Had nothing that he enjoyed more than exploring the earned income tax credit. His pechant for policy included the first law that he signed as president , the family medical leave act, as well as the childrens initiative, the other laws that we will discuss, and if you wonder the impact of these laws, i was speaking on a radio show and one of the producers was not there because her family is going through a rough patch, and she is able to do that without imperiling her job, and she would thank president clinton for that if she could be here today. Alexis herman deserves applause for being here because her flight was canceled, so she jumped in a car and got here at about midnight. [laughter] [applause] she has promised not to take a nap until the panel is over. [laughter] Alexis Herman helped organize the 1992 Democratic Convention and with bill clinton won that she became the Deputy Director of the Transitional Office in the white house. She handled the White House Office of public liaison in the clintons second term. Bruce reed was the chief advisor, and the director of the domestic policy council, and he has been the chief of staff for Vice President biden and left recently to focus more on k12 education, so we welcome him. Finally, we have Andrew Rudalevige of bowdoin college, thanks for being with us. We are going to take some of your comments. As i said before, you look like a reasonably smart group, i dont want to go to far, so all of you have these cards, so if you want to ask a question write it out in a legible fashion and we will get to it later in our program. I want to ask you, this is a question that was asked in another panel, tell us about the first time you met bill clinton and what you thought. Alexis, you can start. The first time i met bill clinton was right here in little rock arkansas in 1978 and he had just been elected governor. He decided to open the doors of the Governors Mansion for the 20th anniversary of the little rock nine. I came down with the delegation from the Carter Administration with ernest green, who was the first graduate, a senior of the little rock contingency, and a few of us came from the Labor Department to celebrate with bill clinton at the Governors Mansion. It was so special. That night, he and first lady hillary invited us back to the mansion for beer and barbecue. [laughter] i will never forget it. That was the first time that i heard him tell many of his wonderful stories about lots of things, but especially, at that time, why he was so glad to be governor, and how he had the opportunity to bring the little rock nine back. What adjectives would you use . He was excited. You could see that he wanted to do things. My grandmother always looked at us and said that us kids were always fixing and doing, and when i looked at bill clinton, i not, this is somebody who wants to get a lot of things done, even as governor. He was just so smart, and so clear, and so proud, that he could be a part of history by inviting the little rock nine back to little rock for the first time, and for the first time, into the front doors of the Governors Mansion. Bruce, when was the first time to you met bill clinton . I met him first in 1990, so high so i had already signed up to work for him before i met him. And the speech he gave in new orleans at that convention was one of the best speeches that i had heard up to let point up until that point. It was the first time i is heard a democrat talk about values as well as programs, and everybody in the audience knew that he was going to be president someday. The first time that i worked with him was a few weeks later. We were working on a manifesto on how to turn the country around, and we had written 10 different policy planks, and he called up and dictated an entire new one on education that was more detailed and better, and it was like that all the time. My impression was that, first off, hearing him, as a speechwriter, hearing him, you think, i want to write speeches for this guy, but he does not need any help at all. [laughter] and a mystic policy, as you said, was his first love. You would just hand him something and it you could take credit for the great things he thought of as a result. Have you met the clinton . Bill clinton . I saw bill clinton from a balcony in 1992, but no i have not met him. [laughter] we are going to talk about domestic policy in the Clinton Administration, and the legacy so set the stage for us, the Political Landscape that he faced in 1992. Sure, thanks susan, and i want to give my thanks to the eller center for the opportunity to speak, and for the opportunity to learn. Let me mention a few things, then. I want to remind rather than to instruct, and i want to remind us that the Miller Center is intruding, but first and most basic is the broad placement that the Clinton Administration has, and what political scientists often call political time. A yale scholar writes about the cyclic shifts in parties and governing coalitions and leadership, and the cycle either enable or in some cases restrain president s who are elected, he even if they are against the prevailing grain of the party order. Then we want to talk about president s preemption, and we think of dwight eisenhower, who was elected despite the continuing dominance of the new deal coalition. Bill clinton seems like a pretty good example of this, he comes into office in opposition to the quite successful effort of president reagan to shift the National Policy to the right. At the same time, president ial preemption continues with those who are not in tuned with their party. President clinton was closer to the century than to the congress. He entered office at a. When the prevailing rhetoric was not that different than today office at a period when the prevailing rhetoric was not