Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Richard Wolffe: Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House

Tonight on behalf of Harvard bookstore I'm pleased to welcome Richard Wolf here to discuss revival the struggle for survival inside the Obama White House revival as a follow up to Richard Wolffe campaign biography Renegade The Making of a president which NPR's Michele Norris praised a clear eyed up close look at the campaign Renegade is the one Obama book that should not be missed. Well Mr. Wolf has brought us another. Another Obama portrait that shouldn't be messed with unrivaled access to the president. Richard Wolffe tells an epic political tale that follows Obama and his inner circle from the crisis of defeat to historic success. This is the inside story of a defining period of the young Obama White House. Richard Wolffe is an award winning journalist and political analyst for MSNBC. Appearing frequently on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and Hardball with Chris Matthews. He covered the entirety of Barack Obama's presidential campaign for Newsweek magazine and before Newsweek Wolf was a senior journalist at The Financial Times serving as its deputy bureau chief and U.S. diplomatic correspondent. We are very pleased to bring him to Harvard bookstore

tonight. Please join me in welcoming Richard Wolf. Thank you thank you very much. So thank you all for coming. It's cold outside. I find it cold that I tweeted. You know the pilot said it was a nice day in Boston and it was 18 degrees and that's has pretty cold to me. And someone from Boston obviously said well it's a nice day for us. I think it's cold. Thank you. So thanks for coming out thank you especially to the book store for rescheduling this we was supposed to have this on Wednesday. My publisher said it would be fine it's Boston and that of my bouts. I said you know 18 inches is quite a lot. So thank you all for digging your way out and to the bookstore especially. This is a really special place. It's a real pleasure to be here. Not just because. I like speaking but because

all our independent bookstores are treasures for our communities and my local bookstore is Politics and Prose in D.C. I grew up with bookstores when my father would travel anywhere he would always come back from the local bookstore with some dusty tome that he picked up some knockdown price and I just think it's really important that we sustain this because because they are so important to our communities because they have a unique link to our communities to our customers and so please keep coming back. Whether to buy or to just to listen. It's really important. I'm going to set the water so. This is the sort of end of this rant of my book tour. So you're very special in a way because rather than just giving you my regular old speech about the book I've got all of these experiences that I've gathered over the last couple of months and I know Harvard is a special place generally and this book story is especially important but.

And by the way it's hard for me as someone who graduated from Oxford to say that Harvard especially. But I'm going to say it anyway. But when the book came out which was two weeks after the midterms my beloved reviewer in that Washington Post said and this was his lead Not that I cad in any way or remember it said that the word revival was best associated with the Republican Party because they had had this tremendous turnaround. They just won the midterms and basically what an idiot this author was for calling his book revival about Obama. The guy who blew it in two years that that was a little bit harsh and also a little bit premature. I'm glad to say I have printed up many t shirts saying I told you so. But let's just look at what happened

since then which was only two months ago two months two little months. Two weeks after the book came out Obama. Came up with this big tax deal with the Republican Party which essentially remade the entire two years of politics because suddenly having denied him any claim of bipartisanship Republicans suddenly were in bed with this guy who that said was a socialist a tyrannical dictator whatever the latest thing was and it amounted to a second stimulus. There the White House just today is beating the drum about the payroll tax cut which people are getting now right now which independent economists think is going to add substantially to growth this year. So there was the tax deal and then of course there was the START treaty and then there was don't ask don't tell there was a whole string of things that people said would never happen

never happened because the presidency was over and Obama was a failure. And they've blown it. And the only thing that was having a revival was the Republican Party. And then just this week we had the sad events and the memorial service that extraordinary memorial service in Tucson. And people said on the right and the left I watched Fox News that night. I don't know if he did maybe not. But they said well this is this is the guy we all thought he was in 2004 not so far away from here at the convention speech in 2008. Through the election. Why did this man go and how come he's back. Well the answer is that he was always there. And the reason I called the book revival The reason I chose was some other of us maybe said was a ridiculously time period. Why was that important. Why was a period a year ago. Just a couple of months.

