Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20111211

the obama administration and its handling of the economic crisis. this is a little over an hour. [applause] >> well, it sure is good to be here in harvard or square. i, um, it's kind of nice to get out of washington these days. um, the white house's reaction to the book was vigorous -- [laughter] so my trip here tonight's being sponsored by the witness relocation program. [laughter] no one will find him in harvard square, that's for sure. i used to live up here. we live, my wife -- who's here -- our kids were born here. um, all those key moments of life unfolding happened here in harvard square, many of them we trolled the books -- i guess there are fewer bookstores than there were 20 years ago, i'm sorry to hear that, but sure this is one robust place here, isn't it? what i'm going to do is i, being in a bookstore and in this intellectual capital, i'm actually going to read a few little portions of the book which is something i don't do all that much, and i certainly don't do it on cable television in my four minutes of screaming. i'm mostly being screamed at. but tonight i'm going to read a little bit, talk about the book and then do the thing which is loveliness for me which is open it up to questions. this is the kind of group you just want to yak with, and i'm sure there are good questions in the audience. there's been a lot of publicity about the book. at this point i think a lot of people have actually read the book, so we can actually talk about the book which is a thing of loveliness for me. um, you know, the history here, the recent history, of course, is that the white house got its copy on friday prior to publication. um, this is now widely known, i gather. and "the new york times" had gotten it the day before, so the disclosures, some of the disclosures, there's lots in here that wasn't, of course, noted in those first noisy offerings. but that became kind of this dust storm of push and shove prior to the publication of the book. by the time the book was ready to be in the bookstores the following tuesday, a few interesting things had happened. the president and the white house clearly had seen some of the signature quotes including the one from a person i know who was near and dear to all of you, larry summers. not here tonight, larry? [laughter] and where he says, and i think now famously after an economic briefing he said this quite often, the larry summers home alone riff, it was called, where he would leave said briefing on various summits, and he would turn to his fellow adviser and say we are home alone, there is no adult in charge. and bill clinton would never make these mistakes. now, larry has a history for acerbic framing of issues. this, i think, is even for him, you know, a pie on the charts. it's interesting, because that becomes something that troubles people. summers' genius is, in fact, framing arguments, and people wondered, is larry framing this right? are we home alone? are we ever anything but home alone? this is one of the things i posit in the book. peter orszag, who discusses his feelings about larry's home alone riff and can actually cite a specific instance where they sort of discussed it and the follow up to that, um, he posits, he opines about this. i say at the end of the book, you know, the case for government is to somehow lance that fear that all of us, i think, understand, that there is no one in charge, that the things that we face in this country, the global forces that buffett us are beyond anyone's control, even management. and, um, the case for government is that, is that that's not the case. that someone's in charge so we can sleep at night and get on with our lives. and that case is one that this administration has tried to make, i don't think always successfully. i think they generally get an a for effort, if something lower than that in execution, and the game is far from over. so having said that, let me read a couple interesting little parts. i don't get to read very much. but this book follows this president prior to his being this president from his days as a senator. it starts in 2007x in the work of -- and in the work of narrative, you try to fit together pieces that create a very similar la tuesday of the life we see every day. i try not to look back saying, you know, if we knew now what we knew then or in hindsight, obviously, that's true. i try to walk in the footsteps of all five characters, all five books now. and you can only know what we knew then. barack obama is an asterisk. a good 30 points behind hillary clinton, he's an interesting guy, clearly a great speaker. people knew the 2004 address in front of the democratic convention, but he's kind of catch shi. and he has an economic briefing on the first of august; austan goolsbee, others gatter and they say look, you know, this economy, well, it's not all it's cracked up to be. in some ways these advisers lay out the evidence that after 30 years of flatlining income or even declining income for many groups, you know, we are living on borrowed time. the response was to load up on debt, lots of debt, more than 100% of gdp, well over. more than we've ever had sort of burdening us up until now. wall street created a terrific model for this, this great debt-trading machine that was so profitable. by 2007, financial services accounts for 47% of corporate profits, unheard of. and debt equity is outnumbering 4 to 1 in terms of the balance sheets and profits of the big financial houses. and really the model, i'll just say this briefly, but the model that everyone now understands they embrace inside that kind of capital cartel of the financial capital of new york, and this is about two capitals, after all -- washington, our political capital and new york, our financial capital -- fighting it out for the direction of our country. new york had built an extraordinary confection where that capital from many good decades in america and some real robust growth of profits, that capital was mostly getting invested overseas. the margins are terrific overseas, you know? no environmental regulations, you know, in china form a union, you're going to jail and, you know, frankly, child labor, terrific profit margins. really good stuff. that's where the money was going. meanwhile, in large measure america burdened even then in 2007 was being shorted. that was the place where you sold debt. and not just debt, your father or grandfather's debt, a new kind of innovation in debt. and that meant that, basically, you could sell debt, all kinds of debt packaged, securitized, tranched. we all knew these terms, now, we didn't really know them in 2007, and the key was i could sell it and make profit from it but not be on the hook because i no longer held the risk, i no longer was accountable as a seller of debt. it moved hand to hand, often to unsophisticated buyers. i had already made my money as the big wall street house or the big bank, and then when it goes down -- and they knew it was going to go down at some point in large measure -- essentially, i'm off the hook. the profits are privatized, the disasters are socialized. government will step in, and the too big to fail nightmare's to come. that's where we were. obama sees this, and he sees this through the eyes of characters who are near him. he sees the economy is hollowed out just like a rickety