Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Presidency 20150221 : comparemela

23 million jobs created in millions moved out of poverty and the narrowing of the income inequality cap and the first legit surpluses in generations. How did it happen . How did the 1993 legit to that reduce the deficit get done . For the 1997 budget deal that balanced the budget unsecured historic surpluses westmark how to the earned income tax credit and the Childs Program that helps the poor and the working class families and pulled will millions into the middle class get done . Jean spurling and erskine roles are the Perfect People to answer these questions. Erskine bowles is to my left and joined the Clinton Administration in 1993 as the administrator of the Small Business administration and then moved to the white house as deputy chief of staff in 1994 and then chief of staff at the start of the Clinton Administration in 1997 until october, 1998. To keep them honest, and to add context to their consequential work is the associate professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy where he teaches about the residency, congress, campaigns and elections. Professor doherty worked with the Miller Center to home transcript to get a deeper insight into the environment and discussion that led to the incredible economic record under president clinton. To get things started, we will spend five minutes of peace expiring their roles in the administration and a professor doherty will give us his commentary then we will have a discussion up hair and while we are having our discussion, i encourage you and implore you to send us your questions on note cards that will be passed around. This way you can give me questions i can pepper the panel with during their question and answer later on. To start mr. Boles as you talk about your role in the administration and also for eugene, talk about how you first met president clinton as other panelists did in the Previous Panel and worked that into your discussion of your role in the administration. Thats pretty boring. Mr. Clinton had more magnetism than any politician i have ever met. From time to time, he would call me and ask me to meet with him. One of those days happened to be when my oldest son, sam had a low blood sugar seizure from his diabetes. Any of you who have seen that come it rips your heart out. After my wife and i got him stable and he was ok, i went and met the governor. The governor looked at me and said you look kind of lou today. I said i am. He said tell me why. I told him about sam having this load load sugar seizure. Low blood sugar seizure. I said i was president of the juvenile Diabetes Research foundation. The scientists have told me that the best hope for a cure for my son and all the other people who have this disease is Tissue Research. I said it just passed in the senate. I said george bush just vetoed it. I swear, expected him to respond because here is a guy whos supposed to be so empathetic. Not a word. Nothing, like i was talking to the windshield wiper. A couple of weeks later, he made his Major Health Care speech at merck. In that speech, he said i have a friend of mine who is a conservative businessman in North Carolina who has a son he loves more than life who has diabetes. He has convinced me that we should take the politics out of Scientific Research and if im elected president , i will let the ban on fetal Tissue Research. Diabetes, parkinsons, als communities went crazy and everybody thought it was great and everyone figured out it must be me. He never said a word to me. After he was elected and as a North Carolina democrat i never voted for anyone who actually won anything. [laughter] after he was elected he asked me to come up to washington. He was having a group of Business People into the white house. He asked if i would like to come and i said it would be great to go to the white house. I went up there in the Business People went through and afterwards, he said come down to the oval office. We went down to the oval office and he took a pen out and sign something. He came over to me and handed me the pen. He said, erskine, this is the pen i used to sign the executive order lifting the ban on needle Tissue Research pretty set i want you to take this pen home to your son sam and say he has hope, hope for a cure. [applause] i still get chills. I thought to myself, gosh, what character, what strength. I told my wife i want to work for this guy and i will take any job he will give me and i called them up and set i will take any job you will give me and sure enough, he sent me to the sba. [laughter] gene . I had been working for someone who is considered more likely to be president in that cycle which was mario cuomo who decided not to run. I was as prepared for the president ial campaign of 1992 as anyone could be and i thought i would be sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, i had wrens like George Stephanopoulos and bob wright and others who convinced the governor to hire me. I came down here and normally you would think you would come down and settle in a little. I came in and pretty much the first day i was there, the unemployment number had come out. They said we just a the president a day off. We gave the governor a day off so unless you are 100 sure this is my first hour unless youre 100 sure of the comments he will make in the evening news, were not commenting. I could not believe it. I said i am pretty much 100 sure this is a bad number. We have to get out there. They bring me there and hes got the day off and they are pulling him out and dressing him up so he can make a statement. He was wondering whos ideal as was. [laughter] at that point, George Stephanopoulos said we should introduce you to your new