>> schieffer: today on face the nation from the clinton global initiative in new york, an interview with bill clinton. >> the republican argument against the president's reelection was actually pretty simple. pretty snappy. it went something like this. we left it a total mess. he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough so fire him and put us back in. >> schieffer: he was the star of the detrimentally convention and the president couldn't have been happier. >> e-mailed me after his speech and said you need to appoint him secretary of explaining stuff. >> schieffer: we will ask him where he thinks the race stands today and what whoever is elected president can do to break the washington gridlock. then we will turn to a powerhouse round table for

analysis. peggy noonan of the wall street journal, david corn of mother jones magazine, the reporter who broke the story of mitt romney and that secret video. >> 47 percent of the people who vote for the president, all right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who rely on government, who believe they are victims. >> schieffer: david gergen who worked for president clinton and ronald reagan, time magazine editor richard stengel, and cbs news political director john dickerson. we are in the buying apple and this is face the captioning sponsored by cbs >> and now from new york, face the nation with bob schieffer. >> schieffer: good morning again and wnl welcome to face the nation. former president bill clinton, we are here at the clinton global initiative in new york, mr. president, this has become an important event. you bring together world

leaders, philanthropists presidential candidates, people with ideas, time magazine said this week it has become kind of an ebay of philanthropy, where you put together people with needs, bring them together with people who have money and the means to resolve their problems, whether it is poverty, disease, just improving their daily lives, you get everybody in one place, and go at it from there. what do you hope to accomplish at this meeting? >> i hope to help people design their philanthropy and fit their partners in a way that gives them better and quicker results. i mean, all along we have been trying to answer the how question, how do you do things faster, cheaper, better? how can these nongovernmental groups working with business and working with government and working with others, like a

group in the congo works for a group in america, and works for the international community, how can they create networks that actually produce the results they want. and it occurred to us that this whole movement in american business to design what you are going to do in, and advance better might work in this area, so we decided to organize everything we are doing and, in clean energy and education and healthcare and our special focus on women and girls with that focus. i think it is going to produce some very interesting, specific commitments. >> schieffer: and you have got a very interesting group of people here coming. >> yeah, we have got president obama and governor romney. we have got the president of egypt is going to close for us, and i think people will find that very interesting. president, new president of liberia is coming. nobel prize winning president -- i said liberia, i meant libya,

and the nobel prize winning president of liberia is coming and a lot of other world leaders from around the world. >> mike duke will be on the opening, president of wal-mart along with the head of the world bank and secretary-general of the u.n. because of at least among american companies wal-mart is the number one user of solar power in america and they use quite a bit of wind too, so it is very interesting that they have, a buying part of their business strategy and their stock has been up and growth is good, it is cutting down on their traditional energy use. >> schieffer: i want to wish you the best of luck with this but also want to talk to you a little bit about american politics. you have clearly were the star of the detrimentally convention. you probably made the best case that anybody could probably make for your side. let's just talk about what is going on in the campaign right now. the buying topic this week was this video that mitt romney, that came to light, which he

more or less said he was writing off 47 percent of the electorate, who paid no independent, income tax, relied on the government, refused to take responsibility for their lives, do you think that was smart politics? >> no. but it is interesting. you know, i know a lot of higher income people, a lot of whom helped me do my work and they are supporting governor romney and a lot of people say things like that but i think it is worth pointing out if you look at that 47 percent, first they do pay taxes. they pay social security taxes, they pay medicare taxes, state and local taxes. second, they are out of the federal income tax pool for two reasons. one is, the economic crash, which lowered a lot of people's incomes, even a lot of the newer jobs don't pay high incomes.

