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tv   Washington This Week  CSPAN  June 23, 2014 3:13am-4:11am EDT

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long distances charges may apply. >> on thursday, outgoing white house press secretary jay carney featured guest. he answered questions about his time working a in the white house and his relationship with the media and the president. monthounced earlier this that he is departing the white house. hour.s just under an >> peter? we've got a space. come on, brother. you can be on tv with me.
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thank you for coming. i'm just this morning is jay carney, president obama's departing press secretary and we are delighted to have him as a guest on the day he is traversing the polar extremes of the media world starting with the monitor breakfast and moving to new york for the "colbert report." he's the 12th secretary to share a high cholesterol breakfast with us. he has degrees in russian and european studies. his 21-year career in journalism began with the miami herald. he moved to time magazine and
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was with the moscow bureau and in 1993 came to washington where he was reporter, deputy chief, and bureau chief at which point he left to become vice president biden's communications director. he stepped in front of the podium in february 2011. whatever his new job, a says he will have more time for his wife. now on to the ever popular process portion of the program. as always, we are on the record. no means of filing of any time while the breakfast is underway to give us time to listen to what our guests as. there is no embargo when it ends. do the traditional thing and send me a subtle nonthreatening signal, the always open to interpretation finger wave or what have you.
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we will start by offering our guests the opportunity to make some opening comments and then move around the table. thanks again for doing this. >> thank you, dave. i appreciated. thanks, everyone, for being here. i've had a couple of opportunities now in the briefing room both when the president announced my departure and then yesterday to say a few things about the experience that i've had and how gratifying and rewarding it's been, how humbling, and how much i appreciate this process, whether it is here or in the briefing room. people constantly say when you have this job, and i'm sure it was true for my predecessors, but you have the hardest job or one of the hardest jobs. as my colleagues know on the
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staff at the white house, and i think many of you know, especially if you are in the regular press corps, i really enjoyed it. i found the briefing interactions and even the contentious ones to be stimulating and at times frustrating but in a way that i would not trade. there are things about the briefing, obviously, that could be improved. overall, i think it's been a great thing for me. i've done the best i could do serve both the president, the white house, the administration, the country, and also to be as informative as i could be about what the president, the white house, the administration, and the government are doing.
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the earliest, best advice i had about the job was to never guess. if you did not know the answer, the surest way to get into trouble was to assume and say that from the podium. i try to take my own advice not always but mostly. another thing i think that i learned is the white house has become, both in fact and in the way it's covered -- no, thank you -- the center of the universe in washington and the country. that has meant that press secretaries have to have an answer for everything. often it is the case that the best ways to go for information, especially some of the more detailed information as to agencies, congress, elsewhere.
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while it's true press secretaries indulge in the phrase, "i refer you to the department of whatever" in order to deflect some of the questioning elsewhere, it's also frequently true that a lot of the important work and policy development, implementation that happens is in the agencies. the spotlight is on the white house, but that's not the only game in town. i guess we should just go to questions. it's early for me to be speaking. [laughter] if you have a long-winded question, please raise your hand. >> i am on my ceremonial soapbox. you told charlie rose that a good white house reporter know 15% or 20% of what's going on.
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they can carefully extrapolate a little beyond that. looking back on your experience, does the area of press ignorance follow a pattern? intel or is the ignorance random? >> i tried to explain that it did not mean this as a hit on reporters or the suggestion that they were ignorant or that this was the result of secretiveness. he goes back to what i was just talking about. the amount of traffic through the white house is immense. the number of issues people are working on on any given day is very broad, very deep. reporters who cover the white house on a daily basis, in particular, tend to because of the demand of news and their
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outlet focus on the top one or two topics of the day and are kind of unaware of and don't have the capacity to become aware of so much else that is happening. one of the things that was initially and continues to be really fascinating to me about the experience of working in the white house is just how the train never stops. we've seen this just in terms of the number of issues that have demanded our attention, your attention, dominated the news only to be replaced by an issue that has garnered equally intensive attention. that's really what i meant. we talked about that line, charlie and i, but it was based on a conversation i had won a first came to washington from my
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friend and mentor, michael duffy, when he told me as i was young reporter covering the white house that really we only know -- i cannot remember if he said this team, 20, 30% so i don't want to pin this on them entirely, but then we have to figure it out or extrapolated from there and i think it's a fair point. what i think is true and has become more so over the years i've been in washington, both as a reporter and in the white house is that the demand for instant information and revelation in the covering of the white house and washington coupled with the strain on resources that so many news organizations have been feeling has resulted in an exacerbation of this issue where there just is not the bandwidth in the organization to cover the agencies or congress with the
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depth they used to and there is a tendency to just throw folks out the white house and have them chase whatever the story of the day is which can be, i think, frustrating for white house correspondents and certainly, on occasion, for those who work there. >> you told major garrett in a presentation you did george washington that after you have been selected as white house press secretary, before you moved to the podium that you went through mock briefings where robert gives "knew from personal experience just the right kind of question that would completely unsettle me." now that you're leaving, can you give us a kind of example of what the question would he? >> the risk that any press secretary in the modern age where everything is televised
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faces is to be forced by a question to lose your composure. sometimes that is because of a gotcha question or sometimes it is just a difficult and penetrating question. it took me a while to figure this out. you can often win the exchange from the podium. you have the higher ground. you have the capacity to: somebody else. -- to call on somebody else. then when you review the tape, it's pretty clear that you took the bait and let yourself be less than 100% on your game. with also true, to only people who sit in the remand suffer through the briefing and a handful of folks who have nothing better to do than watch the whole thing, experience it that way.
