's first year when al qaeda attacked the twin towers. people often forget that the truck bomb was in the first year of the clinton administration. or on policies gone astray, such as the bay of pigs, the shoot down of the spy plane in china or a failed coup in panama. but out of those crises comes a team learning well. just a month after that the bush team responded to the falling of the berlin wall. we at the miller center have been looking at presidential history for the last year and a half preparing for this moment. i want to show you a short video and then get into the three terrific panels that we've assembled today.

♪ ♪ >> an extraordinary democratic moment occurs with the peaceful transfer of executive power in america. ♪ ♪ thomas jefferson in his first inaugural address referred to the presidency as a post above his talents. jefferson humbled himself before the magnitude of the undertaking. it takes one year for a new

president to go from here to here. >> mr. speaker, the president of the united states! >> history teaches us a president's first year in office is crucial, a time of dangerous peril and exceptional opportunity. >> the problem for u.n. forces has been controlling the streets. >> the president was hit. he was wounded. >> i can hear you! >> the real world tests the untested commander in chief and the new president must act. it is also when presidents can enact their enduring policies. >> civil rights act of 1964. >> whether renewing american's promise at home or making historic breakthroughs on the world stage. as inauguration day 2017

approaches, our responsibility is to look beyond, to prepare for the new president's pivotal first year in office. how will our 45th president staff a cabinet, prioritize an agenda and act on it. what risks and rewards dwell on the horizon. the miller center has launched a nonpartisan effort to research those pressing challenges and to take those ideas directly to the presidential candidates and their staff to opinion leaders and to the public at large. the first year project illuminates the major issue areas, featuring public events, digital components and vigorous promotion and communication strategies. we are connecting history with policy and impact. >> president truman on the line, sir. >> well, how are you feeling?

>> i'm feeling pretty good. how are you? >> i'm having hell. >> what's the frubl? >> i got a little bit in the congress, a little bit with china, the vietnamese and a little bit all over the country and i just thought i'd call you and try to get a little advice and a little inspiration. >> the miller center specializes in studying the institution of the presidency. we apply the lessons of history to contemporary public policy challenges helping to understand and shape the modern presidency. our scholars have conducted comprehensive oral histories for every administration since president carter, creating a living network of the most senior officials who have led our executive branch. the miller center brings the lessons of history to life and connects the past to the future.

♪ >> so to dye into this we've assembled three panels today that combine the terrific expertise of our own scholars but also partners like the brookings institution. i think in putting together this project we've had essays written by almost ten scholars across brookings, particularly from government studies where i had the pleasure of being a senior fellow here. our great thanks to darrel and his whole team. the first panel includes one of my colleagues, elaine kamarck and we're delighted to have the two people who successfully did the last transition in the bush administration to the obama administration, chris lu and josh bolten. that will be moderated by my friend and colleague, barbara perry. after that a panel on moving a domestic agenda and then organizing for global challenges. with that i'm going to hand it over to barbara and her count

counterparts for the first panel. >> well while your colleagues are being miked, thank you bill, so much, thank you to brookings, of course to martin, thank you all for being here. this is my first visit to brookings although i feel like i've been here because as a political scientist i am forever tuning in to c-span and watching brookings panel. it's such an honor to be moderating a panel here at brookings for the miller center. as you can see from the program, we have arranged an amazing

group of scholars and practitioners who have served in four different presidencies. in the case of josh bolten, bush 41 and bush 43, chris lu currently deputy secretary of labor in the obama administration and elaine kamarck of the clinton administration. so we represent four presidencies and we want to dive right in to the subject of today and particularly, as bill announced and the title of this panel is first years and first principles. so all of you had the amazing experience of being part of a presidency in the first year. some of you long after that as well. but we want to talk then and start off today with that very intriguing question of how does a president-elect go from being a campaigner to a short window of opportunity of being

president-elect and then start the first year of his presidency? elaine, we'll start with you. >> well, i can say generally in one word they do that poorly. okay? >> explain. >> democrat or republican, this is not a partisan statement. and i'll explain it with a couple of statistics. okay? there are just over 4,000 jobs that the president has to appoint in the federal government. but of those 4,000, only a little over 1,000 are the big ones that are confirmed by the senate. and even that is a big number because it's really about 700 to 800. a couple hundred of those are part-time appointments to boards and things like that. now you are looking at 700 to 800 people to run a government in and a uniformed military of 4 million people.

it's impossible. okay? and so one of the things that a president has to figure out quickly is what is this thing that he's inherited. because what happens is that whenever a big blowup happens, guess who gets blamed. now, president obama wasn't in charge of writing code for the health care websites. but i promise you, the american people looked at him and said uh-oh, you screwed up. jimmy carter didn't fly helicopters into the desert in tehran but that came back to get him. george bush wasn't delivering ice to the people in the superdome in new orleans but that was a big black mark on his presidency. so what happens is that presidents tend to ignore this vast government they run, and then the government blows up on them and surprise, surprise, they get blamed because the american people thinks that the

president is the boss. so the first thing the president should do, and they rarely do, is figure out what this thing is. and understand that in any given point in time an organization that consists of several million people, two things are happening and they're happening simultaneously. something is going very right whereby th, they've got the right intelligence on this right, the right analysis on this problem, the right expertise. and at the same time somewhere else something is going very wrong. okay? they're understaffed, something is about to blow up. i'll just end with an anecdote that i used to open one of the chapters in my book and it goes back to the fall of 2013. on december 13th, just two days -- or tomorrow, 2013, there

were two astronauts in space repairing a misfiring heating and cooling system at the international space station. they were floating around in space, in space suits, doing something that you know for most of us in this room, was inconceivable. right? and two months earlier, of course, the obama administration was facing the collapse of the meltdown in its health care websites. well in october of 2013 and november and december, everybody started writing oh my god, the government, what a mess, it can't do anything, it can't do technology, blah blah blah blah blah. of course the same government in the same fashion had these two guys up in space wandering around with wrenches or whatever they were doing. the fact of the matter is that at cms, the centers for medicare and medicaid, and at nasa,

federal bureaucrats had contracted with private sector companies to do a job the government wanted done. at nasa there's a company in western massachusetts, they make space suits. okay? go figure. they make the space suits that these guys were wearing. so in other words, the process wasn't any different. it's just that at any given time something is going right and something is going wrong. presidents generally figure this out when it's too late. and then they discover that their campaign skills of messaging, tweeting, speech making, rallies, your campaign skills don't help you when the government has blown up in your face. which is why it behooves presidents to spend a little less time wandering around the country and a little bit more time in their first year

figuring out what is happening in the government that they are the head of. >> you know, elaine's example of things blowing up does make me think of a first-year fiasco as it was called, the bay of pigs. certainly that blew up in president kennedy's face and he went on national television and said, i take responsibility for this. i am the responsible officer of this government. and his opinion poll ratings soared to 83%. so there might be a little bit of a lesson. if the people are going to blame you anyway, go ahead and take responsibility and it might work in your favor. let me go to josh. we'll go in chronological order according to presidents and particularly president bush 43. a little bit about the fact that you were with him throughout the campaign as the head of policy and then part of the transition but in a very short window of opportunity because of the bush

v. gore controversy. >> thank you. and thank you for doing this program and the work you do both at brookings and the miller center. it's an important public service. yeah. i had the, i had the good fortune of being a part of the bush campaign, the bush 2000 presidential campaign which began at the beginning of 1999. so almost two full years before the election i arrived in austin, texas, as the policy director of the bush 2000 campaign. chris, i know you started pretty early in the obama campaign. and that's the first way that you, that you start to build a presidency that can with stand the difficult period of transition that every president faces.