structure with a fresh coat of paint. one good speed bump, one gust of wind, that thing's going down. he sees that. he's troubled. a few days later he gets a call on the 4th of august, his 46th birthday. gets a call from a wall street titan who adores him, guy named robert wolf, head of ubs in america. he's the real deal, and he just, um, he has, he says, a nonsexual crush on this guy. he'd take a bullet for him. and a lot of people gather around obama in this 2007 period were quite stunned by him. what a character. haven't had one like him in, my god, in common memory. and wolf is standing on the 4th of august on the flying deck of a 110-foot lazara. that's a boat, okay, some of you don't know. big one. from here to the door and twice over. it's got four bedrooms, it's got a library, it's got a desalinization program on the boat. this hedge fund manager is melting down. it's all going bad. the great credit eruption. this is about a week and a half before everyone starts to see it. and this guy, sal marrow, hedge fund guy, is cursing into the phone. and robert wolf, adviser to obama, really, though, mostly a contributor, he ran a lot of the wall street money raising for obama, he sees it, and he goes up to the flying deck of this boat. there's a deck at the top of the little pool on it, on the deck. and he calls obama on his birthday. i mean, they're friends. and he says, happy birthday, young man. they chat for a minute about their kids and their wives, obama had just called wolf's wife on her birthday two days before. and then he says, you know, basically, i haven't been an adviser to you, barack. i've been a contributor and a friend, but you've got to see what i'm seeing from here. we have a market-driven disaster coming. it's a once in a lifetime event. it's going to change everything. and wolf lays it out for him in plain speak, quite brilliantly. and obama sees it. he gets a glimpse of the future on his birthday. where is he on this day? he's down in atlanta speaking at the southern christian leadership conference convention. another martin luther king speech. this very day. and obama, of course, is a student of king. he understands what king said at the end of his life, that often was not embraced by others in the movement about economic justice. so let me just read one page. barack obama, in just a few days, had caught sight of an emerging catastrophe that would again draw together the issues of economics and justice. no one in washington's power structure had been presented with a similarly dire and credible prediction from an actual captain of a wall street bank. that latter group having too much at stake for that level of candor. and such a market-driven tidal wave would surely be headed for the dense shoreline that only days before the economists had so aptly described; rickety structures, freshly painted with easy credit but rotted beneath that housed so much of the country's economic livelihood. did government in its weakened state have the power to hold this catastrophe at bay? and if such a tidal wave wreaked devastation, might it recast basic moral equations by which power and wealth had long been distributed and perhaps even herald a birth, a rebirth of the public ideal? when king spoke of giving democracy its full breadth of meaning by altering economic inequity, he was in the midst of his own struggle with a certain duality between the transcendent character who stood at lincoln's feet to tell of a dream deeply rooted in the american dream and the man who spent the ensuing years of his life walking the flat earth, struggling to conjure the righteous actions with which to make real that earlier days of fusion of noble purpose. a week after that national cathedral speech in washington, king's death in memphis would leave behind only the image of a man as familiar now as an old friend giving voice to an expansive dream perhaps big enough to bridge americans' own duality between noble ideal and, at times, ignoble action; between principle and practice, word and deed. obama acutely understood how people painted their longings on to his welcoming presence. yearnings he would try now to harness in the service of tangible change if he could manage it. he might finally cash king's promissory note to stand, his right hand raised, at the other end of the mall as the culmination of a centuries-long struggle for civil equality and as the torch bearer for king's second dream of equality of opportunity upon which to found a truer democracy. obama had seen the longing in the eyes of the crowds already, and though he had not yet found a way to tap this longing, he understood on some level that his fortunes rested on how he could craft his narrative and himself into a sure vessel for that hunger. the forces of change were now at play. obama finished up the conversation with wolf, robert wolf, his wall street informer, and turned his attention to policy at that night's speech. like so many he had given, he would strive to conjure the spirit of king or at least the spirit embodied in that well-worn image of the man. but now those hard questions of economic justice gathered around him. those questions of the second, less familiar king. they gathered in the air like the clouds of a coming storm. obama gets a glimpse, and he does act. he is ahead of the curve. he gathers around him in the fall of '07 and the spring of '08 an ecumenical team led by paul volcker, democrats and republicans, bill donaldson, the sec chief under bush was there, robert rice who, of course, is one of your favorites here. their all together. robert wolf, the ubs wall street titan. they're together because they're afraid. people are feeling the shudders on the landscape, they're feeling it shake. and obama right from the start is saying the things that almost no one else is saying, we need to reform the financial capital, we need to reform the system of credit. we need to make it work for the american economy and the american people rather than in so many ways against it. to kill off the volatility that we feel even now as we run up and down these parables of fear just in the last few weeks. he got it. and volcker is really his guide. now, volcker is in the book, and some people say he's the hero of the book. i'm not big on heros or villains, you know? the reporting is the reporting. but volcker speaks with force in this book. we had many, many lunches, we talked across almost two years. and volcker is the kind of avatar, the kind of champion of tough love, you know? after greenspan's demise for the most part having pushed forward the bubble across 20 years, one bubble to the next, all of a sudden people say what about volcker, the previous fed chairman? you know, volcker choked off money supply in '79, '08 and '81, he did force that recession, but he killed inflation, and he set the predicate for so so much of the expansion that reagan would take credit for. ultimately, reagan, says volcker, you're out of here. i'm not reuping you. why? because volcker was not a believer in the deregulation that reagan was such a champion of. he says, no, no, that doesn't get us anywhere. they need rules of the road. they've needed them since roosevelt, and they still need them. unleashing wall street is not the answer. and volcker's out in '87. but he returns to stand, all 6-8 of him, to stand behind obama. credibility. this team is sized up by the