now the second reason is interesting. it is a bipartisan reason in the past. is because the combined impacts of the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, i doubled the earned income tax credit which i think president ford signed into law and which president reagan supported and it is refundable if you work and got kids and your income is low, the government will actually refund the credit if you drop out of owing income tax. it was designed to support working families. then we put in a child tax credit which when president bush passed all of those tax cuts, that is what he did for middle class people. he doubled the child tax credit to $1,000. then when president obama came in and we had a democratic congress, and the economy is reeling, they increased the earned income tax credit so you could get a little more if you had more than three kids. so an enormous number of these people who were dropped out, were dropped out for reasons of

work and family, not defebruary dependence, they are working their heart out, they would love to make enough money to pay federal tax. we were all before trying to help them with their work and with their child rearing. >> schieffer: well, do you think governor romney understood who he was talking about when he made this statement? >> i don't know, because, you know, the primary they ran kept pushing them all to the right, i remember when they all raised their hand and said would you oppose the budget, a new budget if it has $10 in spending cuts for every 1 dollar in tax increase, and every one of them said yes, i would be against that, so they got pushed further and further and further out there, and i think, you know, you don't just purge all of that out of your system when you start running for the general election. >> schieffer:, you know, the fact of the matter is, though, that government assistance has increased tremendously.

don't you think that the governor rom friday i, romney has a point when he says the government has just gotten too buying? >> i think that, i think we have to wit wait until normal growth resumes to make that judgment, that is, of the 33 countries in the organization for economic cooperation and development, basically, bigger, richer countries, we are .. 31st out of 33 in the percentage of income we pay in taxes, and we have been 25th out of 33 in the percentage of government spending we have, that is just because of the collapse. in other words, a heck of a lot of this money is unemployment and food stamps and medicaid for people who lost their private health insurance and 2009, in the depths of the rerecession, insurance profits went up, 5 million people lost their health insurance, three and a half million went on medicaid, working people, so i think when -- after normal growth resumes

we will have a better feeling. my hunch is that the number of people depending on the government will go way, way down, once we have got an economy that functioning again. >> schieffer: where do you think this election is right now? >> i think that the president is winning, and winning in the swing states. i think that the republican super pacs and the romney campaign combined will out spend the democrats probably two and a half, three to one here on in and i think this is the only time i can remember when a lot of the national polls are closer than the polls in the so-called swing states, that is because the obama campaign doesn't have as much money so they have to concentrate that in the swing states and we are doing pretty well. so i think -- i think, assuming the debates are even a draw i think the president will win,

but i think you can't know because of the enormous financial advantage that is set, that gave to the republicans super pacs and because of the work they have done and will do on election day to try to reduce the number of young people, first generation immigrants and minorities voting, they have worked hard at this, they have a theory that if the election, the people who vote in 2012 look more like the 2010 electorate, then the folks that elected the president in the first place in 2008, they get enough of those folks to stay home they can still win so that's why we have to keep working at it. >> schieffer: you know, the fact is, and you have made as i said, you probably made as good -- made the case as good as anybody could make it for president obama, but the fact is, unemployment is up. it is higher than when he came to office, the economy is still in the dump. some people say that is reason

enough to make a change. >> it is if you believe that we could have been fully healed in four years. i don't know a single serious economist who believes that as much damage as we had could have been healed. we were losing 700, $800,000 a jobs a month when he took office so you really have to look at it when the economy bottomed out in about six months after he took office, and we lost jobs for the first year while his programs were beginning to kick in. since then, his jobs record has actually, is actually better, particularly private jobs record than in the previous eight years under the bush administration. so my belief is that his approach is more likely to lift americans up and to build a modern economy we need and to bring back the middle class and i don't think there is any

evidence that this sort of militant anti-government deal will work. i also think that if they enact $5 trillion more of tax cuts we will never get out of this debt hole and when the interest rates start to rise, as they will when the economy grows, we are going to be in a world of hurt. so i think that the obama approach is better. it is more likely to produce broad based prosperity than romney's and i think that people will see that unless they believe that somehow magically somebody could have brought us back to full employment in four years. i just don't believe it could have happened. >> schieffer: mr. romney released his income taxes for last year this week. do you think he has given enough information? >> well, it would be interesting to know, you know, i think some people just -- i think john mccain only gave two years but he did make senate reports