Important to me. Important I think to the White House. Well let me scroll you back to what happened. You should remember it because it was a period that around the time of the first anniversary of the inauguration when the Democrats had just lost the Massachusetts Senate race. And you know what people said at that time they said the presidency was over. The guy blew it. Health care was dead. Nothing was ever going to happen again for that man and his politics were finished. The country had changed they rejected him. And that the one year mark he was a complete failure. And health care by the way was finished. And then two months later the end of the period that I and I sort of embedded myself in the White House two months later he signs health care into law historic achievement which to this day Republicans think is the worst thing ever and Democrats may be debating but it was still the

culmination of a Democratic dream for several generations. So I looked at that period and thought Wow for a start this is an incredible test. This is the first existential crisis this White House has had. So for that reason alone the period was really important to me and to them. But it also was important because it hark back to many things that I'd seen through the campaign which was that repeatedly there had been these huge swings of the pendulum from failure to success and back again with almost nothing in between. So it's been written off many times before in 2007. He had this big spike when he launched and then he flatlined and he couldn't take a punch and he couldn't deliver a punch and then and that was most of 2007. That was most of the first year of the campaign. And then he won in Iowa. Everyone says wow he's amazing that a few days later he lives in Hempstead New Hampshire and he's a flash in the pan and he's blown it. And then he actually loses again in Nevada. And then he

wins in South Carolina and it goes on and on and on the pendulum goes back and forth from these tremendous highs to these desperate lows. And don't think by the way just because they happen all the time that it's easy for the people in the middle of them because it's not. They find it incredibly challenging to get beaten up. And this is true of the president as well. And then the candidate they get beaten up in the press online that donors their supporters the members of Congress all say What are you doing. How could you screw it up so badly. And yet they keep coming back. He keeps coming back. So there was this process of revival The reason I chose the word revival was partly to capture that comeback coming back from the dead. But partly it was also to look at the question of why does this keep happening. I mean really there's something wrong if you have to keep going back and forth from failure to success party of course it's the exaggerations of the

pundits or members of Congress or the supporters and the panic and fear and hope and all those emotional rollercoaster aspects of it. But partly it's also the way they are and who they are. So I want to look at at what in the White House what in this core team of people around this president made this happen. And and I came up with a oh I sort of stumbled upon through my reporting a really sharp dividing line inside the White House inside the president's team about the campaign itself about what 2008 meant about the identity of the man in the Oval Office. And that's not a small thing. You know every institution divide itself up into two camps. There's that old joke about the Jewish guy on the desert island who's built you know this one I'm going to mess it up but you know they find this guy in the desert island and he's built two synagogues and you know they say why do you have two synagogues

and he says well there's the synagogue that I go to and there's the one I would be seen dead in. And it's true that every place has has at least two camps and in the Bush White House there were the hawks in the Dobbs or the you know the neo cons in the old style conservatives and then in this White House it's not an ideological dispute but it is a really sharp dividing line that has played out time and time again over who he is. What they're trying to do as one person said to me Well this is the Washington crowd in the non Washington crowd and this person has spent their life in Washington. So I was like I think it's a geography thing. But that kind of captures some of the spirit of of this dispute whether they were going to bring change or whether they want to play the old Washington game whether they were going to have transparency and reform and keep lobbyists out of the White House or whether they were going to have to bend the rules and the odd lobbyist here and there and

sign 9000 earmarks into law because that's the way Washington works. And the truth is that over the course of the first year the more compromises they made to the way Washington worked the more people thought well is that really who we thought he was. When you ask people about health care what don't you like about health care what you scrape away the socialist government takeover stuff. It comes down often to a couple of things like. Nebraska deal the Louisiana Purchase the sweetheart things were on the left. The deals with the industry the drug industry for instance those backroom deals that inside Washington politics are what made people think maybe he's not playing straight with us. So there's the shock division and that took me to the back to the theme of revival because it was a revival of the campaign spirit that the campaign team wanted to bring back. And verses the revivalist who. And it's a