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most people just see a snippet. they often do not see the interplay between the questioner and the press secretary. they just see what i say and you have to keep that in mind when you are up there. robert was great having had done it at provoking me into the kind of exchange i found out i wanted to avoid but did not always. [laughter] >> sam. >> me? thank you. what was the toughest point as a press secretary for you in this gig? what was the best point for you in this gig? what was the most memorable? no policy because i know -- as press secretary.
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>> newton, connecticut, was emotionally low for a lot of parents in here. it was just unimaginably bad for everyone. and separating it from that, i would say the most difficult period since i've been press secretary was dealing with healthcare.gov and it's pretty awful rollout and that was because, in contrast to some of the other issues that became challenging at the podium and challenging for us in the press, this one was completely of our doing, completely our responsibility, was obviously a major legislative accomplishment of the president. we had really not gotten it
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right. i think that made everyone feel from the president on down a great deal of responsibility. it made a lot of us worry about what would happen if we could not fix it in terms of the goal of expanding the availability of health insurance to millions of americans. obviously it was a concern politically if it did not work out. in contrast to a lot of these sort of issues that burn brightly but for now, this was a sustained bad news story. i remember that as being the biggest challenge. and in some ways, because it is more recent than some of the other issues, in many ways it's one of the best moments also. as we gradually became confident that the website was going to be fixed, as we became aware gradually that revising down
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expert rations of what the numbers would be were too low when they were going to get better -- revising down expectations of what the numbers would be and when we hit one million, that was a good day. what distinguishes that is unlike a lot of things the president and the white house has to deal with and some of the toughest moments often started at least by events not in your control, this was on us. i know the president felt that responsibility deeply and others who worked on it felt it deeply and we are all indebted to the team that went in there and figured it out, got it right. >> alexis. >> he's mixing it up going to the back row. >> alexis was often my go to. [laughter]
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>> several former presidential press secretary's say they don't know why the gavel does not still exist in think it should be resurrected. do you think there is value in trying to do the morning gavel? i'm not trigger but he remembers the cameras were put into the briefing room not that long ago, during the bush administration for the inside of the white house to be paying attention, you call out the names in the transcript so it's clear who asked the question. can you tell us about how the breaking is carved up inside the white house and used by the staff and how the president absorbs anything that's been asked? >> after the fact? >> after, yes. >> let me answer the gavel question. it is a great idea.
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what i found, and i think robert found before me, is that it's very challenging to try to do at the gaggle and a briefing in the same day if you also want to be in the room during team meeting see you can stand at the podium and represent what's happening on the inside. what i found early on is my day starts with the first meeting in the chief of staff's office pending if it's 7:30 a.m. or 7:45 a.m. i have five meetings before then and 10:00 or 10:30 a.m. if we were to do a morning gaggle, that would require more prep and time, then i would miss most or at least some of those meetings and those are key. i found i was more prepared and more comfortable trying to
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answer questions authoritatively if i was in the room and i heard the discussion and they understood and participated in exactly what was happening. what i think would be a good idea, and this will not be universally welcomed, is to alternate between off-camera and on camera briefings. it's very hard to do both, especially now. what robert found out is the old days, like when i started in the early clinton years there were a handful of people who would come to the press secretary's office for the gaggle, that does not work. robert found he had to move it to allow for all the people who had to be there and you had to take it out of the office into the briefing room. then people wanted to turn on the cameras and you get in this cycle where it was just going to be another briefing. it did not have the kind of informal value it had had in the past.