before that. i think we gave ten years or something like that. that is really up to voters. they can decide. but in the last two years he wouldn't have any ordinary income, which would mean that most of his income would be capital gains as it is and they would be taxed at 15 percent which is what the law is, and gave a lot to charity which is commendable, including to his church which is commendable, but it would be interesting i think for the american people to see how the ordinary income years were treated, but apparently we are not going to get to see that so the voters will just have to make up their mind. >> schieffer: what did you make up of this that he didn't take all of the charitable deductions that he could have taken? now for the next -- he has the right over the next three years to refile and claim those deductions but he didn't take them and i guess if h he hd taken all of those deductions he

would have been paid at a rate of about ten percent, something like that. >> yes, apparently they wanted to keep it at 13, 14 percent, but that is -- i don't know what to say about that. i think it is what it is. but i think he shouldn't apologize for his charitable deductions, that is a good thing, but i don't think we can get out of this hole we are in if people at that income level only pay, 13, 14 percent. and so we will just see what happens, but i think apparently he is not going to release anymore income tax returns and the voters will just have to make their judgments about that. >> schieffer: all right. mr. president we are going to take a break here and come right back in one minute.

>> schieffer:. >> president, the congress is adjourned again until after the election. the best i can tell the only thing they did was pass a continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down. there seems to be no end to this gridlock now.

it was tough while you were there over the last couple of years, nothing seems to get done. it seems to me that is one of the issues here. president obama has been unable to get them to do anything. mitt romney says he knows how to get them to do something. what is it going to take to break this gridlock? >> well, i think the election will have a lot to do with it. we only had one really inactive year when i was president, that was 1995, after the gingrich congress came in, that sort of pretea party, tea party congress and not much happened and two government shutdowns, public had a very negative reaction to it so even in a presidential year we got a lot done in '96 and even with all of the troubles that we had in the second term we had 99 and 2000 were extremely productive years, so something has to change so that both parties see that they have more to gain from doing than not doing. and i think what will happen is

when the election occurs, let's say the president wins, i believe he will. if he wins, then he can't run again, the calculus of the congress will change, they will be facing this fiscal year and doing exactly what it was intended to do. it will force them to concentrate and i believe there will be a lame duck session of congress in which they will either reach the beginnings of a budget deal or more likely agree to some sort of period of time to avoid the fiscal cliff and make the budget deal then. i think that as soon as this election is over, the incentives for gridlock will go way down and the incentives for action will go way up, plus you have got not just a fiscal cliff, we need to get the economy going again, if his jobs program had passed we would have another 700,000 to a million jobs. but that won't be enough unless

we also reach a ten year budget agreement that will hold interest rates down when the economy starts to grow, when the economy starts to grow and people start borrowing money again, banks start loaning money to small businesses and not just buying ones, interest rates will go up, because there will be more competition for money. if interest rates were the same today as they were when i was president, the payment on the debt, that is what the taxpayers have to pay every year, the financial debt would go from $250 billion, they can't let that happen. if they adopt the american plan now and a ten year budget plan, then i think it will lead to an economic boon and accelerate economic growth and keep interest rates in balance. >> schieffer: mr. president i have to ask you about your wife. is he is getting ready to wind up her term as secretary of state. do you think she will run for president next time out? a lot of people think she ought to if

barack obama is reelected. >> i don't know. you know, she has worked hard for 20 years. we had eight years in the white house and ran for senate. she served in new york for eight years and then she immediately became secretary of state. and she is tired. she really worked hard. i think she has done a fabulous job and i am proud of her, but she wants to take some time off, kind of regroup, write a book, i hope it will be working together, she was doing this work long before i was, and a lot of what we do now in women and girls were driven by some of the shings they started in the things she started in the state department so i think we should give her a chance to organize her life and decide what she wants to do. i just don't know. she is an extraordinarily able person, i never met anybody i thought was a better public servant but i i i have no earthy idea what she will decide to do. >> schieffer: do you think she would be the most qualified

person to run? >> i never met anybody i thought was any better than her at this, but, again, we have got a lot of able people in our party who want to be president. there is never a shortage of people who want to be president. we have a lot of bright young governors, we have a lot of other people who will probably run out of the congress. we won't have to worry about people wanting to be president next time who are good people, but i just think, you know, as the decision she will have to make, but whatever she does i am for her first, last and always. he is the ablest, i know i am biased but i think she demonstrated as senator and as secretary of state that she has extraordinary ability, a lot of common sense, a lot of, you know, stick to itiveness and push a rock up a hill as long as it takes to get it up the hill. >> and if she decided to do it you would be right there to help her. >> whatever she wanted me to do, i would, who knows.