slightly ironic thing I admit that's lost on some people but the revivalist is kind of exaggerated these are people who are true believers. I mean they there is a slight religious tone to it because they believe so strongly in the spirit of that campaign. And then on the other side I call them the survivalists the people who say you know it's desperate. We just got to get by we just got to win we've got to beat Republicans we just you know do whatever it takes. And there's a that's exaggerated too. I mean is the world really that desperate. When you have such big majorities do you have to do all these things. So those are the two sort of camps we can get into. We can get into that but those are the broad themes that I thought revival captured how you deal with a campaign and how you come back. And by the way how you get into these messes now for me as a writer. The revival theme was was really it was a blessing as well

because the book had its genesis in something and a question from actually Michele Norris who you just heard about Michelle's a friend of mine. And as you know if you listen to NPR she's great at asking questions and I gave her a manuscript of my campaign book of renegade. And I asked her what she thought of it. And she said Well it's really good but what I really want to know which is when my heart sank she said what I really want to know is is how is he changed. This was sort of about February of 2009 not what you want to hear when you've just finished a manuscript. What I really want to know in other words what you've missed and and screwed up on. And it was a really good question and it stuck with me. I told her yeah you know that's a great question thank you very much but I'm not going to rewrite my book now. My publisher won't be happy. So I did find that the question stuck with me want to sway my head because the idea of how you bring about change without changing yourself. What kind of changes you

want to go when you are trying to change Washington seem to me fascinating actually. You know one of the one of the frustrations any of us in the media any of us who've grown up in journalism have right now is is the kind of collapse of the journalism model. There's a business crisis. Newspapers are making money magazines a losing money. The network the broadcast news is is collapsing in a Woody and sign advertising. And so what's what's taking its place and you have a number of journalists who are making who are filling their days not making their living but filling their days tweeting and blogging. And and it keeps them very very busy. And that's no there's nothing bad I intend to say about Twitter or blogs or any of the

social networking things at all. But it's not fulfilling journalism. You can't really tell a story. You can grab attention and you can jump up and down. It's like those flashing lights in Vegas you can say look at me. And and that fulfills a purpose. But it doesn't tell a story. It doesn't tell you about character. It doesn't explore theme. And in the White House the stories are enormous. These characters are enormous the challenges are enormous and. One thing that appealed to me about the change theme about writing books was that I could explore something much bigger than in a book than I could through a tweet or on cable TV or or even a newspaper story or a magazine. So the change theme was what really helped shape my feelings about this follow on book

and. And it turned out that change bringing about change was in the middle of this fault line between these revivalists and the survivalists because basically the survivalist didn't believe you could ever change Washington. I mean they just don't buy it. And the campaign folks the people I call the revivalist are saying no that's what we're here for. That's what we said we would do. And it was a dispute that began even before the election came up because two weeks before the election they already knew they were going to win and. And the transition team led by a guy called John Podesta who was chief of staff and in the Clinton years one of Clinton's chief of staffs said it was a conference call with the campaign people and he said well I know the candidate has made this pledge about keeping lobbyists outside the administration but there are all these great people that we want to hire. And so how do you want to work around this. And this rambled on for several days if not

weeks and eventually the campaign folks in Chicago had to say it wasn't an idle promise. I mean he actually meant it. This is who we are. And and they astonished to this day that they had to explain that. Now the truth is that actually some lobbyists did what they went to the administration other lobbyists. I'm not on the still frozen out and. Those compromises were made maybe because there was an economic crisis. Maybe because they were genuinely the best people. But they were also made because the character of the guy in the middle of it is conflicted. The reason there is this chronic dispute the reason there is the shop dividing line is because you have a president who has a foot in both camps who wants to have it both ways. He wants to change Washington and he wants to master Washington and finding a balance between the two isn't easy. Now it's the pragmatic side of him to be generous to get things done. You have to learn the ways of Washington you have to do certain deals you have to get