summer of 2008 as trouble, trouble for another team. i call them team b. and that's the team led, for the most part, by robert rubin, more attuned and tied to wall street. rubin, of course, the former goldman chair, goldman chief, treasury secretary under clinton and now the citigroup chief. wall street saw his volcker-led team, and they said, my god f they get into office with this new president, we are toast, plain and simple. and they plotted their counterattack. the counterattack was get our people in the key jobs. interestingly, something i found out which sort of surprised me and there are dozens of disclosures here, but some of them you're like, really, my goodness. is that robert rubin was actually offered in the latter days of the campaign a dollar a year job to have an actual office in the west wing. when obama was thinking, hey, i might win this thing. of course, by the late fall, by october citigroup is collapsing, and that's untenable. but rubin's left and right hand, tim geithner and larry summers, well, they get the jobs. what happened there? why did volcker and that team get washed away, team a in favor of team b? you know, obama, i'm sure, will reflect on this in his memoirs, but there's a lot of evidence at this point that, well, that things that are very natural happened. you know, here's a man who is not an expert in finance or economics, he, of course, is an extraordinarily brilliant man. but, you know, he broke into the lead in september by besting mccain on these very issues. he spent so much time with his wall street gang, with his advisers, i mean, mccain was no match for obama. even hank paulson republicans are like, jeez, that guy, he kind of gets it. and this other fella, mccain, he's not even buzz word compliant on this stuff. [laughter] and when obama breaks into the lead, you know, the book is sympathetic to obama. you know, you're trying to feel, what's he feeling? because if you feel what he's feeling as best as a writer can render it, you get a sense of what i call the good enough reasons. i have a rule that i've used for all my books, and it's what i call a good enough reasons rule, and i learned it dealing with gang leaders, actually, in my first book. you know, it was so easy to be judgmental. you know, these guys are wreaking havoc. but i said, no, no, hold on, if i'm judgmental, i don't understand the good enough reasons. they may not be your reasons or mine, but they're good enough. and if you know them, you can know a person republican as well as -- almost as well as you can know another, and you get why they do what they do, and it often is quite clear and discernible, even rational in some cases. i'm always looking for the good enough reasons in all the characters, and i want to know that for obama, the central actor of this time. you know, all of a sudden he breaks into the lead just like one of those bad robert redford candidate moments. what do we do now? he's got to own washington. he has to tame new york. he has to keep us from what looks like a coming depression. and caution, the cousin of fear, grips him. how could it not? and at that moment the more progressive activist grew and, again, democrats and republicans both of team a who i don't know if i can manage that haiku, and he goes with team b. and they are very good at speaking the words of caution, prose from dover, men who have been there. we served bill clinton, we know where the levers are to push. and they get in there. larry summers, chief economic adviser, tim geithner, treasury secretary. rahm emanuel, chief of staff. he was warned against emanuel. obama didn't listen. you know, back when the campaign -- remember that whole thing between hillary and obama, that judgment v. experience? and hillary said experience, and obama said, judgment. it was a nice retort. he seemed to be a man who was e fuse with the the clarity of judgment. i think obama now would say experience is good as well. [laughter] but he makes judgments to bring in this team. and significantly, the dye is cast. -- the die is cast. there are moving moments here. you know, i was at the last rally, his last speech of the campaign. my wife and i both went in manassas, virginia. a 23-month run -- 21-month run. heroic run, really, out of the midwest, out of -- mist, out of nowhere to capture the imagination of a nation in fear. and that last rally in manassas, virginia, was one that was, you could not be, you could not avoid being moved. i mean, my eyes welled up. you know, 10:00, 10:30 at night, a chillty night, his last -- chilly night, his last speech before he flies to chicago to vote and play basketball and see how the cards fall. you know, and here we are, um, just four miles away from the battlefields where with 147 years before the rebel yell sounds out to start an earlier chapter of our often-painful american journey. and now on this night people come from all over. i mean, not just the professional types like us from washington. it took us five hours to go about 20 miles. and we left the car miles away to just walk. but also people from trailer parks in northern virginia who can't afford the live near where we live. you know, and of all races. latino-americans, asian-americans, african-americans certainly, and then there are guys with confederate flags and gun racks. they're there too. 100,000 people in a field. and obama the tens up on that stage, and the cry that went up from those hills, i can still hear it. i think many of us can hear it. which is why some of this is hard. and maybe we were part of this too. of course we are. this is a conversation between a leader and a people. we're all in it together. how could we not have painted our yearnings on this guy, in a way this sort of tab la rosa with all that he was able to draw from us and then send back to us. in those extraordinary turns of powerful rhetoric. but the next night in grant park you can already feel him stepping back. the acute just burden of it, the pressure of it. you know, he tells axlerod, no fireworks. too celebratory. i mean, he's waited his whole life for this moment. the man wrote his autobiography at 33. but he's already a step away assessing it. he gives a speech which is a great speech, a fine speech. it wasn't like the night before, i was there. and then he walks off the stage, and michelle is waiting for him. it's her moment too, and she puts up her hand for the high-five, and he gently takes it and says, no, no, not tonight. hmm. he's feeling the burden of history. he's saying, am i up to this? and even the inaugural speech, two million people freezing their buns off, screaming, cheering, people dancing in capitals around the world. it was a flat speech. people were disappointed. but whatever. i was there for the moment. i think, jeez, what would reagan have done -- i would shudder to think what reagan would have done. use the inspiration, just go with it. but it's amazing when he gets into office. it's almost like he's not going to manage these expectations anymore. there's no way to manage 'em. just live with 'em. he couldn't predict what this was like, to be the actual president, to be in that cornerless room. and you can see in february and march obama saying, yeah, i can do this. i can manage this. and his object, his focus is, of course, not just on health care which he says will be the priority. yes, that'll be my legacy. but then, of