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this is something that i urge my successor and sick -- successors to consider. i found that the gaggle's i've done on air force one were just as substantive and a lot less theatrical than the on camera briefings. as you know, because you were around, mike mccurdy apologize for being the press secretary who agreed that the entirety of the briefing be on camera. i know why people wanted that. i certainly don't expect it would be reversed. it creates a different dynamic. there would be some value, i think, and having more of those off-camera gaggles.
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after a briefing, my team depending on what else is going on in the nature of the briefing, we sort of dissected quickly and assess where there any things we needed to get back to people on, anything where a messed up and we needed to correct -- that almost never happens. the teams who represent different areas of policy would make sure that folks off they needed to what we were saying about things either in the policy councils are out in the agencies. in the modern communication world, this all becomes available so there was not a formal way or a more regular way of disseminating it. if there was a flag or some issue somebody needed to know about, it would move around pretty quickly. as i said, truthfully over the years, the president does not
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watch a lot of tv during the day and does not really ever watch any news tv. he might hear about it from somebody else if there was an interesting exchange or read it later at night and i would hear from him if he had a comment. it's usually at night. >> michael. >> i'm assuming you've got to know him well personally. i'm kind of curious why publicly he seems aloof sometimes, unlikable. what's your view on why that public image persists? >> i would argue that it doesn't, when you say that broadly. the first president in more than your lifetime to be elected twice with more than 50% of the vote. you have to be pretty likable to
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have that happen. i think there are two things that i can say about that perception that some have. one of the very compelling and distinct things about barack obama is he was not on the national stage until fairly shortly before he was elected president. what that means is he was, in ways that his predecessors were not, a fully formed person before people were looking at him as a potential president. he was not a creature of washington. he did not spend much time here. he was a senator only for a few years before elected and that also contributes to how he is as a person compared to a lot of people who run for the office. you can argue there are
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downsides to that. there are downsides to being a creature of washington and having those relationships, to be sure. when he took office, president obama, i would argue, was a lot more unlike and in touch with the experiences of non-washington people than the usual occupant of the office. the other part -- a lot of this has been written and said well -- he's not an individual person or politician who is reactive to the emotions in the sort of swings of everyday politics in washington. there are upsides and downsides. i would argue the outbound ways
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the down because it means -- the up outweighs the downs. he looks at issues and challenges with a night to the horizon as opposed to winning the day. when you are on his columns team -- comms team your urging him to do something and he does not do it that way. more often than not, he's been right in that decision. on a personal side, i've said this before, it's a great thing about this country and it says so much that one reason i found it so easy to work with him and have developed a relationship with him is that we are not unalike, which is pretty amazing. he's three and a half years older than im, has kids a little older than mine. temperamentally, i felt a lot in common with him.
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i would also say one of the myths, i think i mentioned this somewhere, maybe charlie rose, when you are president of the united states and you have that they playing, there is a bedroom that's really nice and an office that's really big on the plane. if you want to be alone, you can spend all your time in those spaces. this president in the miles i traveled with him, which were many, never spent any time in those rooms. he's in the conference room with people around him all the time engaged in conversations, watching sports, reading briefing books, playing cards. i think that reflects his nature. >> justin. >> i have a personal and maybe a follow-up. >> what's the question?
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>> i wanted to ask about russia. i know you said you are not interested in the ambassador job, but there seems about -- >> my wife is not interested. [laughter] >> there are a lot of people who suggested that at some point you are interested in that job or had conversations about it. i wanted to ask if that was something you ever discussed with people or the president even though it has not come to fruition. >> the truth is there were some folks -- not the president -- who looking at my record, my interests, my background thought it would be a great idea. there was some story that said i was lobbying for it. to the extent there were any discussions, i was lobbying against it, not that it was ever a real thing.
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there's a certain romantic circularity to it. if i were ever able to do something like that, but it's not something i ever expressed any real interest in. so there's that. because of my seminal experience as a reporter is in the soviet union, being in what was then leningrad with me democratizing mayor and being vaguely aware that this lieutenant of his, vladimir putin, was also on his team and having him now be who he is, that will always be interesting to me but not in service of the government.