legislation passed. But you also need to have public support with you. And what we saw over the last two years is actually independents especially moving away from this guy so it doesn't always work to make those compromises. And that I think is why you're seeing things change a little bit now. In my view they're not changing as much as people suggest everyone says oh he's moving back to the center he's triangulating and. That's kind of weird to me. I mean first thought he's not Bill Clinton. Can we just all agree that he is not Bill Clinton never will be never was in some ways he was triangulating before we haven't needed to. But that's because he was never the scary socialist. OK. I mean if he was a socialist he was a really really bad socialist. You know he had the chance to let Wall Street collapse capitalism could have collapsed under his watch. And what he did he saved it. My goodness no good self-respecting communist would allow that to happen never mind never mind

saving GM and then selling all your shares I mean if you're a socialist keep the damn Chavez. I enjoyed that little conversation I had on talk radio conservative talk radio of course they they insist that he really is a socialist and they have no idea what the word means. So. But there is a genuine I think we've seen with that memorial speech a genuine shift back into some of the themes from the 2008 campaign especially what's a really difficult balance which is how to raise the level of discourse how to have an elevated debate when frankly it's not that elevated. It's pretty simple and base and and vitriolic. And I say this is a cable TV guy OK. We're all we're all to blame. We can have a discussion about chicken and egg. Are we giving people what they want or we corrupting

people in some way but really really that's a debate that's been going on about journalism from the very beginning. You know does journalism corrupt the masses or the masses already corrupt. You know it's you know of the elites the people who should have information or it is democracy messy and depending on the time of day and how much coffee I've had I could argue it both ways. But the civility question is important because through the campaign often not just outsiders but people inside Obama's team would say where do we strike this balance. We have to punch back we have to defend ourselves against what Clinton or the Republicans are saying. And yet you have a Canada who said no negative politics no attack politics. They remember that he actually said that everyone says oh this is him going back to the center. He was always there and it was really hard for his people who were hired guns for the most part to know where to draw the line. And

often they trot out a line they walked all over it there was a press release they put out about Hillary Clinton's ties to Indian American fundraisers and they said that she was the senator from Punjab. And he was incredibly pissed. You know people say he has no emotion or he has emotion when he gets angry. The temperature in the room is about what it is outside he he was pissed. And not least because some of his closest friends from college were from the Indian subcontinent and he had to call him up and apologize for the sort of xenophobia of his own campaign that by the way was the day that story when that story broke was the day he ended up in the small town in South Carolina. Where it rained on him and he had to drive out in the middle of nowhere and he came across this small woman who lifted his spirits by saying fired up ready to go fight ready to go. Lifted his spirits because of the

Punjab story. So there's a little piece of campaign trivia for you. Civility is something that he will hold on to. It keeps him above the fray for 2012 while the Republicans are going to be throwing rocks at him at some point he's going to have to clamber down from the pedestal and throw rocks back. But it's not a bad position to start this election cycle because it has actually already begun. I'm just going to wrap up like this because you're have a crowd so I expect you know feisty questions. There have been suggestions from some people on the left and from many people on the right that this guy. Is ready to stand down step aside by you know kick out Joe Biden and put Hillary Clinton on the ticket do something dramatic because obviously everything's gone horribly wrong that at least was the conventional wisdom

all of 2 months ago. Apart from being ridiculous it overlooks just one tiny thing about this guy which is that he wants to win. He is exceptionally competitive. He and his wife cannot. Well can barely play cards with each other. Partly because he hates losing at anything and partly because when he wins he really rubs it in your face. And on the rare times that I've allowed him to win anything in games with me he doesn't forget AFA evah so. You know one of the reasons he got to playing basketball was because he won't wear a mouth guard. And. And I suspect the reason for that is because that would stop him from trash talking. From what I've seen being a short funny glasses he likes the trash talking. But I'll