course, the great crisis. a melting economy and a collapsed financial system and, of course, a crisis of jobs that we still live with. and he did some studying, some reading. he was reading a lot of paul krugman. in the economic briefings, it was larry and tim. but obama was sort of self-schooling. give me a copy of that. yeah, that's good. what does he come up with? he says, look, i want to be sweden, not japan. that was his big construction coming through february. sweden, as we know, bailed out its banks one slice of this is ridiculous, they nationalized them, they killed them, they killed off wild speculation, and they let the banks recover slowly. they basically returned banks into a boring spine of an economy rather than a casino. sweden roars back, japan, well, they did what we're doing now. just bail 'em out, restore them, use government's purse and effort as best you can. we can't live without whatever they are. whatever that business model is. that's two decades of stagnation in japan, we're now three years into a very similar model. obama gets this, and he says i want to be sweden, not japan. now, what's happening is havoc inside his economic team. summers and geithner, old friends just like emanuel, these guys have known each other forever. their conversations with one another is important in some ways as anything they say to the president. well, summers and geithner embrace this notion of hippocratic risk, first do no harm. this is a very, very difficult thing to challenge. almost everything does harm that's bold. obama hears this, fine, fine, but here's what i want to do. he wants to nationalize, take down, wind down some of the big banks and reopen them. he wants to kill off the fear that will have another lehman-style disaster from one of these too big to fail banks because that's the fear that's holding us back, keeping us from building and growing and investing. committer in opposes -- geithner opposes him. even summers, though, jumps on the side of the president. he's against geithner. it's everyone against geithner. the president, christy roamer, larry summers and tim as the guy with his finger in the dike. adviser are there to advise. they are experts. that's why presidents hire them whether in economics or national security. they're supposed to know more than the president. the president listens to what they say, ultimately, he then has the lonely spot of making the decision. in this battle in mid march with the president, his 70-75% approval rating, two million people weeping on the mall and cheering, obama's got political capital that happens once in a generation, and he says, i want to be roosevelt, i want to rise to it. i want to take down these big banks, i want to show accountability flows both directions. they did it to themselves. we're wildly overbanked, they can be smaller, and we need to show a kind of justice. people are hurting. this will be the step forward. basically, tim geithner thinks he doesn't know what he's talking about. he needs to be protected from himself. after this meeting where tim talks about his plan, something called the stress test, some of you know about this -- basically, a way to support the banks with a federal purse -- tim wants to carry that forward, obama says, fine. ultimately, he ends up backing off a little bit. just citigroup. with 200 billion left in the t.a.r.p. fund, i want a plan, tim, i want a plan of how to do it. a month passes. they're in the oval office, i have meeting after meeting in the book, every person cooperated with this book. there is not a person in the room that is not in here cooperating. everyone affirms all these stories. make no mistake. anything the white house is throwing out, we in washington call nondenial denial. remember that from all the president's men? is that a -- no, it's a nondenial denial. i don't remember that. i was on venus that day, you know? [laughter] i was temporarily insane, yes, that's what i was. it's hearsay. what's that mean? i don't know. in this meeting a month later, the president says what about that citigroup winddown plan, that resolution plan? that's a key arrow in our quiver. now summers looks at romer back and forth nervously at one another, they've been watching over the last couple weeks, nothing's happening at treasury. and finally christy romer says, mr. president, actually there isn't, there isn't any plan for citigroup. obama says, there better be. he's angry. what do you mean there's no plan? all of a sudden romer feels emanuel's gaze on her. the meeting breaks up, emanuel and summers huddle. emanuel's livid. he says, i can't believe she said that without tim geithner being here to defend himself. forget about the material issues. summers reports to romer minutes after. yes, yes, christy, rahm was livid. he would say that -- you would say that without tim here to defend himself. but, christy, i defended you. i said, jesus, rahm, she's right. there isn't a plan. i asked the president about this. it wasn't an easy moment in our interview at the end of the process. i said, you were agitated. he said, i'm not sure if agitated would be the exact word i'd use. i said, how'd you feel, what'd you say to tim? i don't remember exactly. well, the bureaucracy wasn't moving as fast as i wanted. i'm not sure the you'd call your treasury secretary a bureaucracy, but it's a term of art, i suppose. this stuff was hard, ron, it was hard. harder than i could have imagined to come up with solutions. talked to geithner too. he's in the book, you can read it yourself. in two pages he affirms that he did what is shown in internal memos, he slow walked the president. what's that mean? well, it's reflected in a memo in february of 2010 from a shadow chief of staff guy named pete rouse who's a brilliant washington actor, was the chief of staff in obama's senate office where he talks about that fact that, mr. president, you do assertive accountability in this building. when the treasury department or economic team disagrees with one of your decisions -- not his posits, not his wonderings, his decisions -- they relitigate the whole policy meaning they ignore you. this can't, can be, this cannot stand. you know, and even after that when they disagree, they slow ec cushion. they drag their -- execution. they drag their feet. you need to assert leadership. you need to take control of the building. this forms a blueprint that helps obama learn to be president. look, it takes a year, year and a half even for skilled men or in the future women, former golfs, you know -- governors, you know, executives to manage this most complex managerial organism. it's a matter of growth. the bad luck for obama and some might say looking back for us in the wider country is that he arrives at a moment of both crisis and opportunity, the yin and yang there. without, without any of that key experience in executing power. it's hard to get anywhere to execute power. but he doesn't manage it. and there's a lot of chaos in that first year. and it's not just a takedown of the banks. you know, meeting after meeting he's essentially trapped in the larry summers debate society. now, some people might buy tickets for that. but right now we're at a difficult time, and they go back and forth. do we want to do deficit reduction, or do we want to do new stimulus? back and forth, back and forth. can't decide. obama naturally, again, get in