that different than today. There was talk that it was not redo be a better roses for governor clinton, and that was right. It was the most partisan to date since 1934. Senator alan simpson says there are guys in our caucus who are always out to screw bill, and it became absolutely tedious, they would say, it is our duty to screw him. An oral histories provide something of a thesaurus for more fragmentation, a talk about fiefdoms, orbitz, factions and tribes, and the white house versus the white house, and over in congress, you have 12 years of pentup democratic demands were spending and for different kinds of policy, and 40 years of treating republicans with some disdain as a supposedly permanent minority, so the polarization goes both ways. There is a House Committee that noted during that. That they would enact the communist manifesto if only they had jurisdiction. [laughter] by contrast, the president really reflected more of the bipartisan consensus that happens horizontally between the governors. This reflected the governors wing of the Democratic Party. And that mattered, because it meant that some of the domestic policies, and again, to paraphrase one of the oral histories, could be very good macro politics but not good for micropolitics. They would attack sacred cows or at least sacred interests. Given that members believe that money salt problems in the duress in the domestic arena, we also talk to other decisions, there was a lot of pain at the table. Despite these divisions, or partly because of them, the Clinton Administration had a very large domestic agenda. One study was mine so it must be right. It counts more than 500 president ial messages to congress across eight years, comprising close to 1100 specific policy proposals, not all of them domestic policy, but the majority. This does not include the executive actions that developed partly in response to the recalcitrance of congress in 1984 to move on that agenda. To remind people, this is immense to move that proposal forward, and it includes poverty, education environmental laws, civil rights, reinventing government and so on. There was such a rush of ideas that one observed that if you put people first, you will see the clinton put people first because he could not decide which policy to put first. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit. And the third is the sheer breadth of that list suggest that we have an Impossible Task as a panel. Domestic policy is hard to define and get a grip on, and the earned income tax credit as you mentioned is tax policy, but it is hard to deny that it is not social policy as well, it is antipoverty policy. I think also in the Clinton White house, this was practice there was a standard model of white house staff work, and i think it is safe to say by the oral histories that the Clinton White house was not standard. I will be looking forward to hearing more from the panelists about that, and the way the domestic policy really wanders into economic policy, as you mentioned and the last panel these are hard to separate out from the large independent task force forces, how policymaking involved, i looking forward to hearing some great conversations. These oral histories, as you may know, some of these are coming out today at 4 30, and that is why these events are held today, so it is way to be a treasure trove for historians and people. Let me tell you how i met bill clinton. It was in 1990 and i was working for newsweek. Dan quayle very much wanted coming he had a rough time in his early days as a Vice President , and he was trying to make his reputation extremely cautiously, and we landed in little rock, and there was a governor who met him and he could not be a bigger force. It was quite a contrast between the two of them. Here we have two people who were at the center of domestic policymaking in the Clinton Administration, so i wonder if you could tell me about the many pieces of legislation and executive orders that president clinton put in place during his tenure. Tell me about one of them that you think has exceeded your expectations, and has been a success even beyond what you wouldve hoped for at the time . I want a lexus to go first. While susan, i think there are so many. Wow, susan, i think there are so many. I think the family medical leave act was really the best, it has laid the cornerstone for the administration, but when you think about the millions of families that have been helped and the lack of partisan attacks on it, the acceptance of it, and the way it has been expanded over the years to include veterans families, and to talk not just about children, but carried about parents, and the original legislation, but now we talk about what needs to be a parent and just to have children in your care, or aged relatives, so this is a bill, in my view, that has managed to eve all with societal changes. Without a lot of partisan rancor. Just last year i had the opportunity to go back to the department of labor with the president to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the family and medical leave act. Adjusted hear the stories of how it still endures, that was one story that you told at the beginning, but there are just millions and millions and millions of stories like that, and i think as we look today at family policy and what we have to do, we have to continue to strengthen it, and it wish we could embrace the spirit of what happened that day when the president signed the first bill in february, at the beginning of his presidency. I think there is a generation of americans who could not imagine that your job should be imperiled because you need time off to take a basic child. Bruce, thinking take care of a sick child. Bruce, thinking about this, what do you think is the builder had the most impact . It is striking that the whole thing work. You come up with ideas, and you say, that sounds pretty good but in part, it is easy to forget just how beatendown the political system was, and the American People were after the 70s and the 80s when so much had gone wrong and there had been so many false starts on policies, the middle class had huge problems and no faith at all that the government could do anything to solve them. And i would say the biggest outside surprises would probably be on the social side. We know that putting more people on the police on the street was great, on welfare we knew it was a good idea to move people from welfare to work, we did not anticipate that all of these things together would reduce Child Poverty by one third, and then there were some ideas that just came out of a think tank or an all nighter that became National Policy. Charter schools, when bill clinton first started talking about that in the 1992 campaign, there was one that opened in 1992, and by the time he left office, there were 2000 others i think more than 6000, and many of them are spectacular. The city of new orleans has turned around its School System all on charter schools. Did you get the impression in the Clinton Administration that there were times when you announced something in the morning, that you had not the final touches on until minutes before you came out to another is that true . That was always the case. [laughter] his first state of the union his first economic message to congress, we woke up the morning of the speech and realize, this is not any good at all. So we sat around the table in the roosevelt room and redrafted the thing from start to finish and then we went with him to the theater to practice. He would rewrite speeches from the practice room. That speech, george and i were retyping it as we got into the limo, with 15 minutes to go, and then he went to deliver the speech, and there were 3000 words in the speech he delivered that had not been in the written text. [laughter] Gene Sperling is here, and there is some story, some domestic initiative, a smaller one, that i was getting a day early for usa today, so i was talking to gene, and i was trying to get a detail, how much the grant would be, or some specific thing of a policy, and he would not tell me. And i kept saying, i cant write the number about this the story about this number, and he said, we dont know what the number will be. [laughter] if you have any doubts about it, we are admitting that now. When you think about the domestic record of the Clinton Administration, we are talking about domestic policy initiatives, what ds think will loom very large . I guess i would say an approach rather than an issue, i think the approach was more consistent than people give credit at the time, and certainly some of my colleagues in academia with think that now, in regards to the notion, i wanted to talk broadly about the idea of reinventing the government, right . Not just in the National Performance review sense, but i think it is pretty clear that you cant change things without engaging government, it is not enough to attack it. I think dealing with the development of issues and Bureaucratic Reform and Service Reform and the like, that can only go in conjunction with people you are trying to perform with. I think if you ask how do you change civil Service Reform act or how you think about government and its interaction with markets and private actors, leveraging private investment, it is not just about cash, it is about responsibility, because this is one of the things that is reflected in the oral histories. There is a speech quoted by a couple of people back in 1991, and i think it was when present clinton said government has the opportunity to provide has the duty to provide opportunity and the people have the duty to take that. You do see a relatively consistent focus on that balance to i think education, actually is an interesting area where education reform is made safe with the Democratic Party during this era, and i think there were a number of issues, crime, welfare, and education makes the case. Can i comment on that . Because i think you said an important work, the approach. I do guerrilla thought it was all like this, but there was a lot of engagement, and i think because the president really wanted i do really think it was all like this, but there was a lot of engagement, and i think because the president really wanted to make change. I cant believe we did not talk about the middle east. In the middle of everything that sandy and the National Security council was doing, i know we want to give tuition american give Jewish Americans and arab americans talking at the same time about solutions in the middle east, and this had never happened before, so here we were in the Old Executive Office building trying to do this at the last minute, to bring everybody in to get a perspective, that the president really did engage the American People on all of his policy initiatives, and sometimes, we were the better for it, because he listened, he really listen to, and i think it contributed so much to his own thinking as we evolved and bruce would stay up half the night trying to capture it all. So you talk of a things turning up better than you thought they were, so lets talk about the other side of law an executive order that just did not deliver the way the you had hoped, just did not work out did not and of the way youd hope. It is white you go first on this one . Bruce, why dont you go first on this one . We worked long and hard and we were led by the hud secretary andrew cuomo and got help from others to negotiate an agreement with the gun manufacturers to do on their own but we were unable to get done through congress and it was supposed to be a coalition of