he'd simply thought that james baker had no business in foreign policy, that he had no training in foreign policy. and he often said about people engaged in foreign policy, whether it was james baker or warren christopher, that they don't know anything and what they do know is wrong. and he also thought that baker was preventing him from giving foreign policy advice to president bush. he felt that baker resented the fact that nixon had bush's ear and baker wanted to be the sole adviser to president bush on foreign policy. c-span: what is your ultimate goal personally? >> guest: well, i'm not quite sure. i know that i'm working on a second volume of this, and i'd like to continue observing and writing about american politics c-span: do you ever want to run for an office? >> guest: i don't rule out any option. c-span: did you learn that from richard nixon? >> guest: i did, indeed. c-span: if you ran for an office, what kind of an office, of all the ones you've seen, appeal to you? >> guest: i think an executive position, perhaps governor. c-span: here's what the book looks like. it's called

james baker was secretary of state and white house chief of staff for george h.w. bush.secretary and white house chief of staff for ronald reagan. and undersecretary of commerce for gerald ford. he joins us from houston. hello, mr. secretary. thank you for joining us. >> thank you, bret. delighted to be with you. >> bret: your sense ofthe election and the importance this time around. >> guest: i think we will see a fairly close election. i endorsed quite some time ago governor romney because i think he is best equipped to dig us out of our fiscal and economic hole that we're in, in this country. as you mentioned in the introduction i was fortunate enough to serve not only as secretary of state but secretary of the treasury. i can tell you that the most important thing about america has been throughout its history, its economy. we can't be strong militarily, diplomatically or in any other way, politically unless we are strong economically. we now have a debt to gdp that is out of sight. we got to figure out some way to deal with that. when he was governor of massachusetts

. >> he also had a great partner in james baker. >> rose: they both understood that. and >> and also james baker, your friend, knew very well there's not a hell of a lot of difference between campaigning and governing. that life is political and at our best to go to david's point the bipartisan votes, these eras we glorify, they were about three votes where somebody would give the other guy the benefit of the doubt. what we've done i don't know if a position where you get two or three a session on big stuff to zero. >> rose: this reminds me of stories i've heard you tell about when henry kissinger was doing shuttle diplomacy. he didn't need to make many stops, did he? >> no, think about -- again, this goes back to our foreign policy discussion on how difficult the world is today. when kissinger was putting together the 1973 '74 misengagement in the middle east he had to deal with one pharaoh, anwar sadat, one overwhelmingly powerful dictator named hay fez al-assad and golda meir no one had ever heard of the likud party. so flash forward today you want to do do a deal,

when then president bush the first was asking secretary of state james baker to hold talks with iraq about getting saddam hussein to pull his troops out of kuwait not long after they had invaded kuwait. that's the right analogy for these fiscal cliff talks, believe it or not. at the time we, investors, traders, actually thought could you make a deal with saddam. we believed you could sit down with tariq aziz and hammer out a compromise. for some ridiculous reason we thought it would have to be done over the weekend. short sellers have been making a killing since saddam invaded kuwait that summer. dow dropping from 2900 to 2350 as the stalemate dragged on. the shorts feared these aziz/bush talks. they didn't want to see the juicy top get obliterated. i would reel in or bring in my short positions friday morning unlike those who came in at the close so i could sleep soundly over the weekend. so i didn't have to wake up to a headline saddam agrees to pull back, u.s. rebuilds kuwait. you had to believe he would do something rational like that. did saddam think he could beat the united st

. >> he also had a great partner in james baker. >> rose: and they both understood that. >> if you were putting together the perfect president what qualities would you draw on from previous presidents you've read about? >> i'd start with tom's brain. you'd be go with lincoln, but i'm going to do my hamilton pitch. he wasn't a president but what he did was introduce a school of thinking that says this country is about social mobility. we have one party that's all about freedom. but we don't have a party about social mobility and the market and i do think that is the missing element in american life which we had in the early republican party and i think it's more the bstance. why is the center spweu tent in america. lack of ideas and agenda. i think it's filling out that agenda that's the crucial thing. one of the things that makes my job worthwhile is that one out of seven of our incoming freshmen will be the first in their families to graduate college. not enough of that is happening in our country and to go back to what i think we all could agree on is where we have an economic system