his shoes, he says i need the comfort of consensus, essentially. i want my team to come to consensus so i feel the confidence to make these tough decisions. i'm going to push, you know, of course, he is an extraordinary interlocutor. he's pushing them, he doesn't get consensus, and the result is paralysis. and he is in the doldrums. and very little occurs during that seminal first year. and all the way to 2010 rouse writes the memos, obama, he's seeming to grow and breathe deeper. and that whole team's out the door in the next couple months, the first team he brings. now, after the midterms obama, well, people said it was like light shone in the windows in the white house. pete rouse became the interim chief of staff, a guy who had known obama from the start. obama says something poignant, sort of moving, and it's something other presidents say. the moment of doubt, a moment of confusion he says to one of his aides, i don't want the rest of the aides, i don't want them to see me like this. not sure of myself, basically. you know, better they not see. you know, my god, who of us would have managed better? but rouse becomes the interim chief of staff, and obama says i can do this myself. he engages, yea or nay, you may disagree, but he engages on the bush tax cuts, he trades it from a lot of stimulus, no doubt about it, you know, in terms of unemployment benefits, in terms of payroll tax, there's a boost. he says i make the trade, he does it himself with mcconnell. it passes something like 82-16 or something in the senate, unheard of, and his numbers start the go up. then he gives that extraordinary speech which many of you heard after the tragedy, after gabby giffords was shot in tucson. then he brings in the new staff. then when i'm interviewing him in february, he's got bin laden in the crosshairs. so at the end of the book, obama is feeling kind of recovery, a resurgence. and he talks about that in the last interview. and some of it is, you know, both illuminating, but a little unsettling too. because i'll just read the very last part, and then we'll open it to questions. what's interesting about this last interview is, um, he, he's dealing with this issue of confidence. that's the coin of the realm. that's why the book's called "confidence men." now, there are some guys on wall street who i sort of call con men. i don't think any of them are here. [laughter] shock, i know. gambling in casablanca. but the fact is in our other capital, our political capitol, obama understands that confidence is the coin of the realm. it was that way, it's been that way throughout our history. roosevelt restores it, establishing his legacy. kennedy sparks it for that great, robust period that he launches. and reagan, of course, was a master at exuding confidence no matter what the underlying facts may be. [laughter] and we have a moment in the interview, i'll just tell you this funny little story because it's something that's been mention inside some of the coverage, but i've never kind of gone through it. you know, in the interview it's about 45, 46 minutes, it's just, basically, obama in the chair, and i'm on the couch, and there's a media person at the end of the couch. something happened which is kind of a stroke of good luck is that i'm at a bookstore just like this one. it's called politics & prose, i don't know if ever you've been there, it's in washington. t our bookstore. it's our harvard bookstore. and there i write in the basement a lot in the café. i have an office behind my house, but i kind of need to get out sometimes just to see another living, breathing person. and so i write sort of with people there. i'm, like, an exhibitionist. i'm writing to an audience. it's a pretty good audience, so i'm tapping away, and the guy from the bookstore comes out, you know, jimmy carter's upstairs. what are you kidding? no, he's upstairs signing books. carter's doing a reading. so he's doing the preliminary signing. i'm like, whoa, and i'm about to interview obama. i know i'm going to be interviewing him soon. so i say, okay, well, maybe there's a bit of opportunity here. [laughter] now, carter has written his book called "white house diaries." now, and i ask carter, i go up there, and i see him, and he's there signing away. and i say, president carter, i'm ron -- >> suskind, how you doing? and we're sort of, the most affable guy in the world. i mean, i could eat apples off his head, he's only that big. and at my height, that's saying something. i say this white house diaries, what's going on? here's the thing, here's the thing. i see that obama is dealing with a lot of the same issues that we dealt with in the '70s that were never solved, and they're on his desk now, so i said, you know, i've got diary entries on a lot of this stuff so i'm just going to get the diary out. that's the diary, that's his book. huh, really? so he's signing away, and i'm cribbing fast. got to come up with something. so i alight on the diary entry that he pens in there after his last debate with reagan. okay, now it's very emblematic. it's illuminating. and carter writes in there, you know, basically, we hit our policy points, and we talked about what we'd tone for our constituents, and we're going to get 'em to the polls, and so i think i won. reagan did his optimism thing, but i think we won this thing. a month later there's another diary entry which, basically, says disregard previous entry. [laughter] and i asked carter about this. i'm like, that's a nice little pairing. oh, yeah, you hit a good, a duo of entries there, no doubt. and i said, what's going on there? well, you know what it is, you know, it's confidence. i didn't understand how it worked really. and i've thought about that for 30 years. reagan got that. and i didn't. but, you know, i thought this obama guy, i thought he understood that. i thought he understood how confidence works, how it's a coin of the realm. i'm not so sure now. so in the oval office i wreak out this story -- break out this story to obama. he's like, hmm, really? [laughter] now, of course, comparing one's self to carter is for no good reason, you know, a dangerous thing to do for a president. you know, carter is the thing you don't want to be. and i think that's wrong, but it's just the way it is. but obama talks about carter because i bring it up. i said, you know, carter and clinton and i suffer from what i call the policy wonks' disease. he calls it a tz. you know, sort of like, you know, we feel like we're going to win like in high school, in high school debaters points. you know? and he says, i'm getting over that. not so many words, i'm not quoting him exactly, but that's basically what he says. you know, i don't want to be legislator in chief, you know, i've got a technocratic inclination i'm working on. you know, the idea very much like kenty with his best and brightest which hall very stamm gets into all this. bring the smartest people in the room with those high i qs close the door and you're going to come up with some beautiful, glorious, creative solution, and it ain't gonna happen. doesn't happen. obama has spent two-plus years locked in the policy room, and he says it ain't enough. and then he addresses a president who's kind of floating nearby right near the ceiling, reagan. and let me say, read what he says, and then we'll be done, and we'll talk to each other. he, reagan, obama says, was