just end off with this one conversation I had with him when we were traveling sort of mid February of 2009. He was already on a winning streak where he was just beginning his winning streak. And he said we were talking about changing the meaning of change we've been having this conversation for a while. And. And he said to me you know I could leave all of this behind. I could go back to what I was doing. And I said that's nonsense there's no way you could do that. He said No no I really could I could leave it all behind I don't need to do any of this. I said well that's great so you just going to having you know revved up all of these young folks and had all the big rallies and you just going to go back and teach law and hang out with the kids. We said yeah yeah yeah I could. I was rolling my eyes and he said but you know

now now I really want to win. Now they've annoyed me. I used to met the Clintons then but he could have just as well be talking now because he raises his game when he finally ultimately desperately needs to one of the reasons they keep getting into these holes and then pulling themselves out is because he's kind of like a writer. He is a writer. He leaves things till the last minute and maybe beyond the last minute. You know he was writing that speech in Tucson on the way there he wrote. He was right to tell the story in revival. He was writing his Nobel Prize winning acceptance speech. Finishing it off in the limousine on route to the event site. Now even for this writer I think that's kind of risking it. But that's who he is he leaves things to the last minute. He he also is

an extremely competitive guy and when the big moment comes it's rather he really screws it up. So let's see how many times he has to screw it up before 2012. But it's going to be an interesting ride and hopefully an interesting set of questions so let's open it up. Well let me say first of all for an administration that's top heavy with people who think they can do communications including the president to screw up your communications that badly is really a significant failure. I mean. Everyone agrees that they screwed up their messaging. They lost the message wars. Everyone including the president and in fact the first lady one thing I describe in the book is how pissed she is about a year ago about how he's lost the message war how he's seen as the inside Washington guy that the change mantle has been transferred to the Republicans so

they've known about this for a long time they've been having meetings about it for a very long time and it's only now that you see really significant change in that message team the two people who were really running running the messaging in the White House are leaving. David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs who are both who I who I respect enormously but both of them would readily admit that they have struggled on messaging. Now there are a lots of lots of environmental reasons why that would happen. Lots of external reasons whether it's about the economy unemployment or the Republican strategy whatever it is. But there's something else because. Having a message problem to me is a is a is a symptom of something else it's not the root cause. For many people inside the White House maybe many Democrats they would say if you just fix messaging then everything else is fine. It's not

and it's the result of something else which is this identity question I've been trying to sort of talk around. Are you in a time when people want change. You know they the voters want to change in 2006 they voted for change in 2008 they voted for change again in 2010. If you don't represent change if you don't speak to change in Washington then the voters will kick you out. And the problem that they had was they felt that all of the changes they were bringing about with big legislation were self evident. You don't have to talk about it because people would understand that it was just going on. That's just not true people want paying attention in that way. And more than that. When they did talk about themselves they didn't know whether they were playing this inside game or this outside game. Did they really need to talk to anyone outside the votes

in Congress. Or could they just talk to a handful of people. Let me put make it kind of more specific when it came to health care. One of the problems they've still have is describing what hap what what health care reform represents. And that's because as health care stumbled and struggled its way to actually becoming law. They defer to members of Congress they said. We're playing this inside game. We need to get all the votes we can. Incidentally we don't we're not going to get any Republicans because we don't like them or they've decided that that's their strategy. And if we describe health care in any significant way we're going to be closing the door to something. So if we say that the principle here is extending insurance to the uninsured then Harry Reid has less room for maneuver. Nancy Pelosi has less room for maneuver so we can't talk about it. So you had this mush

ball for most of that year until it all fell apart. They had no framework to talk about health care. They really didn't they could talk about what was ailing the system. But they can really talk about what they were trying to do. And one of the the stories I have in the book one of the ways they revived the whole health care messaging was to go back to literally a campaign ad the script of a campaign ad a TV ad where they said well there are people on the left who want to have a government run system like they do in Canada or Europe and other people on the right who want to leave you to your insurers and Barack Obama is the guy in the middle. That itself was a sort of defining moment because at those times he was saying OK we've got our own plan. I know where I want this to end up. Enough with the congressional back and forth we need something really clear. And it took them that moment of real crisis to to get back to the campaign to define who they were and and grapple with that identity question.