Economic Policy director, gene sperling. The interesting thing was i am staying now in the marriott excelsior. I walked in and the president and george and then set we want an economic plan now. I was told not to even get an apartment or anything. I just lived at the excelsior for a month and we went into just this hyper rapid desire to put together which ended up putting people first. That was an amazing introduction to bill clinton. Anybody who works for a president knows you get a little bit of a honeymoon and the new guy is a little smart. We were stuck we had promised to balance the budget. I am coming in and i am almost like the auditor looking through the books. I kind of said to him, you cannot balance the budget area you cannot cut the deficit in half and you cannot do both the Child Tax Credit and the tax cut but you can give people a choice. They could have a payroll tax cut or a Child Tax Credit. This is the moment you expect the president or a political leader to be unhappy not telling them what they want. He looked and said that makes perfect sense for its credible its more believable. We went out there and we put out putting people first. For me, it was so amazing to see what i ended up seeing all that time which was the intensity and focus on i he is policies. On idea policies. He starts with policy and stars with whats best and the political antenna come in not to figure out what you are for about how you can figure out what you can explain and shape what you want to do. There are politics but they are in the shaping and the marketing and the selling as opposed to what you are actually four. That was an extraordinary introduction. I was in heaven. For those of us who are back, i have seen so many, heidi chapman, the Office Director it was a magical time for us. I dont know that anybody will ever get that type of experience. We were a band from little rock. We had no senior staff meetings. Everyone into the war room at 7 00 a. M. Can you imagine a campaign with 150 people crammed into the room . Feeling like youre in third place and going to first place and to see is a democrat that you are suddenly working for the guys doing every thing right youve got a candid date who is so smart and savvy and his team is working so well. And then the focus ands deed and the execution, the feeling of confidenceas we started bruce wanted me to repeat this and i will tell this story as we started to look like we were going to win, they started doing a lot of stories on George Stephanopoulos. They became like celebrities paris when they got a little bored of them, they started writing stories about roos. My team would say that sooner or later they have to write something about you. [laughter] i finally write the first profile on me. Its not about the stories about george bruce about how cute they are and how they are wrote scholars. He gets in at 6 00 a. M. He leaves at 2 00 a. M. , he works all the time, hes just all work come and nothing else, no, smith, nothing. [laughter] people said that is the first story for the second story they are going around pulling people on how much coffee i drink. [laughter] what people estimate my sleep pattern is. A guy in our staff named paul put both stories on my desk and then put a sign over that said sperling, he is not particularly good but he is here a lot. [laughter] that became bruce and my anthem or eight years. For eight years. We were both deputy economic advisers. He was a domestic advisor. One thing i will say in this goes to a question that was asked to how we startedi ought the thing that he came in with such smarts about is the that process mattered. Process was not boring. It was about whether your team actually trusted each other and Work Together. He would say to us that aced on his experience, as governor, he had seen all policies happen or not happen but whether two or three different cabinet members got along. When he saw the bush Team Fighting with each other, he actually felt that for bush. He thought it was so disloyal. He constructed this i you of the National Economic council, that there would be an honest broker is to represent the best of the council and you have this kind of fairness of process and this belief that everybody, once youre at the table, had an equal opinion. Your job was to organize that and he would say to you all the time there was note tolerance for Henry Kissinger in a role that sandy or bruce r i had. You were there to give your opinion and you were there fundamentally to make sure there was a fair process. I think that served us so well. It was the kind of constant narrowing the choices, the back end forth in the open presentation in front of him with everything being weighed and that insight he had. If you do not have that from the top, it does not work. They cabinet member thanks they can influence the president i just pulling them aside at a state than ever getting on air force one, they will do that. If they think he will not tolerate that and that you have to go through the process and everybody has to be at the table equally, thats what the process people did. The fact that he created that National Economic council and it survived now through two different president s and i think it will survive always is very important. I think the ethic of creating trust at the table, trust in process, trust that nobody is getting an advantage or whispering in his ear is incredibly important. I wish of the age of artie three i would have thought that. I lived it and id so what difference it made i wish at the age of 303i would have thought that. It is not as exciting as the substantive debates between parties. Set the table for us, professor doherty. You have gone through all of these transcripts of their colleagues through