president bush, then governor bush said something interesting to me on my first day when i arrived in austin, and i met him in his gubernatorial office and he said -- i go out and do a smart thing, you know, put all the policy together. and he said, but just remember one thing, i want to campaign the way i'm going to govern and i'm going to govern the way i campaigned. and every presidential candidate ought to begin a campaign that way. i doubt whether he used the same kind of words but i bet president obama said much the same thing. and what he was telling me and the rest of the staff was, build a campaign, build a policy structure that is something that i can take into the white house and implement, because what i say on the road is what i'm

going to do when i'm in the oval office. we were blessed in the bush campaign also with having a campaign staff that was essentially a staff that was itself ready to move into governance. i was the policy director. i became the deputy chief of staff for policy. karl rove was the chief political strategist. he game the strategist in the white house. erin hughes was the communicator and she became the head of communications in the white house. when you've built a good campaign team that's ready to move into the white house, you're ready to mitigate at source of great disruption during transitions, which is just the total changeover in personnel. very often campaign people are

not good governance people and vice versa. and in building a campaign and in building a government, i think presidents ought to look for both. so we, we were unusually blessed. we had only half of the usual transition because of the, because of the recount in florida. and yet i think we came in with only 37 days worth of transition in much better condition to know who was going to be in government, along with president bush,and what the agenda was. we had a 450-page policy book that spelled it out. my concern for the current transition is that they're not in that sort of position. they tl is not a thick policy agenda with detail to it. there's certainly inclinations

and drirections and so on which is what the public pays attention to and worked very well for president-elect trump and there's not the big structure of people ready to move in with him. it's incumbent on all of us, including with processes like this, to help what is a difficult situation for the best prepared for those that are coming behind us. >> well that's a perfect link then to chris lu and the fact that the outgoing bush 43 administration worked very closely, as i understand, chris, with the transition team with president obama to make that transition as smooth as possible. >> you know, in every setting like this i compliment josh for the tone that he and president bush set. >> that's why i show up. the only time we get complimented. >> in 2007 for pledging full collaboration and cooperation with the in-coming president,

regardless of which party it was. and the success that we enjoyed in 2008 really is in large measure because of the cooperation rereceived. i was in daily communications with josh's deputy working through transition issues, all 77 days. so in return president obama has pledged that same level of collaboration with his successor. and i think on balance we're doing that. it is certainly challenging, though. i mean i think it's fair to say, there is a playbook of how you transition from campaigning to governing. this is a president that's turning the plaque book on its head and ripping it up. with foreign policy updates, tweets, the carrier deal, there are a lot of things that we haven't seen before. it will be interesting to see on january 20th whether that changes or not. i suspect it will not. this is going to be an interesting ride for all of us. >> to be sure. let's then turn to governing itself.

let's say we've gotten through the transition. you have situations, as in the case of president bush 43 where we had a very clear agenda in the campaign, and so to say i want to govern the way i campaign makes for, it would seem to me, a fairly smooth transition to prioritization of policy topics and policy issues. i wonder if you could talk a little bit about president clinton and his prioritization and what he brought in as a priority and what might have begun to be imposed upon him by events. >> well, his -- i mean he had a similar saying, josh, as to -- his saying was, good government is good politics. that that's, you know, can get it all going right. and therefore i think the most important thing he did was the very first budget in the first year, which he got a lot of grief for.

okay? a lot of grief. cost us some congressional seats et cetera. but it was absolutely critical in setting us on the road to what was, by the seventh year, a balanced budget, first and only time we've had a balanced budget in many, many, many deck kasade. there was a clear direction, he understood that that was the most important thing he had to do. and like reagan before him, reagan is the only other president i know who got this right. they understood that macro economic policy is a very blunt instrument and it takes a long time. so you have to do the tough ugly stuff. you have to do in your first year. and so clinton did that with that first budget deal and the first reconciliation deal, so did reagan with his first budget deal. and by 1984 it was morning in

america -- i remember this well because i was working with walter mondale, a pretty depressing campaign to work in. and by 1996 we had incredibly low unemployment, peace in the world and all sorts of things that in-coming presidents want to have. doing those tough things early is really the most important thing. and then of course getting used to running a government. in my book i talk about a scene i witnessed between al gore and bill clinton. and it was one of those awkward things where there were a lot of people in the oval office and then they all went off into betty curry's office on the side there and there was sort jamb. i was the last one. obviously al gore wanted to say something to bill clinton so i sort of stood there stupidly trying to pretend i wasn't

there. and i got to watch al gore say to clinton, you must say this, this, this and this. it was on a foreign policy question. and what was going on is gore, who was more familiar with foreign policy, was saying to clinton, who was, you know, maybe the best ad libbed speech maker in american history, this is one place you don't ad lib, all right, because foreign policy statements have consequences, the world looks at them, parses them. usually the diplomats work them out so precision of language matters. as opposed to when bill clinton was talking about medicaid or welfare or something like this. so there's a lot of learning and sometimes it's very counter intuitive. i don't know who's going to tell that to president-elect trump. okay? somebody is going to need to say

to him -- i don't know when he's going to learn that precision and language matters, that when you're the president there are consequences to what you say, and that this free-wheeling campaign which he's run which had definitely many electoral advantages is going to be a problem in governing. they all go through this to a certain extent but they all have sort of some inkling of something. this current transition is unusual. >> to say the least. chris, could you tell us about transitioning into policy making, the links to the campaign agenda which had health care reform at the top for president obama, but coming into office with an ongoing crisis, an economic meltdown in the financial world. >> you know, when we started transition planning in april of 2008, we weren't focusing on

immigration, education, health care, a whole range of issues. by the time we took office in january of 2009, there was one issue, the economy. i recall the first jobs number we got in february of 2009, the country lost 800 jobs. so no matter what else you campaigned on, the number one governing principle had to be getting the economy up and running. three weeks after inauguration day, congress passed an $800 billion stimulus package and then the charge from vice president biezen who oversaw the recovery act was to get the money out the door as fast as possible with as little waste, fraud and abuse as possible. we had a couple of cabinet members confirmed, not many people around them. the ability to get $800 billion out the door was really in large measure because of the career leadership at these departments who understood these are the programs that you can put money into that will have the greatest

impact as quickly as possible. there's often a criticism of career employees and their ability to move quickly and drive your change. we learned very early on you can't accomplish anything unless you have the career leadership behind you. >> that brings me then to josh and president george w. bush. again, very clear agenda coming into office. talk about that, talk about how he implemented that agenda and to both chris and elaine's points about being able to reach out to leadership, both in the executive agencies and in congress and others in congress. >> president bush came into office having published two books of policy in his campaign, one of them which we published in july or august of 2008 i mentioned was 450 pages long. it was detailed policy speeches

and then five or six page fact sheets with all of the details that went behind the speeches so that you could tell the policy direction and philosophy and principle from the speech. you got the numbers, you got the programatic details. so when we came into the white house in january of 2001, we didn't have to have a lot of meetings about what are the policies that the president wants to implement immediately. we didn't face a crisis on the way in the door as chris and his gang did. but we did face an economy that was headed into recession. we had -- we had policies that were well-designed to combat that recession, in particular a large tax cut which president

bush campaigned on being necessary regardless but had also -- he had had advice from his economic adviser to the effect that a recession was likely on the way. and that this would be the best antidote. so we weren't confused about what the policy priorities were. education was a big one. president bush by the way, no one will remember this, president bush campaigned on being the education president. that was his intent when he came in. and in fact campaigned against al gore on the notion that the clinton administration had become too distracted by foreign activities and nation building as the bush administration wasn't going to participate in that sort of activity. and i'm probably anticipating -- >> it's amazing. >> probably anticipating a further question about how

events change the perspective of every president, they always do. but on the way in that gave us an opportunity to focus. president bush did one other thing that i think was generally regarded as having been a short k coming of the clinton administration come in the door and maybe a short koming of the trump administration on the way in, and that is focus on the white house. there's a tendency in every transition to focus on the big shiny objects which are the big cabinet posts. those are absolutely critically important. but it causes presidents elect and their senior teams to neglect the construction of the white house staff which actually is the group that's going to help drive the really critical presidential priorities.

the government that elaine described so well in her first set of remarks is pretty darn resilient and some would say impervious. but it is very -- it is very capable of running itself, at least sort of on a steady state, without substantial political leadership. it is only on those issues where the president really wants to take the country in a particular direction, especially a new direction, where the presidential leadership counts a lot. and typically that comes from the white house. so they don't have to be, you know, big, big public figures. but the folks whom the president brings in the white house and empowers to drive those initiatives are key appointments early on in a presidency.