I don't know if I've answered the question directly but communications the communications was screwed up really because they couldn't decide who they were what they were trying to do and explaining it meant that the strategy would fall apart the strategy being an inside Washington game. Now they realize you know it's not just about a few votes they've got to actually speak to a bigger group of people especially the voters they've lost the independent voters. And that means that means a very different platform they actually have a mission that one of the problems they've had is that if you ask people you know what was the mission of the Bush administration. If I ask people around here you know people would also come up with something around the lines of kill the terrorists keep us safe defend America. You know it's very clear it was very clear because they kept repeating it over and over again I might not agree with it. But but that's what they

said it was. If you ask people what is the mission I've asked I've played this little game here with the folks in the White House what's the mission of this administration. What did they say their mission is as opposed to what we think it is. They will come up with something different. Helping people at the bottom expanding opportunity repairing relations with the rest of the world is all of those things but it's not any of those things in particular and I'll just end it software like this you know in the middle of the campaign strategists the consultants the pollster would say to Obama you know what people really want to hear is what you said in Boston about uniting red and blue America there is a yearning for that you should go out and say that same thing again. And he said I'm not going to do that. I don't want to do that. I've said it once already. Bush never said I've said it once already and I know he

did complain about having say the same thing over and over again but that's slightly different. So repetition is hard for writers but it's actually necessary for politicians especially in this culture you know. There was a there was a late recognition among Obama's people. And this again is something in this book that they really couldn't afford him to be a prime minister. They kind of been they that set him up as the guy running the legislative process. And and now they can't actually do that anymore because they're not going to get any legislation through. So that's sort of easy. But the president has to be bigger than that and has to speak to a broader audience. So we're seeing some of that recalibration now but of course that's by necessity as well. It is interesting seeing the reaction to that memorial speech because I can't tell you how many times I've read the story that the guy is too

cold. He doesn't have any emotional connection with people. He you know he's too cerebral and cool and detached and yet nobody's make that case this week. Finally there's no accountability in the press it's a wonderful thing. Well I'm convinced she's running for president. I have not. All the people I hear who have said no she's not running for president because none of us really know. But all the people who say that she's not. I asked them why. And they come up with some reason like well she won't be able to make money anymore. And that's a temporary phase in making money and she's made so much money she really doesn't need to work ever again so I don't think that stacks up or there's the argument well she knows she can't win. And that's a strange argument to make because who knows whether you can win until you actually try and if Barack Obama had listened to that he'd never got anywhere he'd

never have got in the race. You know one of the one of the things the Republicans are responding to it always fights the last election you know is a bit like the Democrats the Democrats nominating John Kerry in 2004 because they were trying to replay 2002 in some ways they wanted this sort of national security guy to go up against Bush but they couldn't quite figure out why they didn't have the choice to find out something different. The Republicans have a sort of there's the there's the fallacy of Obama that he made it look easy. He is for them. This guy is a kind of fluke. He came out of nothing and he showed that you don't have to do anything in your life. You don't have to have a resume you can just face it just by being smooth on TV so pale in his pale it is there. I think one of the reasons Palin is attractive is is because of course she she lands a punch pretty well. But one of the other reasons is that

they think she's kind of Obama like. You don't have to achieve anything. You have to do have to have time governor when he was a half term not even a third term senator. So which kind of overlooks just how you get tested through the course of a campaign. It is true you had a pretty thin resume but it's also true that he was tested to an extreme degree by that presidential campaign. So the contrast. The contrast was striking on a couple of points. For the majority of what she said it was actually pretty reasonable and try pretty closely to what everyone was saying clearing the president. But she chose a certain moments to be extremely defensive and go on the attack. And it was not a moment to attack. It was not a moment to be explicit about seeking political advantage. And