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james baker the former treasury of the secretary who also served as white house chief of staff for ronald reagan and george h.w. bush explains why tuesday is all about the economy. >> i can tell you the most important thing about america has been through out its history its economy. we can't be strong militarily, diplomatically or in any other way and politically unless we are strong economically. we now have a debt to gdp that is just out of sight. we to figure out some way to deal with that. >> robert gray from the fox business network joins us this morning. what are we expecting from these jobs numbers? >> not a lot different than last month. keep in mind for october sandy not going to effect the numbers that much. we will see a lot of that next month. let's take a look. here are the estimates we are looking for. 8:30 eastern time these are the numbers 125,000 jobs created the unemployment rate to jump 7.9 percent. unemployment rate a big jump down 7.8 percent here. a couple of key things to watch. 125,000 right on. government not adding anything in there. they are looking for manufact

there's this famous story of reagan's second term where james baker goes in with donald regan, the then secretary and said, mr. president, we've come up with an idea, let's swap jobs. >> right. it didn't work out so well sniet didn't work out so well. that while don regan might have been a good secretary of treasury, he was not a good chief of staff. >> right. look. the answer is, to follow up on what john said, you've got to open the circle. you need some fresh talent, yo need some fresh blood, you need some fresh ideas yochl u also have to learn from will lessons from the first term which means nothing is static, which means you have to start building relationships that you may not have had during the first term. john is right. you have about a year before you start getting into the next god-forbid election cycle. this is the time to narrow your agenda but be bold. what are the two, three, four things that you want your ton cy and prison dency to build the country around. >> david, a lot of people think it's not just a question of new personnel. the president in this particular case n

he helped establish the james baker institute for public policy at rice university in houston.assador, good to see you. >> good to see you. >> so how confident are you about this truce thus far? >> so far, i think it's holding. and that's obviously a good sign. there have been minor violations. but the important thing is to build on this truce. in every crisis i think there is an opportunity. and if the truce is just to become a prolonged truce only to be broken, say, a year or two down the road and we're faced with a similar crisis that we just seen in the last 12 days, then that i do not think is a successful outcome. >> so it truce is contingent upon what? besides both sides trying to be as peaceful as possible. >> well, obviously, a sustained cease-fire. the israelis do not want arms to be smuggled in and rockets to be smuggled into gaza during the truce in order to avoid what we've just seen, the rocket shelgz in sou shellings in tel aviv and jerusalem. then on the palestinian side, they want to end the targeting of hamas leaders. they want the border crossings, the gaza b

former reagan and bush chief of staff and former secretary of state james baker will be our guest. system is back up and running, following sandy. the area three major airports resumed. at least limited service. plus, more breaking news on the libya story. more documents surfacing at this hour. and more news organizations are actually asking questions. "special report" there washington starts at 6:00 eastern. now back to new york and my colleagues with "the five." ♪ ♪ ♪ >> greg: in a speech, pbs anchor jeffrey brown noted a generation ago people got news from the big three networks. but now all this new fragmentation makes the nation harder to gob. he says, "it's hard not to feel it has some relationship to the divisions around us." translation, i hate you fox news. before there was fnc, the news was slanted so far left you had to lie on the floor to watch it. now that it's over, brown longs for the days he hogged the ball 24/7. more proof that the media embraces diversity, except an opinion. things aren't balanced now. seesaw of the american media political viewpoint has michael m

james baker for the republicans, warren christopher for the democrats were sort of brought in at the last minute. not this time. they are both locked and loaded with lawyers, guns and money and it is really, it could happen tomorrow that we start seeing lawsuits about keeping ballots frozen and you know, they're ready to go. >> jeff, we'll be in close contact with you. thank you very much. >>> tonight, joe biden and paul ryan are making their final push through battleground states. final night of campaigning before the polls open. we'll tell you where they are and how they're trying to close the deal for their candidate, ahead. i'm an expert on softball. and tea parties. i'll have more awkward conversations than i'm equipped for because i'm raising two girls on my own. i'll worry about the economy more than a few times before they're grown. but it's for them, so i've found a way. who matters most to you says the most about you. massmutual is owned by our policyholders so they matter most to us. massmutual. we'll help you get there. the potential of yelp unlocked. nyse euronext. unloc