and i think especially those who are less familiar with governance have a tendency to neglect that aspect of the early part of a transition. >> one of my favorite stories in doing the oral history for bush 43 at the miller center, we've done ever president's oral history from jimmy carter, really starting with the administration of gerald ford and carrying through. we're coming to the end of the bush 43 project. those are still confidential but this is in the public record. one of my favorite stories from that administration -- and this might be a lesson for president-elect trump, and that is that president bush 43 invited ted kennedy and his family within the first few weeks of the administration down to the white house theater to watch the then new film "13 days" at the cuban missile crisis. here sat ted kennedy with president george w. bush watching a film about ted

kennedy's brother a few yards away in the oval office in the cabinet room coming to terms with the cuban missile crisis. and the bush library where i just had the pleasure of visiting for the first time last week with bill, i noted that they had a handwritten thank you note from ted kennedy to president bush thanking him for bringing him and his family down to the white house to see "13 days." and he said i hope i'll have many opportunities to come down to the white house and to the rose garden and watch you sign some policies that we can agree on. and he said including exoccasion and health care. and apart from that, that outreach and that bringing together of two people from across the aisle, which ted kennedy had done on many occasions and governor bush had done in texas, from that grew the no child left behind policy. there can be issues about whether that was the best policy for education but the point is one of reaching out to the other

side and the other side accepting that outreach and carrying on from there. >> barbara, i mean, president bush's -- after the tax cuts, the top priority or the top -- both temporal and principle priority was the no child left behind act for which president bush's partners were democrat george miller in the house. >> the house. >> and democrat ted kennedy in the senate. and many people will recall that when 9/11 happened laura bush was on the hill, with ted kennedy preparing to do a hearing on the no child left behind act. eventually the act did get adopted and ted kennedy was there in the rose garden. but the country went off in a different direction. >> that's right. the wonderful display with the ted kennedy handwritten note to president george bush is a painting. ted kennedy painted daffodils

and he gave that painting to the first lady, laura bush with a very nice inscription. it does show come let us reason together. we can work across the aisle. that takes us of course to the notion that crises, economic and foreign, military crises can intervene and disrupt the best laid plans of an in-coming president. josh, since you mentioned 9/11. let us start there and talk about the impact that 9/11 had on president bush's first year in office. >> total. i mean it can't be yor staovers what a radical change in the agenda of the bush administration of government, the federal government, and i think of the whole country was that product of the 9/11 attack. and the whole focus of the administration changed overnight. interestingly, i think president

bush was among the first to recognize how profound and complete the change would be when he convened basically his war cabinet on the evening of september 11th, and he started giving different instructions, including to the fbi director saying your mission just changed. your mission traditionally has been to catch the bad guys after they do the deed. it needs to change. it's now we have to catch them before they do the bad deeds. that story was written across at least half of the government and changed the focus, the tenor of the entire government in ways, as i just suggested, that were completely unexpected in the campaign that president bush ran. >> elaine, thoughts about president clinton and things like the waco disaster, for example. >> yeah. i mean, again, the waco was --

waco was probably -- i mean it wasn't -- clinton didn't have anything nearly like president obama or presi obama or president bushcrisis, there was no major attack on the united states. so he had a much more normal, shall we say, first year. but there were those -- everything from gays in the military to waco was evidence of my, you know, opening remarks, which is he really wasn't very familiar with the government he was running. he was an outesideoutsider. he had been a governor. there were certain pieces of it he knew quite well. god forbid you made a mistake briefing him about medicare because he knew everything. right? but no president comes in knowing the whole shebang, okay? so he clearly -- there were just mistakes that he made in the first year that really did hurt

him and decrease his political popularity et cetera, et cetera. and a lot of it came from him and his cabinet not being attuned to what the federal government was doing. it's worse -- we came in in '9 2, '93 after three republican terms. so what that means is two reagan terms and one bush one term, and what that means is the last time you had democrats in any major role in the federal government was really a long time ago. it was jimmy carter. and frankly some of them were dead, some of them -- a lot of them were retired. and so it's harder -- the longer you've been out, the more difficult the transition is because you can't just go to, you know, the last democratic secretary of defense or secretary of something or other and say, okay, help us. >> your bench is thin, in other

words. >> your bench is very thin. and i think that showed in president clinton's first year. >> chris, thoughts about again how this crisis that was ongoing as you came in, as you're trying to move forward on health care reform and other aspects of the policy agenda of president obama. >> you know, it's interesting dynamic with the three administrations because i think when folks have -- when a president has a governing majority, they think that majority is going to last forever. as we quickly learned in 2009 with the recovery act, we were able to get health care passed, you know, and we're ready to go and then we lost the majority in both house and senate -- or lost in the house certainly. and then really for the last six years we've been relying on executive action to get our policy agenda done. we used to joke in white house legislative affairs in the first term when staffers would leigh, they would print out a piece of paper showing all of the bills we had gotten passed during that

period of time. i don't know what they give out now. the list has gotten much much shorter. it was not only the change in policy priorities, it was the change in tactics that came about because of that 2010 election. >> right. we have a few more minutes for one last question from me and i want you all to be thinking of questions you can ask in the last five or ten minutes of our panel. we'll go down the row and i wanted to present this question to all three of you. what did you learn in the transition and first year of your respective administrations that you wished you had known, looking back, now you know it, you wish you had known going into it? >> i don't know. there were a lot of things. but i think that the thing that we wished we had known was exactly how complicated pieces of the government were. that from the outside you thought you knew, and then once

you got in, there were layers upon layers upon layers. and you know, here you had bill clinton had been governor of arkansas for more than a decade. al gore had been a member of congress and a member of the senate for a long time. these were two guys with real experience. and yet there was so much learning that went on in that first year. and i think probably making more time to do that would have stood them in better stead later on. >> more time to learn. >> more time to learn. >> you know, i think i was surprised and i guess i'm surprised over the last eight years how fast this goes. in particular you have the wonderful window of opportunity in the first year and that disappeared so quickly. the other thing i would say is the political pendulum swings back the other direction. the policy initiatives that we tried to push in the second term, gun control or immigration, we could have gotten them done in the first

two years and we decided to sequence other things. lost the majorities and never got the chance to do it again. >> prioritization key at that point. >> yeah. >> josh? >> chris said exactly what i was going to say, which was toch to have a keener sense of the clock. we came in with the conventional wisdom understanding that the most productive period was early on. what at least i didn't understand well enough going in is how small the windows of opportunity for productive action are. and therefore the crucial questions to be concerned about, if you know what your priorities are, if you know where your policies are, is one, to be aware that you will be knocked off balance by some sort of intervening crisis. and number two is, get the sequencing right and take the stuff you think is really important and run with it as

fast as you can as soon as that window opens. the windows are not only in the first year, but they are, but they are widest in the first year the first year. and then watch for those windows, pick the right issue, which we did not consistently do later in the administration, and run as fast as you can with them, because the windows don't stay open long. >> i would say words to live by for the incoming administration, and thank you so much. now let's turn to those of you in the audience, and if you'll wait for a mike to come to you. >> hi. my name is richard skinner. and we've heard a lot of talk about the importance of filling the white house staff early on. and of course, everybody pays a lot of attention to the cabinet. but oftentimes, new administrations run into a particularly huge challenge in filling all those subcabinet positions, many of which are extremely important in those

issue areas. oftentimes, these are the people who actually sink their teeth into the policy detail more so than the cabinet secretaries. i'm wondering what the people on the panel have learned about filling those subcabinet positions, which some can remain vacant for a pretty long time. >> well, i'll give you my example simply at the department of labor. we have 17,000 employees. we both train people for jobs and we enforce workplace safety, workplace wage rules. who your osha administrator is, who your wage an hour administrator are, they're critically important to enforcing the laws. i'm bias, i'm the deputy secretary, but who runs the agencies and keeps trains running on time and making sure you are doing the internal changes and watching your budget are all important. i will echo josh's point on the white house staff. i have a lot of thoughts about the trump transition, but i think that they are making the classic mistake of focusing on the cabinet instead of the people who are immediately

around the president who can help him get his agenda done. it will be interesting to see whether the sequencing changes, whether they start moving faster on that front. >> they have time. >> they do have time. >> thank you very much. excuse me. larry cheko. this running as fast as you can the first year scares me a little bit. my question is, can the first year do irreparable damage to our republic? but do we have enough checks and balances and sanity built into the system to keep us on an even keel somehow? >> on election night, my son-in-law, who's an army captain, said to me, well, now we have to trust the constitution, okay? and i've been quoting that all the time, because the constitution does build in checks and balances, and there

are people who are nervous about where a president trump might go in this first year. but to sort of answer that specifically goes to the discussion we've been having, and i think josh pointed this out. most candidates for president come in to office with policy papers. they come in in a couple of key areas with a deeply thought-out policy agenda. i mean, we know that president bush really was steeped in education policy, knew it as governor, came in with a vision. you know, they knew where to go. so if you come in having campaigned on it, given a lot of speeches on it, et cetera, yeah, you can pretty much do a pretty good job in the first year. the worries -- and so, and that's generally what tends to happen, you know, is that the first-year focus is on something that the president cares about,

has thought about, there's a lot of guidance on. the problem i think we're facing and what's making everybody a little bit nervous about the upcoming trump administration is that we have an absence of these policy papers. so we don't quite know what he means, right? we don't know, well, how much money do you want to spend on that? where are you going to get the money from? which part of the government are you going to task with implementing that? what's the legislation look like? i mean, there's a whole list of things, right? you have to sort of figure out. and there doesn't seem to be that depth in the trump transition or administration, and that's brand-new. that was never the case. i mean, very few presidents come in knowing everything, but they generally come in with some expertise in some piece of the government, some idea of where they want to know.