the Miller Center which will be released later this afternoon. What did you learn . I have only met president clinton once. It was a fleeting handshake after his presidency. What i have to offer is months and months spent poring over dozens of oral histories and reading over 1000 pages to dive into the treasure trove of memories accumulated. I would like to thank the Miller Center and the library for jointly putting together the oral history project and hosting us here today. [applause] i would like to set the stage for the discussion of Economic Policy making in the Clinton Administration Political Science is in terms of commitment and constrained. What were the president s priorities in the economic and political realities that limited and shaped his abilities to accomplish this . When you think about president clintons economic commitment, it goes back to a speech made in the fall of 1991 at georgetown university. Mickey kantor said if you look back at the speeches in georgetown that all can i believe you will agree that in the history of modern politics, he is more consistent with what he laid out that almost anyone. Made a difference in the campaign. Everyone who came and understand what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. What did he want to do . We will get into that in a few minutes. Governor clinton promised released what he termed the forgotten middle class. It was things like education job training and more. He promised to cut the deficit in half in four years. We know that was gene sperlings idea which is great. When you think about constraint the economic constraint that clinton faced was a duty. January 6, 1993, two weeks before he is inaugurated as the 42nd president , the outgoing budget director for president bush releases new deficit projections that are starkly different from those he had released the previous summer. The projected abhisit for the next fiscal year the projected deficit would be 20 billion higher. It was a fiveyear estimate in the projection for fiscal year 1997 was 68 billion dollars higher than forecast. When youre a president of candidate promises to cut the deficit in half and the deficit is now larger, that changes things. President clinton has said he brought Risk Protection back to budgeting and the arithmetic of budgeting meant he could not do everything he promised. It was not possible. Alice rivlin said some aides said wait a mac, weve got to deliver on these promises we made in the campaign. If youre doing all the deficit reduction come you cannot do that. That was the fight. Leon panetta who was budget director recounted what he said to Robert Reisch after the election. He said if you want to fulfill the agenda, you have to walk through the deficit fire. That was not unappealing process. Alan blinder called it root canal politics. He said it was a question of whose axe you were going to gore. There were substantial economic restraints. Now lets turn to the political. Once the president had chosen the path he wanted to pursue, he had to work the congress. When president a clinton became president , he was blessed to have overwhelming democratic majority in both chambers of congress. It sounds like a golden opportunity for productive policymaking right . Not exactly. Democrats were not in the habit of taking the lead from it resident of their own party. They had spent the past 12 years working with republican president s, reagan and bush, in 20 of the past 24 years. When you look at the members of congress on the democratic side, 2 3 of House Democrats and one half of seven Senate Democrats had never served with a democratic resident. There were not in the habit of looking down pennsylvania avenue and looking to the president for direction on what they wanted to do. Democrats had held the house for 38 years. Republicans had been born and died without seeing their Party Control the speakership in the house of representatives. It was 32 of the last 38 years and that senate. Alan winder called it an unruly majority. Tom daschle from south dakota said when it came to the residence at gender, he said congress is likely to listen but not necessarily comply. That was an understatement. That was just the democrats. Turning to the republicans, were they eager to cooperate . They were not. They did not look at resident clintons 370 votes he won in the electoral college. They did not look at the fact that he had beaten a sitting resident by over 5 in the popular vote. They looked at the threeway race with george bush and ross perot. They said almost 57 of the people voted not bill clinton. They said they would represent those voters and stand for a different economic agenda. The president would focus on deficit reduction which would involve tax increases per the 1990 to deal at made the Republican Party more antitax. The deputy treasury secretary summed it up like saying most republicans take the view they would rather die than vote for a tax increase. I think he mightve meant that literally. The stage was set for contentious Economic Policymaking. Incredible presentation, thank you very much. Erskine and jean, can you react to what the professor just laid out . Does that jive with your recollections . Did you have fun with that unruly majority . I will always remember january 6 because i had the pleasure of telling Vice President and president elect that our numbers had changed her medically. Had changed dramatically. You have to understand what this was like. We were in an and the president elect wanted to announce a full budget in february. This is not what a president normally does. He wanted to announce the entire budget, and what president clinton ended up doing in these famous roosevelt room meetings was expediting the process by literally