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>> we will go next to peter, and julie, ryan, neil. >> you've learned a lot about media that you got to see from the point of view. as you mentioned, reporters probably get 15% of what's going on. after 20 years of doing this, what surprised you most about how it works inside the white house that reporters don't got? -- don't get? >> right. what surprised me --
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i think what is surprising is how human the enterprise is, how small the rooms are. how, in the end, very weighty decisions are made in a very human way. i think there's a tendency when you cover a white house, the tendency i had, to make assumptions about control, process, and intent but did not account for the fact that in the end a lot of these issues have to be decided, and this is true of any white house of either party, by a handful of people dealing with the best collection
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of fact they might be able to get but invariably an incomplete election. -- collection in a very challenging environment usually. you don't have the luxury when it gets to that room where the president is making the decision among the menu of options seeing the one that says you get everything you want just as you would have it be. the other side of that, and i would assume this has been true for mike houses of both parties, is that the people in that room are trying to do the right thing as they see it. i was very encouraged by what i saw from the very beginning as
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people dealing with -- with the economic collapse and through this day with a tough issues in trying to get it right and the way they thought best serve the country and its people. that sounds a little mushy but it is encouraging. i think there is a tendency, and i succumbed to it, to be very cynical about the decision-making process, very cynical about what the reasoning behind anything that a white house does is. as a tendency to assume that politics and political considerations drive every decision. i'm here to tell you that's definitely not the case. as someone on the communications political side, it would have been a lot more convenient had it been the case, but it's just not. for the country, i think that's
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a good thing. >> was there ever a time you felt tension between 21 years of trying to be a truth teller, in effect, and five years now as mccurdy once said telling the truth slowly or finding ways of telling the truth that presented the best possible version of the truth but in maybe not what you would have written had you been a time magazine reporter? >> i benefited a lot spending the first two years in the white house as the vice president communication director in essentially, a behind-the-scenes job. there's only one podium job at the white house. i would not have been nearly as ready to take the podium if someone had suggested i do it right out of being a reporter because i think there's a lot you need to learn about how a
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white house works and how the policy process works and how decisions are made about the ways that you explain and describe policy decisions that i was able to learn in two years. you and i have talked about this. i was shocked to find out how the expertise i thought i had developed as a political reporter about communication strategies and white house communications was not really expertise and there was a lot to learn. i learned a lot thanks to others in the vp office, axelrod, gibbs, others on the president's team. to go to the other part of your question -- you know, i was talking to someone yesterday about this. i tried very hard. i was not a traditional old-school reporter in that i was not an advocate i did not
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take sides in my reporting. i did not feel like i had a straitjacket but on me. i felt liberated. that only works if you actually believe in and agree with the policies you are advocating. i certainly did. but the problem for people not only in this job at other jobs in a white house or administration. you take a job because it's a good career move but you don't agree with what you're doing? that's a risky proposition especially if you're having to articulate and speak about it publicly. there are strongly differing views inside the policy process. those are expressed and the president and vice president insist on that. you obviously know a lot more
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about what's going on when you are a press secretary. i understand what mike was saying when he said you tell the truth slowly. you only do this job successfully if you tell the truth. i know he did the that -- he did that and i did. >> the media landscape has changed more dramatically from the time you've been in the white house than any previous time. i'm wondering if you could walk us through how to change is not the communication strategy per se but policymaking, the idea that you not only have news popping all the time but there could be a single tweet about starts changing the conversation. when i talk to those who serve in multiple administrations, they talk about how the policy teams operate particularly in crisis situations, domestic or international, is somewhat different given the media pressures.
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>> i will take a couple of wax at that. -- whacks at that. it's totally different. it's a different job and a different atmosphere from what it was when i first came in first term clinton and even from the bush years. i covered the first term of president george w. bush. so much of what media drives the discussion did not even exist then and there is no question in the public-facing parts of the white house that creates a totally different dynamic. mostly it's about trying to assess very quickly, because the cycles demand it, whether or not
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we need to chase that ball down the field or if she would take a step back to wait and see where something is going that's popping on twitter or elsewhere. there is the great push among some to follow something and respond instantly and aggressively. what you find is that there is some wisdom in being discerning about doing that. twitter and social media have created an environment where new news grabs people attention much more quickly than it used to. the fires burn brighter but they burn out faster. there is wisdom and valor in waiting sometimes to see whether and how quickly you need to react.