this, we're in unchartered territory here. >> can i -- >> yes, josh. >> -- throw in something? because i'm not as pessimistic as, well, you might imagine. b but, i mean, we've spent years here in washington with everybody bemoaning, oh, the gridlock is terrible, washington never gets anything done, and now all of a sudden people are saying, oh, my god, washington might get something done! [ laughter ] and i am a believer in our constitutional system. it is a -- it's a difficult system. as a system well designed to frustrate governmental initiative. i can't tell you the number of times when i served in the white house. chris, you probably experienced this, elaine, you, too.

i had parliament envy. >> mm-hmm, yep, definitely. definitely. >> cue woodrow wilson. >> if we just had a parliament, you know, we could just go do this dang stuff and, you know, get all those people out of our way. but you can't in our system. and i happen to be among those who thinks that even though the trump team isn't coming in with fat policy papers, i'm a big believer in tax reform, which there's wide consensus in this country we actually need and have not had in 30 full years, no significant rewrite of our tax code in 30 years, and it's because the internal tensions that we have built into our constitutional system and the growth of ideological and

partisan chasms in washington have been too large to bridge. and so, on areas like tax reform, i am cautiously optimistic that a successful candidate who is not part of the deep ideological divide in this country, is not part of the deep partisan divide in this country, actually has a chance to help us break gridlock in areas where i think the american people will benefit. so, i am concerned, but i am cautiously optimistic about what our system can produce over the next year. >> well, thank you. obviously, this could go on for the entire first year of the next president, this discussion. and so, i'm going to use my moderator's prerogative to have the last word, to this gentleman's point.

i have several favorite phrases from "the federalist papers," and they are thusly, wise men may not always be at the helm. if men were angels, no government would be necessary. and ambition must be made to counteract ambition. so, with that as the three premiseses of our constitution which has served us well for over two centuries, i like josh have great faith, and as elaine said, we'll put our faith in the constitution every time. so, thank you so much for your attention and thank you to our panelists.

>> so, while our panelists are getting miked up, maybe people could come back to their seats, particularly people outside. as we started to discuss in the last panel, moving an agenda through is a great challenge. presidents often get one thing done, occasionally get two, and in rare instances get three done in their first year or two, and we're delighted to have a terrific panel here to scout out what that looks like, feels like from the ground up. so with that, i'm going to hand it over to niki hemmer from the miller center. >> thanks. well, we are going to sort of go in the order of how a bill becomes a law. we're going to start with domestic policy, then legislative affairs, then communications. so, i have here dan crippen, who worked with the reagan team. he was domestic policy adviser and assistant to the president for domestic policy, dan meyer, who was in the white house as

assistant and deputy assistant to the president for legislative affairs, and jen psaki, who is the white house communications director for the obama administration. and i'd like to start us off by thinking, if you could talk a little bit about what some of the challenges and opportunities of the first year are for your particular places within the domestic agenda building, especially for, if you could start us off, dan, domestic policy. >> sure, sure. i had the luxury, i guess, or good fortune, of watching transitions, first from the senate, then from the white house and then from the congressional budget office, so i got to see several transition phrase several vantage points. as my former employer in the senate used to say, however, many of the things i remember never actually happened. so i want to make sure there's a bit of a caveat in here so that my colleagues are to correct me. starting with reagan, of course,

which i guess that transition was better, best, there was a consistent message during the campaign and it was pretty clear what he was about, not necessarily in the specifics, but certainly on many policies. he had a good team around him quickly, as we talked about the white house staffing, pulled from other campaigns. jim baker brought people from california that he knew, tapped a congressman who helped a lot for a while, dave stockman. and they started the transition quickly and worked very hard. so, by february, we had a new reagan budget, mostly put together by dave stockman. in fact, the notebook that came to the hill was called "the stockman black book," for reasons we later understood. so, they created very quickly a budget that reflected the reagan priorities. ultimately, it was the first time reconciliation was used,

passed much of the budget, which had spending cuts, tax cuts, even included things like blocking grants to states, so taking a bunch of the categorical programs and blocking them as they're talking about it. so a lot got accomplished through the legislative budget process. one -- i should probably start by saying, and some of our previous panelists talked a little about -- virtually everybody has something happen in their first year. sometimes it's foreign policy, sometimes, of course, it's been terrorist attacks. in reagan's case, it was an assassination attempt. i don't mean to make light of that at all, but it did interrupt some of the progress for a while that was being made. and toward the end of that first year, after the successes were accomplished, the administration sent up in november, maybe late october, a package of social security changes, thinking that because they had already had such successes, they could probably or hopefully could

replicate that with social security, which reagan thought ought to be reformed. let's say that didn't succeed very well. a number of provisions were not very well thought out, changing dramatically benefits for early retirement, for example, which many people took as being unfair. and so complying with the other politics of it. but to go back to the beginning just a bit, there were -- we despair sometimes of the partisansh partisanship. i think it's defined a little differently. we think about it differently than those days. the budget resolution in the senate, which embodied all of the reagan policy, there were 39 straight amendments in which baker had to produce 51 republicans because no democrats supported him. they were all offered by democrats. and in the house, which was then controlled by the democrats, as dan can speak better than i can about, had to be a coalition formed because the house

controlled by democrats and democrats helping republicans and helping the president, and it took a fair amount of effort to get there. so, bipartisanship was not the rule of the day. not on budget, not on taxes, necessarily, certainly not on social security. but i think the main lessons here are a couple. the consistent message in the campaign, the ability to translate that campaign message into legislation very quickly, to move relatively quickly, but all of it still takes leadership. in this case, leadership by the president in putting a coalition together in the house to pass the budget. then i saw the bush 41 transition from the other end of the avenue at the white house. and of course, the white house was literally down the hall from all of us, saw everything that had gone on, and was in some cases, some aspects limited in his abilities to have a big domestic agenda. i mean, he was one of the guys who helped create the reagan

agenda. so it was a little hard for him to go out and say the last guy did it, you know, broke the position so nobody could play it. he had to make kind of modest changes and suggestions. and while he certainly didn't think this, a lot of the voters thought it was another reagan term, and so he had to be careful about how he positioned himself. there were some things, of course, he had to address or thought he should address, certainly with the savings and loan crisis and other things so that his initial domestic policy was somewhat limited, and in the transition, there was not as much policy exchange as there were lots of other transitions. in looking from the congressional budget office at the bush 43 transition, or look even at the clinton transition, you see the same kind of elements of the reagan process -- fairly consistent campaign themes, translated into legislation relatively quickly,

taking an opportunity of that first window, as josh said, there's more than one window, but again having events intervene. in the clinton administration, some of that was self-imposed or self-inflicted, such as the failure of the health care plan. but at the same time, got his budget passed, had a fairly large stimulus package, didn't all of it succeed. some of it did. so, again, it was the combination, i think, of those things that moved clinton along as well in that first year. and then with the first bush administration, lots of the campaign rhetoric wasn't very defined, but the policy that josh and others were putting together was quite fine. and so, their ability to move quickly was also a prospect that they developed themselves along the way of the campaign. again, we talked about some of the things that bush 43 accomplished pretty quickly. worked substantially on no child left behind, on the tax cuts,

other significant changes that occurred in the first year. and obviously, the first year there was impeded by 9/11 for a long time, although some significant domestic policy happened after that. again, looking at just a moment back at president clinton, not only did the health care policy not get through, but it did slow them down and impede other things. like reagan and social security, trying to bite off a little bit too much initially is sometimes a problem. and congress can only absorb so much. your resources are only so thick, and you only have so many damn irish working for you, so you have limited scope sometimes. >> dan, once this policy agenda is being developed, what's it look like over in legislative affairs? >> thanks, niki. i think the first point i would make is, and it builds on what dan was just saying, is it really depends on the circumstances in which you take office. and by that, i mean what the congress looks like.