it is her decision and her life, but whatever she decides i will support it. >> schieffer:. >> schieffer: i am going to go back to one thing you said back there at one point that you thought with this economy being in the shape it is that it might be necessary temporarily to extend the bush tax cuts. do you still feel that way? for everybody. >> well, what i -- but i did say that back in 2010 when i supported the president's decision to do it. what they heed to do now is avoid the fiscal cliff and make a long-term deal. i understand the president's reluctance to extend a tax cuts for upper income people again, have a lot to do with the calendar, the timing, when you had all of those republican candidates for president saying they would oppose a budget deal that had $10 in tax cut

spending, excuse me, spending cuts for every 1 dollar in tax increases, that won't work. nobody thinks it will work, you can't get this budget deal, the simpson-bowles commission said you can't bring the debt doubt without three things, economic growth, spending restraint and some revenues. a balanced approach. i think that is what he wants. that is what i support. i don't think that he can give that if he gives away one leg of the three legged stool before the negotiations even start .. that is really what is going on here. >> so if he had to do that just temporarily, you would -- he would do that? >> no, i think -- i don't know what they are going to do to avoid the fiscal cliff. but if you look at what senator durbin is shopping around, he would basically, basically saying we are going to avoid the fiscal cliff for six months and have a deal within six months.

that is different sort of thing. but for him to agree to take that out and say okay you can extend this for another year, to do that one more time would put him in a very disadvantages you position and make it impossible for us to get a reasonable budget deal. i should say that most of the republicans i know who would have to pay higher taxes agree that they should, if it is part of a budget deal. they just want it to be part of a long-term budget deal where they see it is a balanced plan that will do something about the debt. >> schieffer: mr. president, i want to thank you very much for being with us. it is always fun to interview you and we will be back in just a minute. >> force face the nation is sponsored by natural gas alliance, modern power today.

>> schieffer: watching our candidates struggle with statements that were supposed to be private and sudden think became public, barack obama got burned last time, mitt romney this time. i offer the following guide to all candidates of the digital age. one, never say anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the washington post. two, there is no such thing as a private party, actually, there is no longer any such thing as privacy, that ended with the coming of social media. everyone has a camera and a recorder and their own rules for using them. three, when you speak to a group, don't expect everyone to keep what you say in confidence. no one is universally loved. the last person to get 100 percent of the vote was saddam hussein. look what happened to him. four. if you don't want your words to

become public, be quiet. like suspects in a criminal case, all of us, including candidates, have the right to remain silent. and finally, and this has nothing to do with cameras and recorders, when you are talking to rich folks about poor folks, be careful. it never seems to come out quite right. as herman melville bro in harpers magazine in 1854 of all of the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticism made on the habits of the poor by the well housed, the well warmed and the well-fed. back in a minute.

>> schieffer: some of our stations are leaving us now. for most of you we will be back with an all-star political panel, including peggy noonan a reporter that uncovered that video of mitt romney, david corn of mother jones, former clinton and reagan advisor, david gergen, time magazine editor, rick stengel, and our own john dickerson. stay with us.

>> schieffer: welcome back to face the nation. back now at cbs news headquarters in new york, our political panel, david corn, who is the author of showdown, now out in paper zero back, david is also a reporter that uncovered the mitt romney fund raiser video from mother jones we want to ask him about that. peggy noonan, a columnist for the wall street journal, a speechwriter before that for president reagan, david gergen and i don't know anybody else who has this on his resume, he worked for both president reagan and for bill clinton, he is now at harvard university, rick stengel who worked with president clinton on the time magazine cover story that bill clinton authored this week, and let's also bring in round out the team with john dickerson, our own political director.