. >> that's why james baker said you got to tie it all together. >> has to be tied together.o be tied to the spending cuts happening. >> gregg: tim, the president wants the so-called rich to pay more. well, instead of raising the marginal rates to accomplish that, why not force wealthier americans to pay more in taxes by eliminating loopholes, limiting deductions and exemptions? couldn't that constitute the basis for a deal? >> well, look, i guess i would start by saying let's not get too caught up and how we get to a deal. i think the white house meeting was incredibly important yesterday because what you had was you had the president and you had the leaders of the senate and the house saying frankly what the american people, what a lot of people have been saying a long time and that's you have to raise revenue and you have to cut spending and you've had a never of bipartisan commissions now and now a group of ceo's and moderate democrats in the house say that. but one of those things, there was an important letter yesterday from a group of moderate democrats in the house th

unofficially a 327-vote marnellen doesn't change in tallahassee today, former secretary of state, james bakerrgument that hand-counting is subjective and unreliable and he accused the gore campaign of needlessly dragging the election out. >> flash back to 12 years ago there as the florida recount battle was just getting under way. it would take another month, more recounts, and finally the decision by the supreme court to finally settle that matter. that was florida 12 years ago. here we are in 2012, and florida's vote tally just came in about oh, about 24 hours ago. as we reported yesterday, president obama, the projected winner in the sunshine state, he will get that state's 29 electoral votes. joining me now from miami, mark prudhoe, political reporter for the "miami herald," why is it always florida? >> there's something in the water. there are 1,000 explanations. this is a little bit of a butterfly effect, little things spiral out into big things. and you had a variety of different things that kind of conspired against us to call for a long night of casting and counting ballots and an ev

one of the things i was listening to james baker the other day who of course was the lead lawyer forwho said, look, none of us ever expected this would happen. we weren't ready for a recount when it suddenly was obvious they needed one. both sides have lawyers that have been studying sometimes automatic recounts in some states. they've been looking at all the voter laws in these swing states just for the possibility that this could happen in ohio or colorado or florida or, you know, any of the -- virginia, any of those other swing states. >> you're seeing evidence in ohio, john, of a lot of lawyers getting ready to get involved if necessary. >> reporter: and let's hope it doesn't happen. but they're watching this through the early voting process. there are observers when you go to the early voting there are observers from both campaigns. both campaigns are trying to turn out the focus in this last weekend you can vote now because of the court decisions and the like you can vote now through monday. each campaign has a list of people who promised to vote early. if you haven't voted, th

know that anybody has enunciated a world view the way that henriy kissen jer did in hs day or even james bakernt of the united states. but clearly he has endorsed him. >> yes. and also he focused on climate change which i thought was interesting. >> right. >> it comes after this huge storm and there's a big fight going on right now. and the scientists are out there saying, listen, this is climate change these sort of huge storms we haven't seen the likes of before. this is the result of climate change. and this is clearly a major who believes that his city was hard hit as a result of climate change. and so, you know, again not surprising the timing is sort of interesting to me. but it does fit in with what's been going on in new york and that he spent so much time talking about climate change. and that was what he was actually criticizing mitt romney for was romney's -- what he sees as romney's flip-flop on things like coarbon emissions. >> obviously critically important issue for him. candy, thanks very much. >>> hundreds of storm victims from new jersey's devastated coast are waiting in line

bakers field goal sets off a teddy bear toss, 7,000 bears thrown on the ice. at number three, check thought kid's shot. he's eight years old. you know who it is? lebron james, jr. this one, the chief decided to get manning's autograph. >> it's peyton manning. who wouldn't want a picture. if you had an opportunity, would you take it? >>reporter: i'd like it. >> he's he's got,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

bakers field goal sets off a teddy bear toss, 7,000 bears thrown on the ice. at number three, check thought kid's shot. he's eight years old. you know who it is? lebron james, jr. this one, the chief decided to get manning's autograph. >> it's peyton manning. who wouldn't want a picture. if you had an opportunity, would you take it? >>reporter: i'd like it. >> he's he's got something. when i first got five, i got dave's autograph the first time i saw him. a legend. we'll be right back. >>> rough weather is coming, so maybe we should see something beautiful before. >> yeah. >> turn out the lights. >> that's tomorrow. >> be safe. band playing "late show" theme ) >> from new york, the greatest city in the world, it's the "late show" with david letterman. tonight...