when reagan won, he had a democratic house, as dan said, and a republican senate. when president clinton won, he had democrats controlling both. when bush won, he had a republican house and a 50/50 senate, if you remember. and when president obama won, he had a democratic house and 60 votes in senate. so much different circumstances for each one, and i would suggest that that dictates the strategy to some extent as well. i remember when i was in the white house and after president obama had won, i was at the end of the bush administration. president obama had won. and i got interviewed for some publication asking about, you know, did i have advice for my successor, phil sclolaro, president obama first head of affairs. and my comment was, which is relevant to this, his job will be much different than mine. first years of the bush administration, the democrats were the majority in the congress.

so, you're dealing with a divided government, whereas president obama was going to have unified government. and my feeling, what i meant by that comment was phil's first responsibility was getting an agenda passed. he had to spend his time focused on being united with the democratic leadership in congress. and people after the fact were second guessing, saying, well, they ignored the republicans or didn't try hard enough with the republicans or whatever. and the point simply is you don't get those opportunities very often, particularly when you had 60 votes in the senate. and if he hadn't gone for it, he would have been forever criticized for it. so i found no fault in that. and i guess that's my -- you know, an illustration of how they have to look at it. once you've decided those first-year priorities based on what you ran on, you know, whether it was any of the previous folks or if it's president-elect trump on, he wants to repeal and replace the affordable care act or tax

reform or social security or whatever it is, because i agree with what bill said in the introduction, you can only do a handful of things. but people forget that in addition to those things you want to do, there are certain things that you have to do, you don't have any choice. but you know, for instance, they're faced with a continuing resolution that's going to expire on april 28th. they've got a debt limit they're going to have to do that year. obvious nominations are a requirement. there's probably going to be a supreme court nomination. so, all of a sudden, you have these things filling up. and for the calendar and for which you need a strategy, and you're going to have to get votes to pass all of those things. and then add to that, okay, how are we going to approach what we want to do on health care and border security and infrastructure and a tax reform package. and so, all of a sudden as you layer it on, it gets a lot more complicated. but that has to be considered up front as well. to make sure you get all of this done.

and then, you know, once you have decided what you're trying to do, then you just have to develop your strategy for each item on your agenda. you know, who are the key players? dan cited president bush. it was a different approach on tax reform, where you're using -- bush 43 in this instance -- where you're using reconciliation versus what he was doing with no child left behind, the other example you had, where that obviously wasn't under reconciliation. and with a 50/50 senate, he had to put together a bipartisan coalition. senator kennedy was very important. congressman george miller in the house, along with boehner and judd gregg, i think it was, was the chairman -- or, i can't remember. it was 50/50, who was chairman of the health committee. but you know, that's the -- you have to look at each part of your agenda and figure out, okay, how are we getting this

one done, how much can we or will we do under reconciliation, which by nature is a partisan exercise, so you're going to drive -- in the trump case, you're going to drive democrats away by doing reconciliation, but that will be deemed a necessity. and i would -- again, i don't fault that strategy either. but then they're going to have to come back behind that and try to put together bipartisan coalitions on items that you can't do under reconciliation, which as we've all learned includes part of the replacement of the aca. so, it will be a complicated first year, as it is for everybody, but you know, that's the way you need to approach it in my mind. >> so, i said i wanted to go third because the policy and the, like, legislative roles are really what our jobs are all about or what communications is all about. i would say one of the things that people forget if they've only done a campaign and haven't worked in government is that

campaigns are aspirational and you're held accountable for basically nothing. and so, that was true, and now there's a consistency and there should be for what a president talks about when they're running for office and when they come into office. that was true for president obama, including for many of the policy areas where his comments were perceived as very controversial, like talking to our enemies. but when you come in as a communications professional, but probably in any role, there is an adjustment where you realize everything we do matters, we're under a very different microscope, we can't just say we're for a certain policy. people are going to ask fair questions like, oh, that sounds good, how are you going to pay for that and what are you going to give up to pay for that, and that's an adjustment, i think, from a communications standpoint. you really come in, you learn very quickly. i would say some of the things that i'm sure the new administration will deal with that we did as well is the

priority izati prioritization. we've talked about that a little bit here. but for us, president obama talked about a lot on the campaign trail, but when he came in, obviously, we were dealing with a financial crisis. we were talking backstage about the overlap in the work that the bush administration and the obama administration did together during the transition, which was essential. and if we hadn't worked together, we would have probably ended up in a different place. but the president came in and that's basically what we had to do first and foremost is pass what were some pretty unpopular pieces of legislation, but there was agreement that they were necessary, whether it was t.a.r.p. or the recovery act shouldn't have been controversial, but of course, we only got three republican votes, so maybe it was, but big, a lot of spending. and what the president really wanted to do early on was health care. and you know, hindsight's always 20/20 in any of these jobs.

you go back and look what we could have done differently. of course there's things we would have done differently, but what everybody's said here to date is definitely true in our experience. and i was there in the beginning as well as still now, which is that you prioritize. you're not going to get everything you want to get done, so you really make choices. and for us, there was a big debate internally about how big of a health care package. you know, if you did a smaller health care package, could we have gotten cap-and-trade? i don't know, maybe. i mean, you look back and you guess these sorts of things, but that's the early prioritization impacts the communications, too. the last thing i'll just say is while governing is entirely different from the communications standpoint, there are some things that help a president get elected that you sometimes can lose the thread on, and we did a little bit, which is winning the hearts and minds of the american people. it's very easy to come to washington and only talk to people here and think that you're going to convince people

to come your way, but what we learned through making mistakes, i would say, in the first year, is that you really need to use the power of how the president got elected to win people over and spend time doing that and sell your policies in a way that you get the public on your side. and that seems like there's not enough time to do that when you come in. so, but certainly a lesson we learned. >> real quick addendum. both of my colleagues referred to it, and it's when you're setting priorities, setting legislative strategy or even developing policy, you have to keep in mind what kind of presidential resource you have. what time are you going to spend on these priorities? how many phone calls? how many televised addresses? how many trips to the hill? all of those things. and so, it's not just how far can you push the policy or how many votes can count, it's important to keep in mind that you have a limited resource that goes into those decisions. >> including the president's

time, which is the most valuable resource. >> exactly. that's what i was referring to. >> yeah. >> so, sitting up here, you three all seem very collegial, but i suspect that there are some -- >> it's temporary. >> -- some tensions, right, between your various areas, whether it's domestic advisers trying to convince legislative affairs that they need to do something, that your priorities might be a little different and what you want to do might be different. so how did you navigate those relationships with other departments within the white house? >> want to start? >> we all have our anecdotes on this one. >> do we tell them, though? >> i'll let you start, but i'll just tee it up with a story. when i went in the white house, my predecessors at leg affairs said one of the roles of leg affairs, one of the ways i describe that is you're the eyes and ears but you're also the hill's eyes and ears back into the administration.