let me just start by asking somebody on the panel, would anybody like to volunteer, did bill clinton say that he wants to temporarily extend the bush tax cuts or did he say not? a show of hands here. who would like to answer that question. >> do we know? >> it was a wonderful, long, complicated answer. the end of which left you thinking, what the heck did he just say? >> yes. nobody knew what the heck he was doing and everybody sort of went on with life. >> and with strategic, not deliberate. >> schieffer: create i think a fog so everybody can find an exit and then when the fog lift everybody is in a safe place. i think he is trying to say basically the commitments of the sequester and of the tax cuts, we can put those off if we can get a deal but that's the kind of thing that led to the sequester in the first place so i am not sure --

>> you want to give president obama a lot of cover, the economy needs to start recovering before before we make any sacrifices before we ask people to make any sacrifice and i think there the president will be able to if he is reelected to kind of have a simpson-bowles moment and that is what clinton is trying to set him up to do. >> i also thought he gave cover in another way which is to say, there is a lot to be dealt with here, first in the short-term and the long-term, and we don't expect the president to come out and say right now what his negotiating position, what his end point is going to be of the negotiations so everyone should get together and start working on this. so when president obama said he was thinking about naming bill clinton as secretary for explaining stuff, he also meant not quite explaining it when the need arose. >> yes. >> schieffer: peggy, let me just start with you. this week, i mean, you write this column for the wall street journal, many conservatives look to you for advice. i mean you are a leading voice on the right. you called the romney campaign

this week a rolling calamity. did you get any blowback from your republican friends on that? >> of course not. (laughter.) >> yes. i will tell you, bob, it was very interesting. there was a lot of formal official and public blowback from the romney campaign, from romney surrogates, et cetera. what was interesting to me, however, was that privately, the constant communication i got was, thank you for saying that they need help, at the romney campaign they need to be woken up and they need to raise their game. the general feeling of just about all republicans and conservatives who are watching this thing now is that this race is close. you can win it if you are mitt romney, if you go forward with meaning and you stop being small and merely tactical and cautious. you get yourself together, you put fund raisers aside and you

go into the public, you make speeches and some commercials which show america what you stand for, what you are going to do, how you get from a to b and why the american people should follow you. so there is very broad feeling that the romney campaign needed to be woken up and i am here to help. >> schieffer: well, was it the wrong strategy? what is it, what is their core problem right now? >> oh, their core problem was carefulness, inability to focus on their own essential meaning, and communicate it to the american people a and i would also say people in america now, we talk about politics are throwing around numbers. there is the unfortunate 47 percent for mitt. there is the question only need 51 percent to win. the way republicans win is by thinking of 100 percent of the

american people, going to them all, laying out your plan saying you may disagree with me, but this is where i stand, please listen to me, give me a hearing, the american people always will. so in a way maybe their essential problem was they were slicing and dicing in america. go bigger. >> schieffer: well, let's go over to david corn, who really was the reporter of the week. i mean, you came up with this video. it was just astounding. how long have you had that video? >> well, i mean, there are a lot of conspiracy theories i only had it for a week or less while we took -- while i took a lot of time to authenticate it, make sure the video clips are accurate and work out an agreement with the source of the tape about how to present it. so we really got it out as quick as we could do it journalistically responsibly, so even though it happened in, i didn't learn of the tape until late august and then we moved

very fast. i got to take issue with my friend peggy i think she is being a little generous here, which is not a bad fault to have. the problem with the campaign, and i think this is what the tape plays into is the candidate. all of the stuff, it is not a slicing and dicing of the american public here and, there it is not just a strategic assumptions that the campaign is making or how they are presenting the message, i think you have seen mitt romney in the last seven years he has been campaigning being all sorts of different things and not having either the obama campaign denigrates him for not having a core i would say not having a core message or a core mantra, and in his pursuit of the presidency and when i did the book showdown what impressed me was the strategy of the obama campaign comes from one place, really, the president. he puts together his vision, his policy, agenda, his own ideas about might be and about governing america into a political strategy, whether you like it or not, whether it is going to work or not but it comes from him and it is really