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in the policy world, there are numerous ways this has a profound effect, just this bead with which a very important information guest policy especially in the foreign-policy world where you have the impact of social media in the arab spring and elsewhere. i think it also effects the way domestic policy has developed, too, but the way i've seen it, at least, to have the most profound effect is in generally a good way, the rapidity with which policymakers, journalists, and everyone else get information from some areas of the world where it was never is easily available as it is now. >> miles. >> i'm wondering if you can tell us whether you sat in on any
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meetings during your tenure in which constitutional amendments were discussed and whether, with your own experience, the climate of politics now in the changes that we've seen, the difficulties that governing is encountering. are there any kind of constitutional amendments that you yourself would imagine a big improvement in the way things get done? >> i've certainly been in a lot of meetings where policy has been discussed. we made clear the president's views around the campaign finance issue and the possibility that an amendment is the only way to address some of what we've seen in the wake of citizens united.
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that's the only one that comes to mind when it comes to a constitutional amendment. [no audio] >> i have not really thought about it in terms of an amendment to the constitution. a lot of experts on electoral politics have noted that we have a real issue, i think, when it comes to the way the district are drawn in congress and the impact it has in creating ever more polarized politics here. i think i would associate myself with the prevailing wisdom that addressing that issue would probably be an official to the body politic. i'm not sure that requires a constitutional amendment, but it certainly would not be a bad idea. >> you said earlier the best pieces of advice you got were not to guess. what's the best piece of advice
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you have passed along to josh? how do you think his experience being in the briefing room for so long might help him in a way that perhaps you did not have going in? >> i said yesterday, and i absolutely believe it, that there has never been anyone as ready to take over the job as josh is now. that's because he's been a deputy press secretary from the beginning of this white house and in my nearly three and a half years he's been the principal deputy. if i need to go do a teacher conference, baseball game, kids play, i have asked josh to fill in for me at the podium a fair number of times during this time. there was nothing like that experience, i can tell you. even the sessions i did with a
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handful of people in a room before i took the podium did not adequately simulate what the briefing is really like. josh has done that. i think it's different from answering questions on a tv show or just on the record in a conversation with a reporter. it's a unique experience and josh is ready for it. he's had it. i pass on some of the obvious advice to josh. he's not going out for the first time. i've told him what i've learned and i think he's demonstrated that he's absorbed whatever good advice i've given them. i think what i would, however, and will tell josh going forward is that it's important
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internally, and this goes back to the question that alexis asked me, to listen carefully and those meetings you are participating in so that you hear from the president and others the parameters of the policy discussion. one of the wings so useful to me in being in meetings with the president when he was deliberating over policy decisions he had not made yet was the understanding of the universe of his thinking. that created beyond talking points or the lines as our first answer to a question that gave me a sense of where i could go, but language i could use. i know i had a better sense of hearing him say it in those meetings what he might say if he were up there.
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i always felt a lot of comfort if i had heard the president himself talk about an issue even obviously if he was talking about it and he was still midstream in the decision-making process about whether you still had to protect but i was able to understand the way it was thinking about it and it gave me car -- more confidence that he was accurate in his thinking. when people talk about press secretary access and their role internally, that's the most important thing, you develop an ear for the way the president and other top policymakers think about things. >> is obviously done briefings before. do you go back and watch the game tape? >> in prep before everything, health care, national security,
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education, talk to me about what's new in some of those areas, what's new overnight. sometimes at the end of that process, if there is a particularly contentious issue or one where precision is important especially in foreign policy, we will do a quick back-and-forth just in my office. i don't expect josh will be doing any formal mocks. he does not need them. >> you talked about wanting to bring back an off-camera gaggle. what are the different ways you are building the press operation from the ground up in a fantasy world? what it would look like if it was not all about -- >> the reference to the blackberry is about anachronisms? [laughter]
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i've got about 36 more hours with this baby. [laughter] it's a great question. i think there are a lot of institutional constraints on the way the press office operates and interact with the press corps. there is inertia on both sides to any attempt to change any of those constraints. talking about doing away with the briefing because it's become so much of a theater performance. i think that there probably is away, and we were talking about this earlier, to drain some of that out. having a situation in an
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everyday basis, a spokesman from the white house is out there answering questions. it could be that you do that in an off-camera gaggle in the press secretary is available at different points of the day to do quick interviews. maybe that's the way to do it. i don't know. i think there is some dissatisfaction on all sides with the way that the briefing has evolved. we've done a lot within those constraints to change on the broader communications side what we do to modernize, take advantage of media development in social media. i know that has also caused some tension and i understand that. i also think that it would be
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malpractice for anyone in our positions not to take advantage of social media. i know that our successors will in ways that we cannot even imagine. i've always believed that. peter, in some ways this goes back a little bit to your question in the whole thing about what percentage of wings, what percentage of what's going on, what reporters know. there are really good ones, and a lot of you in this room don't rely just on the briefings or the press releases for your stories. i guess we wish you would -- [laughter] when i was a reporter, the best ones certainly didn't and they do not today. it's just part of the
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information you get as you piece together your understanding of what's going on. >> we have about two minutes left. >> deuce around the uncomfortable truth with a blizzard of uncomfortable facts, but where there e-mails between lois lerner and other members of the irs who could have been involved in some sort of conversation. did you know about those e-mails and did you like? >> the answer is no. >> did you lie? >> honestly, it's not because i'm a paragon of virtue. that would be a terrible way to do the job. what you do when you cannot say is you don't. you take the question or you explain without revealing what you cannot say because these are internal deliberations or national security issues.