very comfortable in playing the role of president. and i think part of that was really his actor's background. republicans hate this sort of thing, but that's what he said. and he says it, and he betrays in his tone a kind of hint of envy like, god, that would be so easy to just be able to flip that switch. .. recognizing that if i was going to be a successful candidate, then the symbols and gestures mattered as much as what my ideas were. hmmm. and who could deny reagan's mastery, this is me talking of symbols and gestures? no one can know what it's like to be president until they are one. and then they have to decide how much of what they feel, sitting in that lonely cornerus room they ought to reveal. people deep down suspect like the life of a nation, like each those each of us are beyond our control and the best laid plans just as we learn in some moment of discovery, that those grownups who seemed so assured and certain were neither. as the nation wrestled through this period of maturation, obama considered how to reconcile his ear as hard truths with a working definition of confidence in a world that often merits anything but. the age-old fear after all is that we are, in fact, home alone. that there is no one in charge. the role of government is to make a convincing case to the contrary so everyone can get on with their lives and manage a good night's sleep. obama, a brilliant amateur, arrived to power's pinnacle believing he'd make his case with a show of demonstrably correct answer to complex problems, solutions, he'd confidently execute to launch what he called a new era of responsibility. it hadn't worked quite as he hoped. bruising, the confidence, quite real, that more than anything is what got him elected. now firmly along in a more dynamic i'll just do it myself model of leadership, he reached for a compus for the course ahead. going forward as president, obama said, straightening up in his irwhat, the symbols and gestures where people see coming out of this office are at least as important as the policies that we put forward. i think where the evolution has taken place barack obama said finally looking in the middle distance is understanding that leadership in this office is not a matter of you being confident and, of course, this is after 45-minute interview about how his confidence has been bruised. not about you being confident. leadership in this office is a matter of helping the american people feel confident. so thank you for listening and let's talk about your confidence in the q & a. thanks. [applause] >> okay, who first. how about you? yes. why don't you say your name? >> steven charles. >> why is geithner still there. he's slow there and everybody else is gone and he's still there. and you read in the paper that obama wants him to stay? what's? >> you know, it's a question i get asked a lot. their relationship is plumbed in the book. i do go through it. geithner is a very canny player, you know, he's got a very interesting manner. a bit of a passive aggressive thing people talk about. >> he laughs and then cuts your throat. so, you know, that's what it takes, look, you know, we're the world's most powerful nation. these are the men around the world's most powerful man. in the annual of history it takes quite a skill-set to survive up there. and geithner survives there. and he sizes up the situation, you know, he sees that his old pal larry summers who i think -- well, it's clear he's not happy with geithner as things progress. summers, remember, wanted to be bernanke. he wanted the fed chairmanship. geithner, i report in the book ran the selection process for weather or who might replace bernanke. summers couldn't be involved he's the leading candidate. part of his deal coming in to take a so-called staff job -- he'd once been treasury secretary after all meaning in the white house, yeah, i'll do this but when bernanke's term comes up in the summer of -- you know, it's going to be decided in the summer of next year, i'm your man. i think summers says obama said, yes, you will be and he feels a bit betrayed and summers ran the selection process and summers feels geithner was faint of his praise of summers in the fed job. there was a breach. meanwhile, geithner is watching this best and brightest high iq, larry summers debate society that obama is ever feeling more trapped in and geithner sets himself up as the default. he often doesn't say much in a lot of these meetings. he's holding his cards close but when obama is frustrated and often not sure what to do, he often defaults to a geithner plan for caution. usually, a plan for not doing a great deal, a plan for keeping the system in america the structure as it is. and ultimately, geithner ends up being the last man standing. their relationship -- it will be i'm sure in both men's memoirs is something of great interest in washington. geithner did want to leave. obama said, please stay. and it may have to do with the kind of relationships you do see with easy prosecute -- presidents. that loneliness that obama talks about. sometimes you need someone to come in the room and close the door and help, explain that to me again. why are we in this box. go over that part a third time. and i think tim did a lot of that and not in the kind of bumptious way that larry did. you see obama trying to get information, reports them going to summers. yeah. so he can challenge summers more effectively in the meetings. he doesn't want -- you know, summers is supposed to get everything. but he's saying to orszag at one point, just give that directly to me. is that okay, peter? will that get you into trouble? and orszag goes, no, yeah, i can do that for you. yeah, mr. president. well, you know, i don't want you to get into trouble, okay? and orszag is like, you're the president. anything you want, yeah. but part of it was that obama was trying to muscle up to challenge summers and geithner but especially summers. geithner watches this and he ends up playing it beautifully. another question. how about you? it's revolving around the concept of leadership. >> yes >> your thesis is that obama's philosophy is that government -- the essence of government is the force that will allay a person's fears, but isn't obama the government? isn't obama the icon of government? i mean, the night before manassas he was the moses that would part the sea of government and i think that's the expectation that has never been met. >> yeah. >> he just seceded all that power to harry reid, to the congress, and that he's perceived consistently as being overly passive to consensus-seeking where, in fact, leadership is -- >> that's a great point. he is the man. i am france. he's the guy at that moment. and, again, it's a kind of political capital. you know, i had lunch today with rob kuttner who's a guy up here and kuttner says this is the only opportunity in 80 years. this is more than a generational opportunity to alter the basic imbalances or structures in american life. and what's interesting is that i think obama -- and he talks about i want to be a more dynamic leader at the end of the book, but what he doesn't take into account, which i think is right to your point is you're not going to come up with a clear brilliant, pristine integrated system and unveil it especially to the republicans, you know, that's brilliant and i'll follow you. look, it's like the upton sinclair