and what folks told me is, you'll be surprised at the number of times you're going to be in meetings inside the white house when you have people who think they know what's going on on the hill or understand the hill say, we have to do xyz, and you're thinking, that will get three votes on the hill. and you get to kill it because you have to say that. so, but anyway, with that tee-up, i'll defer to the domestic policy person. >> the question is your own loyalties. occasionally wonder if you work for the cia. there's always a tension, and it's with communications as well. i once had to deal with our communications director that i wouldn't do communications if he didn't do policy. neither of us held to that completely. but you certainly have to be cognizant of what the president said, what those policies. and we were reminded very often about the consistencies of the presidencies and how important it was that we develop policy that reflected that. we developed speeches that reflected that, that we push

legislation, obviously, but there is a tension. policy folks think everything's passable. we always assume you can develop a communications strategy from whatever the policy is, again, because it's good stuff, without understanding fully the elements of the professions at all. >> so, i joke with my staff sometimes on tough days that i'm going to get a t-shirt that says that "it's a communications problem." sometimes it's a communications problem, but sometimes it's bad policy and sometimes we lose a vote in the house or the senate because people think something's going to pass and it doesn't. so, these are some of the roots of the tensions. i think one of the things that as a communications or press person you have a responsibility to do in any white house is to recognize that it's not all about what your objective is. if our objective was solely on how things would sell with the american public, we'd probably do different policies and we'd probably push different legislation. and sometimes, oftentimes, that

is far more important. so, in the early days, the auto bailout, which now we talk about as one of our big things we did which is so great, was so unpopular, it was terrible. everybody hated it. they thought it was the worst thing that we could have done. and you know, we had a responsibility to sell it because the president and the economic team thought that it was the right step. now, it turned out to be the right step, but there is -- you have a responsibility in any white house to recognize there's long-term objectives. if you have a good leader who's the president, and they have to recognize that sometimes the stories are going to be terrible for a couple of months because it's the right policy. one just last anecdote i'll share is, you know, the other piece that often people don't recognize is there are a lot of limitations to what you can say, either because there are national security reasons why you can't change exactly what you say about things, or even on the economic front. when i came in, we, the political and press teams,

wanted to say things are so -- to the public -- things are so terrible and awful, you don't even understand how bad they are. i mean, something more articulate than that, but that was the basic message. and the economic team would say that will crash the markets, that will rile the markets. and so, when people look back, they say, oh, you have a communications problem, and there are things we could have done better, but there are certain limitations you have when you have the responsibility of the presidency. and you know, that's sometimes hard to explain, i'll say. >> dan, any further anecdotes? >> i've kind of took my shot at the policy side already. there wasn't much tension between the leg affairs and the communications. one of my observations of washington over my years here is whenever anybody has a failure, one side or the other, usually an election, so republicans in

2006 or the democrats in 2010. or i can remember back when i was on the hill in 1998 when republicans lost a handful of seats when they thought they were going to pick up seats. the messaging always gets blamed, right? it's never what you did. it wasn't because you were pushing impeachment in 1998 or it wasn't because what you did in your first two years in 2010. it was the messaging. if only our messaging could be fixed. so i was always pretty sympathetic to the communications side because they always got blamed for it, you know. >> you can keep your health care plan was a policy idea. it wasn't a messaging point, just to say that for everybody's understanding. >> exactly. anyway, that's about all i have. >> well, if we could turn attention from -- >> no, i just -- i promise, this is the last time i'll try and have the last word. we all think, and it's not us three necessarily, but certainly our colleagues who we work with all think they can do our job. dan mentioned someone pushing

policy for three votes. everybody has a communications strategy that will work if we pursue it. if we get the right policy, we'll get the votes, and of course everybody's always doing poli policy. >> everybody's always doing legislative affairs, too. especially that one. >> so, those are the internal relationships. what about those external relationships that you have to navigate in each of your roles, whether it's the press, whether it is the public, whether it's congress? what were the challenges or experiences you had trying to navigate those relationships as sort of the person in the white house who's reaching out to these other stakeholders? >> i think on the legislative front, one of the things you have to get right the first year is how you're going to manage the outreach to the hill. so you do need, you know, the ideal from my perspective is you need -- you need the person who's ahead of legislative affairs to be managing that. now, that doesn't mean the leg affairs shop is the only ones who can talk to the hill, but if

anybody else is talking to the hill, the leg affairs team will know about it. every administration has their horror stories. i can remember going -- by the time i was in the bush white house, that had kind of gotten worked out. people were, you know -- of course, you know, my boss was josh bolten. he would talk to the hill, but he was really good about, you know, harry reid's calling me, why don't you come down, that sort of thing. but i remember telling schalero, you have a president who was a senator, a vice president who was a senator, a chief of staff who was a member of the democratic leadership, and you're just going to have a lot of people. and i don't mean to be singling out. every administration goes through that. so if you're going to have a successful first year, you need to sort that out very quickly, o putting a system in place so that if there's any outreach to the hill, that it's coordinated under the leg affairs shop. >> you know, i think in terms of

relationships with the press -- i see ann compton here. she's in my eye. i think if there is intention, that you're not doing your job and the press isn't doing their job, and i mean that within reason. i mean, i think the age of civility needs to i think return or be a part of how people interact between media and public officials. i in the early days was the only woman in the press office and was a spokesperson. and this is not purely a gender thing, but i will say that a lot of my male colleagues were a bit more likely to scream, slam phones, yell, and it wasn't always the most effective thing, to be totally honest. but you know what, i think in the white house, the press always wants more access to the president, and we always don't -- we never want to give as much access as people want. but there are some traditions -- the pool, which exists, as i

think most people in this room know, because there have been enough, unfortunately, assassination attempts on presidents that there's a public right to know. now, you can argue, do they need to go to the, you know, kids' basketball game or the restaurant? you know, you can argue those points. we have been through, i think, over the last eight years a lot of changes in the media, you know? i think in terms of how people consume information and how we reach the public. and what's challenging from somebody in my role and i'm sure will be challenging for my successors, is that there's so many outlets now and so many ways people consume information that you can't just talk to the white house press room, because you won't reach a lot of people, but those people in the press room are also responsible for and attuned to everything the president is saying and people are saying, and they hold you accountable, too. so there's a big push-and-pull, which is challenging. one of the things we went through fits and starts of,

sometimes better than others, was making officials in the government available. that's oftentimes what people in the media want access to. they want to talk to the policy experts, right? sometimes they want to talk to the leg affairs folks, but they don't really want to talk to them. but the policy experts often will. and the truth is, that's very useful for any president. and sometimes to the staffing point, you just run out of resources and time and ability to do that, but that's always something that's useful. but you know, there's always a push-and-pull with the press and the white house, and an element of that is healthy, but there are certain parts of tradition that certainly should continue. >> i was going to say, thank god we didn't have twitter, but then i can't imagine ronald reagan using twitter. wouldn't have mattered probably. >> you wouldn't give him his password, just like we don't give any officials their passwords. >> but it's, as you said, it's

useful for policy folks, and that's why i had the deal i had with our communications folks, and i was always off the record or whatever the right term is these days, so i tried not to get in the press. that wasn't my role. and i thought press ought to be made by the people i was working for. but there are other outside groups, and i don't know whether you alluded to it or not, but certainly with domestic policy in the white house, it's your responsibility in many ways to keep up with the outside groups, to meet with them, to talk to them, to make sure their policy papers were processed. otherwise, you lose not just your base, but your constituency or important advocates. and so, part of the white house apparatus, whether it's domestic policy or somewhere else, is kind of the contact point for many outside groups that don't have to necessarily be support i ing, but that's the first place you go. >> we've spent the last six years or so talking about the problems of divided government when it comes to enacting a

domestic agenda. are there any pitfalls to having a united government, or is it just an unadulterated good four-year domestic agenda? >> as ann could tell you better than i, sometimes much worse. you're expected to produce more when you have, you know, a unified government. but your party colleagues on the hill also think they have more discretion to not agree or to intervene with policy and try and get you to do things that they want you to do. so it's not uniformly a good thing. >> yeah, there are lots of pitfalls. just going back to what we were talking about before, i think you come in with a unified government, there's expectations that get raised that are sometimes hard to beat. and i think you're going to see this in this coming year. they intend to do major tax

reform under reconciliation or repeal and replace the affordable care act under reconciliation, and you can't do it all under reconciliation. you have limits under reconciliation and the byrd rule in the senate. so i mean, i saw it even with divided government here in recent years where republicans controlled the house and the senate and there were some members who didn't understand why they couldn't get things done and government was shut down, you know, with all sorts of claims that we could force the president to sign something. it's like, where do you go in your civics class? i mean it doesn't work that way and it still doesn't work that way. so, the challenge is people aren't realistic. they set their expectations so high. so, then you set yourself up to fail if you can't achieve everything, and that's the problem. >> yeah. i mean, i think we're a two-party system, and both of

