just keep driving that in there. >> reporter: the shearers kept a steady pace for the entire 24 hours. they had been shearing sheep for years and have a good pattern. >> in reality, none of this works unless legs aren't in the right position, sheep is not in the right position, equipment is not sharp. what you want to do is stretch out their skin by lifting their legs up, shear the belly out, shear through the crotch, through one hip. every stroke you take at that point is setting up the last 2/3 of this sheep. you try and shear them in roughly 46. when you get good and tired, you start counting strokes. then, you realize you're wasting time 5-10 above that. >> reporter: in the end, doug sheared 607 sheep, roughly 25 sheep per hour and he sheared 480 sheep, but 20 per hour. noa though they may not do another marathon sheep shearing, they will probably keep their shearing creeps careers for a long time to come. i'm erica goss for the "u.s. farm report". >> at the rate they were going, gavin was shearing a sheep every2:58. doug was finishing the job in 2:23. most amazingly, the guy coun

joining me now, michael shearer, white house reporter for "the washington post." hi, michael.ow are you doing? >> hey, chris. >> let's sort of try to break this down. we have been hearing this criticism -- i can't remember a president who wasn't criticized when he was on vacation and people thought he should have come back and jimmy carter, we want to go back that far, he was criticized for staying at the white house and not getting out during the whole hostage crisis. realistically, is there something he could do in washington that he couldn't do from hawaii? >> you know, i think technically, no. they pretty much move the white house wherever the president goes. so from a technical standpoint, he can order up whatever he wants to order up from hawaii or for wherever else he happens to be. politically, though, we're in 2010 officially now. it's a campaign year, and, you know, what this president has to balance as his predecessors have in the past is, you know, the symbolism versus the reality. the symbolism is what the republicans are seizing on. >> and "the washington post" n

stability policy will have very negative consequences sometimes in the future would neither you or i shearer. i have to understand that on that particular issue, we do feel we have a stake and an expertise in that we're trying to get the right policy. >> well, i appreciate that and also apologize for being given some information about a hearing that apparently was off days, and certainly i'm very glad you cleared that up. and i would just say that on ten e-echo the same thing that he said and that is that all of us here are trying to get it right. and i think it's really hard. i think the resolution piece in the two big to fail peace is the most important. if we do nothing else over the course of the next several months, but solve that, i think the most important thing in my opinion. again, if we only did that, that would be fine. i hope that you will, you know, continue to talk with us in our offices both privately and in any other setting to help us work through this. and my comments today come again, are not in any way -- there just to say that look, my antenna right now makes me feel ner

and my friend, mike shearer who is a very nice guy, even if he's got a tendency to write articles like this, he wrote a piece about the 10 things barack obama did wrong with health care reform. and then michael heaven had written, the five things barack obama did wrong in the first year. one thing to know about the media, my colleagues are very bad at their jobs, you work backwards from outcomes, right? so we failed. all right, what contradicted to failure? well, it is over reach too liberal. you succeed, my depended, how did you make that happen and the five things barack obama did right. we amplify outcomes. we cannot keep things in perspective by definition of the way we do our work. we amplify outcomes, if this fails, it'll fail as worse than it was. if it passes maybe at this point but generally speaking it'll be a better bill than it was. two other quick points. one, we should not miss here the fact that if health care fails the people that actually die are real people. if all of the congressmen did not get health care insurance unless a version of the bill went through, i guaran