thing. i'm not going to get it right, but when someone's salary is based on opposing you they are not going to oppose you. it's just the way it is. obama still think he's so persuasive and these solutions will be so beautiful that they have to give well, they don't. and what is forsaken and what's not given credit is the dimitism of leadership. and axlerod is like get out there and say this is what you want to do and fight and don't flinch. and what you'll see is the tumblers will click and the plates under the surface will start to shift and move and that dynamic process is one that creates the opportunities of leadership. obama wasn't doing that. and ultimately i think he's frustrated because of it. there are moments that's fascinating where he knows his best thing is he says i can give an amazing speech. and he knows that. that's my skill. but time and again what he finds like after that great speech in 2009, which is just breathtaking. i've seen it, watched it read it ten days, it's so much along the ways of the world but i couldn't sum it up like obama did. it's stunning. he said what we need is a policy that harnesses these speeches. we didn't have one. you know, the streets of iran start -- and tehran start to roil. remember the wars of the president can cause the capital of one of our arch enemies to become a place of disruption. just the words. but he says we had no policy. we need policies to harness my words. again, he sees it but he can't manage it. and the health care speech -- just one more thing on this because it's fascinating. is that obama at the end of the summer when he doesn't engage on health care, he steps up this is my number 1 priority and then he vanishes, nothing happens where tom daschle who is mr. health care and obama's right hand and he doesn't get the big job but he is still an advisor. he says i can't get a call in for two months. it's a black hole in there. he's losing in march and april and into may the most important two months in 15 years on health care, after he steps up saying this is my priority with all of his power, obama, nothing happens. and he forfeits it. he gives to max baucus in the senate, the tea party kicks up in the summer. i need to give a speech, 2009, biggest speech of his first year and iran says you only get one end and obama says no, i'm going to do it. again he doesn't make a lot of these but this is one he makes. he calls in the brilliant speechwriter, you know, the guy is all of 14 or 15 years old. it's unbelievable. how did that happen. [laughter] >> but he's brilliant and they got a bond. they got this bond, you know, because favreau in a way is kind of the fusion of the youth, you know, sort of movement that followed obama and favreau is a which i had and they're rif f-ing, and kennedy isn't it right and what's interesting at this point is there's a little debate going on alongside obama 'cause obama says, i want a policy out there to harness the speech. meaning, we have a fully architected health care policy. they had it on the shelf, you know, they had basically said, no, we're not going to be too specific on it. we'll get arrow shot at it. but obama says i want the full plan released contemporaneously with the speech in front of the joint session. i've made my decision. and then he goes back to writing the speech then he goes on and writing the speech and emanuel says he's wrong. we're releasing a two-point bullet point sheet. that's it. orszag, fights for it. no, release the whole plan. no, two page bullet points. right up to the speech there's a meeting where they're debating. obama arrives in the meeting and he clearly thinks they're releasing the whole plan. i mean, the speech is just right before this page and orszag goes, he's the president. he ought to know what's going on. but, mr. president, it's a two-page -- >> emanuel -- orszag clams up. astonishing. he knows what leadership looks like, i think. he's the smartest guy you'll ever meet but he can't seem to manage it. now, i'll just say this. is that he says he gets it now. you know, voters and the rest will only tell day-to-day, week to week. another question, two more questions and then we're done. how about you over here? >> you know, obama wrote two books, one is his autobiography which is fantastic, a beautiful piece of work and the other is the audacity of hope. i challenge anyone to go through that book and find out what obama believes. >> yeah, you bet. >> i think that the major problem is, look what happened to the debt ceiling. i mean, that's where obama really, really went down into the depths. >> yeah. >> because in that debt ceiling he had the 14th amendment. he could have crushed the republicans. and then threat go into the courts and fight it out, but he didn't. >> okay. well, this was a broad question about obama having written two books and our friend here says, you read both of them and you're not really sure what he believes, in terms of essential interests but in terms of the real goods, not there. and also, you know, this idea that in the moment, in the clinch, he does not know his mind, where he digs in where it's a yes, but of yes this and a little of that and put it together and add water and mix, no. you know, he's -- he's got a on conviction. i've heard that, you know, i think there's something to that. you know, i think that the idea of balancing competing interests which he is very good at -- it's like calculus. it's nourishing to him on his international heft, you know, the bottom line the way power and interests are arranged in just country when some interests are more gravitas and powerful to others essentially gets you the same dull equations that has led to 30 years of drift in the country rather than an actual course correction. okay. one more question. how about you in the back, yeah. let er rip. >> first of all, i might have been nice to get a call from mr. wolf, but i didn't need a call from him to know something was happening because i found myself being evicted from my apartment here in cambridge through the winter and early spring of 2007 as a result of a mortgage foreclosure that sort of, you know, foretold what was coming in a not very happy way. >> right. >> but interesting way. i liken the situation to the following way and you mentioned fdr a couple times in your talk. we needed an fdr and we got obama. and if you try to think about the differences between fdr and obama, one of them that people talk about -- and it's come up a little bit tonight would talk about leadership, is fdr was at harvard. he applied to the most exclusive club interestingly just a couple blocks down this street. he was rejected. his family had been members. he learned -- he came from a class and understood that he didn't need to be afraid of challenging that same class. >> right. >> obama might be understood to a degree as somebody who really wants to be accepted by that class. now, that may be -- that may help to explain some of this, and i'd be interested in your view of this. >> right. >> the difference of the political view of these two individuals but there's a larger explanation which individual character really isn't sufficient to explain which is the political movement that would -- >> yeah. >> that roosevelt connected with but that obama doesn't seem committed to in any way. >> well, look, you give voice to what a lot of people feel. and also you give