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on the other question, what the irs is dealing with the terms and, i don't know all the details about what the next things are. i addressed e-mails from lois lerner yesterday and i would just refer you to them for what else they are doing on that issue. >> this will be the last last question. you understand the concept. >> and asking you are leaving with the midterms coming and there will be more of a struggle to get media attention than the white house has had in the previous year. what kind of advice would you give josh about that? how would you expect the operation to change given that? >> that's a great question. there are upsides potentially to
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the fact that, as i did, most of you get excited about elections and the intensity of coverage shifts, especially the presidential beginning immediately after the midterms. i think there's an opportunity to continue to focus on what the white house focuses on which is getting as much done as he can in the time that he has. in terms of governance. and using every tool he has to make that happen. congress has not been particularly cooperative or bipartisan in efforts to move the president's agenda. which is an agenda shared by the majority of the american people. but that doesn't mean he cannot do a lot of important things and i think we have seen that this year.
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it does not mean that there are not any opportunities for getting significant legislation passed through congress. not because republicans will suddenly decide that they want to do president obama a favor, but because they will see it in their interest to compromise on some of these issues that are actually good for the economy and good for them politically, immigration reform being one of them. broader, how do you get people to pay attention to what you are doing, there is an upside to having maybe not as much of that attention. but i think this would be true of any white house. there is the preoccupation with electoral politics in washington that is not shared outside of washington, certainly not this far out.
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and what you have seen us do with the president is come up with as many ways as we can find to have him seen and heard talk about what he believes by americans who are not tuning in to political shows. or even when they look into the newspaper, they are not reading those stories at all. it is the right thing to do because most people, especially in this media landscape, they don't consume it the way we do here. but they do care deeply about their own economic future and the future of their country and there are ways to engage with them that we try to find an
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exploit and i'm sure our successors will go, too. >> people who want to ask questions, my apologies. we have run out of time. >> thank you very much. it has been a pleasure. >> are you off to cnn? >> i have absolutely made no decisions about what i am doing next beyond spending a lot more time with my kids. it is an amazing thing, after the resident visited my daughter's little league game, they did not lose another game and they were sort of middle of the pack and they won the championship on saturday. but i look forward to spending time -- my son is 12. as parents with kids older than he is reminded me, it will not be that one before he is not that interested in hanging out with his dad so i am going to do that first. >> did you keep a journal for a
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book? >> i didn't, probably because of the volume that i talked about. i took notes to keep track of what was going on. we were talking about this earlier. my wife came out with a book and i lived that process twice with her. as anybody knows from personal experience, writing a book seems to me something that is very demanding. and i wrote for a living for 21 years. when i came to the vp office, i said i am not writing speeches because i found that really hard. i am looking to relax a little bit. writing is not what i am looking to do. >> thank you.
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>> next, a house hearing on iran and human rights. with cheryl appleton. then your calls on washington journal. today, the white house is family -- is hosting leave. the vice president and thomas perez and valerie jarrett. you can watch it live starting at 9:00 a.m. on c-span 3. >> lawrence strickland has the national communications and administration communication. he talks about domain name is shifting from u.s. government
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control. >> in the clinton administration determined they wanted to move theoperation out of federal government and monetize it. in 1998, which is to complete that private occasion. tonight at 8:00 eastern on c-span 2. >> the u.s. house held a joint hearing on iran's humanitarian effort. they discussed the imprisonment. about thealso heard persecution of gay iranians. the hearing is held by the house foreign affairs committees on foreign immigrants in the middle east. this is one hour and 45 minutes. >> the joint subcommittee will come to order.

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