the parties, certainly the democratic party is a big umbrella, and i'm sure the republican party is, too, right? and that's the beauty of it, that everybody doesn't have identical thoughts, but there is an expectation that, you know, people will all march to the same drummer. and the fact is, everybody has different politics, people have different views, and these all come into play. you know, if you look back at when president obama came in and we had the house and the senate and a pretty sizable number, as was already referenced, in the senate, getting health care done was really hard. it almost didn't happen. and that was with majorities in both houses. so, even with the incoming administration, you need 51 to repeal, you need 60 to replace, right? and that's not easy. that's hard. and so, you know, the systems are in place for a reason, but i think sometimes you forget how hard it is to get bills passed. >> we like to think we have a

tent, by the way, not an umbrella. >> okay, umbrella, tent, sorry. >> that's all right. >> they're sort of cousins. >> yeah. >> well, i want to get all of your advice to the incoming administration. but actually, i want to start with jen, with a specific question, which is, you've been working very closely on creating new policies and strategies for navigating a very changed media environment. so what kind of advice would you give to the incoming team about how to navigate that, what sort of things that you've learned in your time in communications for the white house that might be useful going in. >> sure. i would say that, you know, the way we view media now is that it's not a social media versus traditional media. there's a big spectrum, and most outlets are on that spectrum. now, i'm not counting platforms that are social media platforms. that's sort of a different beast for a different panel and lots

of questions to be discussed. but, so that's how we view it. i would say the lessons we've learned are that, you know, you want to think about your prioritization, which is driven by your policy team, and really force the system, even when everybody doesn't love it internally, to focus on those priorities. 1,000 flowers cannot bloom in government, because you'll spend -- you know, you're responsible for everything. in terms of the way that you communicate, we found that a mixture of what people would view -- and i really hate the term traditional or mainstream media, but i'm just going to use it because people know what it's a reference to -- and social media is probably the sweet spot. you know, because what our objective is is to try to communicate with the american public and the american people, and you can't be snobbish about, oh, well, this outlet's only been around for five years, and therefore, they're not eligible,

because the fact is, a lot of those outlets do really interesting and really good, serious work. there is an inaccurate and i think unfair perception that people like to throw out there that we only do zach galifianakis, which frankly i've been gone for two years and that was before i came back. the fact is, i had an objective to sign people up for the affordable care act. but we do a combination, and there are outlets that are online, like mike.com is an example, where we did a lot around the iran deal, we've done a lot around serious policies that do really good work. and sometimes i think there's an us versus them in mainstream and social media or online outlets that is not healthy. the last thing i'll say is that, you know, while it's important to recognize the opportunity with all these new outlets, there's also a lot of risk, as we've seen. and i don't mean risk for a president. i think we've learned from even the reporting over the past couple of weeks that the way

people digest and consume information, it's hard for people to differentiate what they see online. and so, while i think it's important to take advantage of all these options, you know, there should be a discussion, i think, in this country about how to make sure people are getting reputable and accurate information. and that's where a lot of the mainstream outlets come in that are, you know, are not swayed. sometimes you argue editorial boards or whatever, but can provide that information to the public. and so, i think that shouldn't be lost. that was really a tirade on media -- you know there was -- there's a lot to be said about this issue, but the advice i would give is just relationships matter. i mean, get to know the reporters who cover you and get to know what they care about and what they're thinking about, and often, they have their pulse on the public. keep focused on your priorities and your issues. don't be afraid to try new things and recognize that sometimes things fail, but be humble when things are not working and change it when it's

not working. and there are people that have been in the press corps a long time, and ann was certainly one of them when she was still with us at the white house, who we relied on not to ask what we should say on things, but to just get a gut check on is this -- like, is this okay? or should we be doing more or should we be doing less? because they have a better sense of the traditions of the white house that are important than often an incoming staff does. i clearly have a lot of the thoughts on that issue, so sorry if i talked too long. >> as someone who writes a lot on media, i'm here for the tirade. >> yeah. >> dan and dan, what would your advice be for the incoming team? >> i'm not sure i have any advice on the communications side. i'm curious to watch, because y my -- one of the things i've noticed over the last two years, is particularly on the republican side and on the conservative side, you've got a lot of folks who try to influence the process and who, from the right, who see their

role in life to try to keep everything pure. and i'm really -- i'm curious, considering how the president-elect got elected and his use of social media, how that's going to play out. so, for example, the republican leadership's not going to agree on everything he wants to do. as john boehner said, i'm not sure he was a republican before he started running. he obviously got nominated a republican, got elected a republican, but he's much more independent-minded than your normal republican president. and so, at some point, there's going to be a tension, and does he take to twitter? and even, or for individual members who might, you know, all of a sudden you have some of the groups on the right say, no, you know, this infrastructure package, it's bad in this circumstance, and may try to make it hard for republicans to vote for it. now all of a sudden there's going to be this counterpressure from the president saying, you know, they're wrong.

and i'll be very curious to see how that all plays out. i think it changes the dynamic significantly, and it will be just curious to see it play out. >> and we'll go to q&a just after this, but dan, any advice? >> like dan, i'm not -- i don't have much advice for the incoming administration. the thing that certainly helped in policy strategies and legislative strategies i've been involved in is that there has to be a consistent message. you have to have a message. you have to be saying something that's important or at least understandable and attractive to whoever you're talking to. and we don't have a message, and i don't know what this president-elect's message might be on various things, but if you don't have a consistent message, it's very hard. my experience has been legislatively, but certainly to try and sell your policy, you need to be able to talk about it and consistently talk about it. >> mm-hmm. all right, well, if there are questions, if you'll just wait for the microphone.

>> charlie clark with "government executive." the office of legislative affairs under obama got criticism for things like not returning phone calls or not answering correspondence. and some republicans said they would have been willing to cooperate more, had that happened. is any of that accurate, and in general, does the legislative affairs office have a duty to return the phone calls? >> it's always a good idea. so, let me defend the obama leg affairs, just because i know a lot of them and i've been in small groups that miller center has brought together leg affairs directors from the bush 41, bush 43, clinton and obama white house. and the obama folks will give you chapter and verse. and i mean, i think very sincerely about how they reached out, and it does take two to

tango. but we've also heard those stories on the other side, not just from republicans, that they weren't as visible. so, you know, it really depends on your approach. i would, again, make the case that, particularly at the beginning of the obama administration, their focus needed to be on the democrats. so if the republicans got a little bit less attention, again, i don't find fault with that. but in divided government, it's a different situation. but it's -- look, if you're going to try to get your legislative agenda passed, you have to be figuring out how you're putting together 218 votes or 60 votes in some cases. and so, there's a lot of people you need to pay attention to, and that's an important aspect of the job. >> i'm bazell scarless.

i used to work at the state department. my question relates to the filibust filibuster. my understanding -- and i'm sure you could correct me if i'm wrong -- is that the senate can at the outset change the rules on the filibuster by majority vote. is that the case? and secondly, would you expect it to happen? >> so, in theory, you're supposed to have two-thirds vote to change the senate rules. senator reid changed the filibuster rules by ruling in precedent for a number of circumstances nominees, not supreme court or some of the judges. but, so, could it happen? yes. are they going to do it up front? no, i don't think so. senator mcconnell's an institutionalist. now, having said that, this goes back to part of the conversation we were having before about

having unified government and managing expectations. the first bill that gets filibustered, there's going to be people, you know, conservatives in the house or conservatives on the outside who are going to say, just, you know, mcconnell, you're blocking it because you won't get rid of the filibuster. so that's something he'll have to deal with, but he's made it clear that at least up front he doesn't want to do that. he didn't want to do it before when it was done under the democrats. >> hello, everyone. my question is a bit general, how to predict the trump way of presidency, given that before he has come into the office, he already saved over 1,000 jobs for carrier company, and he has elected so many into his cabinet and also he had a telephone conversation with the taiwan

president, which is breaking the diplomacy of 37 years. so how do you predict his way of presidency? thank you. >> this sounds like policy and communications questions. >> exactly. exactly. i've had a number of these conversations since the election with lots of people and folks in business. otherwise, i start out the conversations with, who knows? then i speculate for 10 or 15 minutes and i conclude the conversation with who knows. and i think that's probably the answer. >> i'll just add, who knows? >> well, is there a way in which the things that happen in a transition help foretell what will happen in the first year or are they just two different beasts? >> i mean, the nominations made, giving an indication of who any president surrounds himself with and who they want to be

providing advice. but even with that, unless somebody has a long legislative history, it can be hard to kind of read tea leaves to predict exactly what advice somebody is giving. so i think it's hard. >> i mean, i assume the transition is an indicator, because people, whether it's this president-elect or any previous president, they learn when they get into office and things do change. so, at least in the beginning, i presume the transition is a predictor of how he'll operate. >> from my point of view on policy and experience, i would say that the first budget's also important. i'm a card-carrying member of the eye shade society, so i still look at those things. and you assume that some of the domestic priorities are going to be funded. those things are likely to be unfunded, but at least it will give you some sense of domestic policy, trajectory, when they do their first budget. >> my question is for jen.