i think sincerely at his core, and so it seems a much more integrated campaign than we have with the romney campaign. i mean you shouldn't have to call for james baker to rush in and save the day if the candidate had something really solid to offer the public at this time in our history. >> schieffer: well, david gergen, you have been in the reagan white house and in the clinton white house. do you think this thing is a gave changer? >> the 47 percent? >> schieffer: yes. >> no. i don't think the game is over yet, i think what mitt romney needs is a game changer in the first debate. the problem he now has got got in the engagement is it is starting to slip away from him in the key states. peggy is absolutely right, it is very close in the national polls and slipping away from him in the battle ground states and that puts pressure on him going into these debates. were he actually tied in the swing states all he needs to do is have a draw in the debates, he now needs to win and win that first debate and have turned that first debate into a game changer in which he does respond to the david corns of the world

and show his true soul and what his message is. there have been a lot of mistakes in the campaign, starting with the idea he should have called peggy noonan for his acceptance address and would be in better shape now. >> i am a columnist -- >> at least he should have called because it would have shown good instincts. i agree with david, i think calling on jim baker now is not a striewtion to this. solution at this. jim baker was best at running campaigns when he had president reagan as a candidate and he was very successful. it is up to the candidate at some point. the 47 percent didn't come from the campaign, it came from the candidate. >> that is true. >> i think he can still win this thing and romney can still win this thing but he has to do it in the debate and have a game changer. >> schieffer: stengel you are the managing editor of time and you worked with bill clinton on this cover story that was written to coins side with the clinton global initiative. i have to ask you and i think dave gergen is right, you just

have the sense, especially in these battleground states that obama is just pulling away. i don't know of a battle ground state right now where obama is behind. if memory serves. bill, does bill clinton get some of the credit for this? >> i think so he is the number one surrogate as we saw and he is the explainer in chief. the president has not done a great job of explaining his own message. i mean, he has to turn to bill clinton to do it for him. and in fact what we are going to see is a lot more ads with bill clinton in them, and clinton will have to decide, am i really going to jump in here and really try to kill that guy or am i going to try to maintain this notion that i am this great philanthropist in chief which in fact he is. i have to say that the central problem of the campaign, the romney folks i thought, look this be is going to be a referendum on the economy, the obama folks thought, hey, this is a choice election and i am the experienced guy. what it has turned into is a

referendum on romney, and that is a problem for him, because that is the central problem because he is not really connecting. >> i talked to a number of republicans this week, one strategy gist who has been involved in a lot of these campaigns said when he saw that video, it was the first time he thought he was seeing the real romney. that is a problem when zero your most troubled moment is the one people think is the most authentic moment, and so that is the problem if it is true and a lot of republicans believe this that romney has this authenticity problem matt is the barrier to keep him from saying i do care about you and have policies that will affect you in your real life. people don't buy the pitch because they don't buy the guy. where he has a possible exit strategy or something that he can hang on to is the pew poll, look at the swing voters still left .. they say one in five, some say it is less than that. on the question of jobs people, those swing voters prefer romney

24 to 27 over obama. there are 20 million more people on food stamps under obama. one in six living in poverty, 23 million either unemployed or underemployed, the economy is still there ready for romney to find his way back to it somehow, he just has to do it,. >> schieffer: does any of this go back to the fact that what if in the beginning, peggy, what if mitt romney said look i am a moderate, you know, i know we have conservatives in this party and i know we have the tea party but the fact is i am a moderate. i was a moderate governor, haley barbour is not going to get elected governor of massachusetts anymore than i would be elected governor of mississippi. it seems somehow mitt romney has been pushed beyond a point where i wonder if he really is sometimes, and certainly if you go back and look at his record -- >> i don't know. oddly enough, i think people do sort of look at him and experience him as a kind of

moderate conservative, even though he never says that i think he does come across that way. but i think he has, as i think richard said, romney so far has failed. the american people look at romney and obama and i think a number of them would be willing to say, mr. obama, we gave you four years, i think i am not going to reup your contract, except they look at romney and he hasn't fully made the sale to them yet. i also think, interestingly this year, so many people think they know who they are voting for but when you get down to it they tell pollsters by the way i could change my mind. so this is still all in play, which actually is an opening for mitt romney, but if he doesn't take it now, as david notes, it ain't going to get taken. >> the thing is, he has been running for president for seven years now. >> yes. >> i think you are right. the mitt romney of 2003, 2004 would have been the ideal