voice to the pain that people are feeling around the country. you know, the unemployment rate -- that's not -- it's 16, 17%, you know, the people are still suffering under enormous loads of debt. income is dropping dramatically. i think 6.2% we find out a week ago, since 2009? some advantage, the top 1%, almost everybody else slipping. you know, and the cry for something to be done is one that i can't imagine he doesn't hear. the question is, will that be an agent of change? of him digging deeper maybe? you know, we all hope we grow. we evolve. we see things that maybe we couldn't see, you know, just yesterday or the week before. you know, that's the hope. and it's the hope that we feel in our own lives often. now, clearly, obama is one of those necessities is the mother of invention moments, no doubt about it. he sees the way the cards are falling and he sees the country is still just limping, i mean, you mentioned roosevelt so i'm going to finish by reading three paragraphs which i think goes right to your question and to the questions that a lot of people ask and i think are thinking. and then we'll be done. all the changes that occurred on roosevelt's watch, one of the most important was government's realization that its role might not simply to assure certain rights but to protect and promote a kind of desirable balance in the society, virtuous equilibrium. the reforms enacted under fdr were different that come before and shifted the basic balance of power between washington and new york. between public and private, worker and owner, saver and speculator. the walls built were not regulatory guidelines subject to the enforcement and diligence of bureaucrats but laws tightly drafted and immovable clear matters of legal and illegal just as the founders had done so carefully laying down the fabric of checks and balances within the government itself. the most off-quoted line in fdr's first inaugural we have nothing to fear but fear itself. it was followed by stern words. all but forgotten to history for the president's enemies in new york. you were talking about turning on his class on his people. face by the failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. stripped of the lore of profit by which to induce our people to follow our false leadership they have resorted to exhortations pleading tearfully for restored confidence. it might make a nice title for a book. (laughing.) >> they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers, which is what some of us have been called in the baby boom generation. they have no vision. and where there is no vision, the people perish and then a final paragraph, there are many ways to understand what vision here might mean. the inventors' insight that creates a new technology or medicine. the leader's foresight of his distant consequences, the pursued dent's man reserve about the extent to which complexity can be mastered and the future known. people's gut-level sense that something better lies down the path of hard work and fair play. the confidence of the nation rests on trust. and can endure for years after this trust has been broken, but it cannot endure indefinitely if the foundation of trust is not at some point earned. confidence is the immaterial residue of material actions. justly enforced laws, sound investments, solidly built structures, the well-considered decisions of experts and professionals. confidence is the public face of competence. separating the two, gaining the trust without earning it is the age-old work of confidence men. thank you. [applause] >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> well, it's a centennial of the civil war and the library of conference is part of the action. this is an illustrated timeline of the civil war and margaret wagner is the author or the editor. >> i'm the author of the book. >> do you work for the library full-time? >> i do. i'm an editor and writer of the library of congress. >> are we going to find artifacts? >> you will find 360 library of congress artifacts, a number of them never have seen the light of day before. we have never published them before. and you'll find a very meaty annotated timeline covering many of the aspects of the war which is one reason we did this timeline. many civil war books cover the battles or the politics or one aspect. and with a timeline approach we're able to cover all sorts of events including those. >> margaret wagner with the pictures in the book, what are some of the things that we'll see perhaps have not been seen before? >> oh, you will see some manuscripts that we have not published before. you'll see -- we have a new collection of civil war photographs that were just donated to the library, this past year and some of those are in the book. you'll see this very sort of charming like a moving picture depiction of the civil war. you'll find drawings by civil war special artists and maps and illustrated envelopes with a lot of the, you know, civil war fervor, political messages and patriotic messages. you'll find sort of the people and the voices. there are a lot of quotes laced in the book and that's one of the reasons that i love working at the library and on projects like this because you get to know so many of the people and the people in the civil war era were very eloquent and very opinionated. and i've come to like many of them. >> is this divided between north and south? >> it laces amongst north and south. and the border states and it also brings in the international aspect for all over the world and especially in europe, people were watching what happened in the united states. would the union survive? would government of by and for the people survive? this was a huge test that was important to other people besides us. >> writing a book for the library of congress, how is that a different experience perhaps than just being an independent author? >> well, you have a great responsibility, as all authors do, but to represent the library's collections and the library's standards and also it's a great privilege because you get to tiptoe through the collections and have the assistance of curators and specialists at the library. so i learn a great deal with every single project i work on there. >> now, do you get the proceeds as the author of this book? >> no, the library gets the proceeds. we receive royalties and that goes back into a revolving fund so that we are able to publish other books. the library, as you know, is the largest library in the world. it has more than 147 million items. about 20 million are online but that leaves 127 million that are not. so our mission is to introduce people to materials that they might not find online. and in this book at the end of the book, there is an appendix that introduces people to the civil war collections in the library and gives them information about them and web addresses so this is our mission to let people know what we have. >> is this suitable for high school students for middle-aged schools. >> absolutely. in fact, i just had some students stop pi here and they were telling me the civil war in social science and we had a nice chat about it. so it's perfect for students as well as for civil war aficionados. >> margaret wagner is the author of this snilike that of congress book, the illustrated timeline of the civil war. >> recently the

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