if you could say a little bit more about the discussion that the communications team had with the economics team about what could and couldn't say, and then if you could kind of reconcile that with trump's approach, and obviously, the outcome of the election and also where the market is. >> wow, there's a lot of things. i'm not sure they're related, but i'll try. so, what i was trying to illustrate was the fact that policy doesn't always make easy communications and you accept that. i will say in the early days, you know, if people remember, the election and the president's first year or more essentially shifted and changed starting in august-september of 2008, before he was even elected. and there was a recognition that, you know, he had a role once he was elected, and even before when it was looking like it was going that way, that he would have a powerful role to play in helping get some policy like tarp across the finish

line, and there's the old story of secretary paulsen -- maybe you were there for this and you can articulate this better than i can -- you know, getting down on his hands and knees and begging him to help pass. so, i think for us, we had an economic team reunion on friday night. don't be jealous you weren't there. it was a wild and raucous party, but it was great. and one of the things they talked about was how they're terrible communicators. they're brilliant, brilliant economists and very smart people, but you recognize early on that if we had our brothers, you would have people that were professional -- you know, not professionals by trade, but very good at television. but that's not often, nor should it be how you pick cabinet secretaries, right? so, what our experience was, and there were many, many conversations, not just one like this, where it was always a push

and pull between the press and communications team and the economic team about what could be said publicly in terms of articulating to the public how bad things were, but you didn't want to scare people at the same time. you know, one of the biggest mistakes we made early on, and she's said this, so i don't feel bad about saying this, was when christie roamer made the prediction about the unemployment rate. you know, that was perhaps necessary at the time to -- i guess people in the meeting would have argued that was going to get people to vote for the recovery act. i don't know that that was true or not, but then it held us to a standard that we couldn't meet, and we could never meet that bar with our, on the press side, and that was challenging. as it relates to today, i'm not sure. it's a different -- i mean, the economy's in an entirely different place. there are obviously lots of -- you know, the economic agenda is always a big part of what any president typically faces or

addresses. there's lots of things under that umbrella or tent or whatever you want to say, but i don't know that i can make any predictions about how president-elect trump or anyone on his team will handle any of these issues or if that's what you were asking. >> in terms of you're saying that -- well, i thought i heard you say that essentially you perceived the economy to be a lot worse than you could say. >> i didn't perceive it -- it was. yes. it was worse than we articulated from the government. >> right. >> and there were lots of other people saying it, but there was something about the president -- not just something -- the president or the treasury secretary articulating how bad it was. there was a concern of what impact that would have on the markets, on, you know, the economy, and that was a real discussion we had on a very regular basis. >> sure. but i guess the thing i look at is i hear people talk about how great things are right now, and

that is obviously something that trump did not do, and i would probably argue that that's part of what made him very popular. he said, hey, things are pretty bad for the average person. so i guess i'm wondering, if you could jump into your time machine, would you do so and then maybe say something a little differently? >> can i take a quick try at it? >> of course. >> so, it's different between when you're running and when you're governing. so i don't think -- i mean, i don't think jen would disagree. when president obama was running for presidency, he talked a lot about how bad things were. candidates do that. once you get elected, there is an instinct, i guess, that kicks in to try to talk about how it's going to get better. and i would -- they didn't say it was going to get better right away. my recollection is it's not good, but here, we're going to put these things in place, it's going to try and get better. but there is -- i've been in the same type of meetings that jen referenced where it's expressed, you don't want to talk down the

economy because it discourages people, and you're trying to build up confidence. so that's a distinction you should make. >> we're actually going to have to to stop it there just because we need to clear the stage for other panelists. if you could help me thank all of our great panelists. [ applause ]. >> we'll take one more 10-minute break and come back at a quarter after 5:00. >> at the brookings institution and the university of virginia's conference on presidential transitions we heard from officials from the george w. bush administration about balancing national security and domestic policy.

>> we are really delighted to have three of the best here. and i have gotten to work with all three of them over the last set of years. this is really terrific group of people. starting with our moderator and the executive vice president here at the brookings institution. twice ambassador to israel and also worked as the special coordinator for middle east peace and the white house person. he has seen this from all different sides of the equation. he was going to be a panelist but the moderator, bruce jones, vice president, came down sick. we will ask martin to do double duty. he has his own observations and input on what these transitions are like and what they look like. two colleagues from the miller center, one of whom i was fortunate to have to have as a colleague in government and we

have all been fortunate enough to have, phillip zeleko, who is white burkett miller professor at the miller center and in the history department at the university of virginia as past director at the miller center and executive director of the 9/11 commission, which was a report on one of the great first year crises in american history. and eric edelman, who was important in my first year. i'll tell this joke even though a few people have heard it. having been chief of staff and then later national security adviseror vice president cheney he once said to eric, wow, you must either be the greatest foreign service officer in the history of the department or a total political wore to which eric responded the two are not mutually exclusive.

and the schlessinger, former professor of economics at the university of virginia, energy secretary, defense secretary is, including a number of other different posts as well. eric will also when that one year visiting fellowship ends will be a senior fellow at the miller center start anything january. so with all of that, i'm going to hand it over to martin in this discussion. >> thank you very much, bill. i had the awe and challenge of serving president bill clinton in the white house in his first year in office when i was handling the middle east.

as explained, we have rich experience when it comes to the three of us when it comes to foreign and national security policy i was just reviewing the record from the miller center and was reminded clinton's first year in office, you had to deal with the world trade center bombing that a few people will remember. that was the initial one. six people killed and 1,000 injured. in june, clinton brought in the first use of force in his presidency against saddam hussein, a retaliation for the attempt to assassinate george h.w. bush.

in a visit to kuwait. some of you will remember blackhawk down. it had a big impact on his credibility when it comes to force. then in december we had nafta. so it is just a reminder, and we can talk about 9/11 and the impact that had on the bush

agenda it is inevitable that events that the prime minister would often remind people, it is events that seem to drive foreign policy in the first year. so the first year of president trump's administration as well. so what's the advice to presidents in their first year to draw from your experience about what they should try to put in place in the first year to the deal with the kind of phenomenon of drinking from the fire hydrant when it comes to foreign policy? >> well, the dependency of government is to drift and

remain on autopilot. often followed up by noise. then your tenure gets reactions. that's the natural he default. the hardest thing to do in government is actually to corral people on together and accomplish something purposeful. that requires great skill is. drift is not very good. as i say, in most agencies, at most times, in some ways that's the default mode. people keep doing what they have been doing and then stuff happens. you will always be visited. the in box will be full. there will always be meetings and easements and things to discuss, and surface noise and turbulence. the dog barks, and the caravan will move on.

my advice, and this gets into process leads if there are here who wanted concrete advice how to make a difference. not only for this sophisticated washington group and there are veterans here. i will single out three things. one, if you want to do anything pig, you've got to do it with the congress. did it with the congress. there's a very great tendency in these sorts of meetings about foreign policy, be very executive branch centric. but in fact, and i'm a -- i sevened in many executive branch jobs and have only worked with congress when i had to. but i had to several times. but let me just illustrate what i mean with a couple of concrete examples. one from the past and one right

now that could be informative to this administration. one from the past. all of you know that president-elect obama did one of his first acts, i'm going to close guantanamo. one of the first acts. now, he did not -- in preparing this, they put everything in motion. the executive order. the speech. they did not deeply consult with congress before they made their move. had they consulted with congress before they made their move, were there people in congress who quietly would have said, yes, we'll help you? yes, there were such people. there were some republicans. senator john mccain, for example. you see, the challenge here was if you're going to close guantanamo, replace it with what? then if you have a plan for, well, let's replace it with t