republican candidate in the general election. that guy would have lost, probably, republican primary, and that was a chance -- a risk that mitt romney wasn't willing to take. so, yeah, he moved so far to the right he has had all of these flip-flops and has an authenticity issue coming into the very start of this thing and then through the campaign, he seems to go back and forth. he ran as an outsider now obama said something this week so now romney runs as the insider. he has been reactive to almost everything the president has done, and it has been noticed when you don't have a rudder the winds push you back and forth, much easier and i think people are looking at romney the way they looked at john mccain four years ago when the financial collapse happened and they don't see a steady hand. they see the guy who knows what he wants to do as president and i don't know if that can really be changed that much at this point. he is lucky it is still close, which may be david -- >> i will tell you why because he has an authenticity program

they should run an hour ad and run the whole video that is mitt romney the whole guy he is fluent and articulate and shows what he believes he is not optimistic about a lot of things and connects better in that video talking to those fund raisers than on the stumps. >> to the millionaires. >> schieffer: i have to break here, and take a look commercial break. back in one minute. don't go away. areas are reportg their best tourism seasons in years. we've shared what we've learned with governments and across the industry so we can all produce energy more safely. i want you to know, there's another commitment bp takes

just as seriously: our commitment to america. bp supports nearly two-hundred-fifty thousand jobs in communities across the country. we hired three thousand people just last year. bp invests more in america than in any other country. in fact, over the last five years, no other energy company has invested more in the us than bp. we're working to fuel america for generations to come. today, our commitment to the gulf, and to america, has never been stronger. >> schieffer: tom dickerson i want to talk to you about, peggy has been talking about bringing some of the republicans say bring back an old hand or something. what about that? >> this is one of the things i heard in interviews this week. mitt romney has been all over the map. what an old hand may do is governor you run the campaign and we will tell you what to do. you need to step back, and, you know, you just have to accept that role, governor and here is

one specific way that might work. governor romney jumped in the middle of the violence in the middle east and he broke a little bit of a tradition by inserting himself and disappeared on the issue. we since learned this administration first thought this uprising in libya was just something that bubbled up from the ground, now they are calling ate terrorist attack. what went wrong there, we needed to get wrong in the first place why weren't you securing the embassy the way you should have been? these are points a republican could make that mitt romney need to make because he knows the press isn't necessarily going to make that case for him. hhe can't make it because he jumped in and said hey this is a very serious issue. but instead he hasn't really come back to it. what an old hand might do is say look you have to prosecute this case against the president in this way, not just let it be. >> i think that was perfectly said and unfortunately for me it was what i wanted to say and i would also add that an old hand on the plane would have said to him, to mr. romney as soon as libya blew, mr. romney went out there and he tried to make some

political hay of it an old hand would have said, buddy, when americans come under attack, the first thing you do is say, we are praying for them, we are asking for unity we will have no criticism right now for the president, but this will unfold. we will be thinking about it and we will be talking to you very seriously about it very soon. >> i don't think romney has that instinct. >> which is why old hands need to be there. >> schieffer: let david make a point. >> i am an old hand. i am very persuaded he should have an old hand there. i think having ji. >> jim: bake they are would help, i think a number of mistakes, my uniform experience has been that what really matters is the person who is running, because what you learn in a campaign is what that president will be like, what that person would be like as president and you know when they get to the oval office so much depends upon the quality and the

character, you wrote a book about reagan and character of the person and the instincts and the way they carried themselves and some of the things romney is having trouble with are the very requirements we look to for a successful president, the capacity to persuade people, to rally behind your positions. presidency is not about having some engineer who comes up with the best set of solutions, we saw that with jimmy carter, it is how you mobilize people behind you to rally to do the hard things that need to be done. >> schieffer: that brings up a point. this week you saw president obama say, look, what i have learned is you can't run washington from the ins that you have to run it from the outside. i guess what he meant was you have to bring pressure from the outside but, you know, one of the main criticisms of president obama is he is not very good at the inside game and one reason that we are in the gridlock we are in right now is he is just not good at brokering deals. >> totally true. >> i disagree with that, if you look at the tax cut deal after the november 2010 elections that

he actually got a lot more than the republicans, you look at how he got start passed and don't ask, don't tell, there are a lot of stories in which he has gone and done stuff kind of more on the inside, then on the outside, and it ticked off his base because they haven't seen this because it has been too much inside washington. so it cuts both ways. >> nostalgic for the obama of 2008 when he could run as an outsider, it is always easier to run, even when you are an incumbent outsider and he doesn't have that message anymore so he lapsed back into that so the problem is he hasn't shown us why he, the president needs to be rehired. >> when a president of four years says excuse me you can't change washington from the inside, he is saying i failed to change washington from the inside. he could not negotiate, he was no reagan sitting down with tip o'neill. if you are buying, you make a

deal with the other side, you can move it forward. if you can't do that, then i guess you have to talk about how you can't change things. >> i want to come back to this. wrong you can read the bob woodward book and include obama is good at the inside game, you can't read that and figure that. but anyway, beyond that, you know, the classic book on the presidency was written by, called presidential power his whole argument was it is a combination you have to be good at the outside game and inside game so two together. and president obama's notion you can do this from the outside simply doesn't work in contemporary politics. >> schieffer: had we ever had a president that was really good at both. >> we had occasional presidents good at both. >> ronald reagan. >> ronald reagan, lbj, to a certain extent. >> the party republicans, you know, you listen so someone like you look at the book tom man

wrote and not flaming radicals and they blame the obstructionism almost mainly on the republicans coming and saying we don't care if you are clinton or ronald reagan we are just going to throw monkey with reference with reference into the wrenches again and again and see what happens at the next election. >> oh, boo yahoo, but. >> boo hoo, and the remedy may not be power from the outside .. look at healthcare as an issue that moved because of outside pressure he picked up no republicans because of this outside pressure and tried to used organizing for america his campaign arm to bring a national ground swell for healthcare and the numbers went down. so just as a remedy for gridlock his own diagnosis isn't right because it didn't necessarily work in the way he thought. >> to the president doesn't want to be locked with no inside or outside -- >> franklin roosevelt was a master as president and he was terrific on the outside, with the radio talks and the rest but also a master on the inside.

>> yes. >> and he has staunch republican opposition. >> you know better than anybody, doesn't it take a while you learn where the oval office is and you learn where the bathroom is and then how to negotiate da. >> and as a second term president, he can actually have some leverage in a different way than he had in the first term. >> we have all been reading the robert carolbj book in the past year and you know why we have because we are nostalgic for and longing for a man who knew how to do it from the inside, from the day he went to work. >> you can't do those private negotiations -- >> oh you can do plenty. >> you really can. >>ive president is reelected my fervent hope is he is a successful president because the country so desperately needs to get things done in the second term but the problem in the second term as you know power runs -- >> your power runs down quickly,

your leverage actually diss piers you have about a year to a year and a half. >> schieffer: all right our power is slowly running down here, the clock has run out. i want to thank all of you, perhaps the most spirited discussion we have had on face the nation in a long time. i wish you could all come back here every sunday. thank you all for being with us. we will be right back. stay with us. k, and i was trapped.

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that's all we time for today, the panel is still talking and talked right through the commercial and still talking over here. we will be back in washington next week, tonight watch 60 minutes, both president obama and mitt romney in separate interviews. thanks for watching. we will be here next week for face the nation. they have teachers... ...with a deeper knowledge of their subjects. as a result, their students achieve at a higher level. let's develop more stars in education. let's invest in our teachers...

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captioning sponsored by cbs . >> this broadcast was produced by cbs news. which is solely responsible for today's guests and topics. it originated in new york. . >> for the first time president obama and governor romney head to head on the key issues facing america. the first presidential debate. wednesday october 3rd on cbs.