and that's what's harmed her because you know the president used this formulation about whether we are trying to whether we're talking to each other in a way that's designed to heal or designed to wound which is a very nice way of of saying are you trying to divide people or are you trying to bring people together at that time. Now it's one thing for us pundits to go out and enjoy conflict. That's what we do. That's what the media does. It's another thing for national leaders or people who have aspirations to be national leaders to do that too. Do do I think that limits her presidential ambitions or her are. Her ability to run for president no actually I mean it does in the sense of the broader population. But the first challenge in running for president is to win your party's nomination. And I I suspect that what she did with that video address and the kind of attack she was under and how she responded to

it will lift her popularity with the base with the voters who will show up in those Republican primaries. They want someone who punches back especially at this time. So I think the more people criticize her the more of the Republican establishment tries to stop her the strongest she gets what doesn't kill her actually will make her extremely healthy. Now the problem is that there aren't enough Republicans out there to be elected president. And her problem is that among independent voters because she's not going to get Democrats just as Obama is not going to get Republicans among independent voters her numbers have declined and declined sharply since she was nominated for the vice vice presidential slot. So. People then make this logical assumption. They say well primary voters Republicans are not going to vote for her because they're going to look at the numbers and say she cannot win.

That just doesn't happen. No one's that sensible. You know if people with that sensible than the the good voters of Iowa would not have voted for Barack Obama. That was Mark Penn and Hillary Clinton's case for not voting for Barack Obama because he couldn't win. He was 20 30 points behind in all of these big states behind Clinton in the head to head match ups he was nothing he was nowhere. So I I just don't think people vote that with with a sort of pundit strategist mindset especially in primaries. The contrast was interesting was fascinating it was a time when people were paying attention especially people who don't tune into MSNBC or Fox News and what they saw was a study in contrasts. It's a it's something that will continue I think through the next two years not just with Sarah Palin but with all the Republicans are going to be falling over each other to land punches on Obama. That's who they are that's the

whole dynamic of winning the Republican nomination will be to mess him up in some way. And the contrast is going to be with a president who says I'm a grown up. I'm trying to bring the country together. I'm trying to do big things. And this all of this stuff going on at some point he has to come down from his pedestal and that's going to be a tricky moment. But for the most part he can just be rising above it. And the contrast will be quite striking for many people. So I think it's a taste of things to come. Well the person they most want to see is of course Sarah Palin. They they they don't think they'll be that lucky. I I'm not so sure. I think it's very hard to predict at this point. The argument the most potent argument against them is about the economy. So in that biggest fear the biggest danger that they acknowledges is the unemployment rate whether it comes down fast enough whether it's below the most obvious measure would be Is it below where it was or around where it was when at least when he came into office which would be

I think is about seven point eight percent of the time is integration. So around 8 percent is going to be a measure a measure for him. Part of that is going to be the trend. I mean if it's eight point two it's coming down steeply and people feel different maybe it won't matter so much. But that opens up the door to the economic argument against him. And there you've got a choice of a different Republicans who can make that case whether it's Mitt Romney as a sort of business executive or Mitch Daniels someone who's a sort of deficit hawk. I don't know that they're that troubled by Mitt Romney but. But someone like Mitch Daniels is is a little more troubling. Depends on how good a campaigner they are. But really it's the economy it's the economy a bubble about everything else and if you look at how hard it is to unseat an incumbent president or even call Rove agrees

with me or I agree with him whatever weirdness that is. It's very hard to unseat an incumbent president. And the most recent cases have all been because of the economy. Really. I mean Carter you could say there's a foreign policy argument too but it was also an economic argument. So I think there's a slot as of Sarah Pailin slot and then there's an economic Republican slot. So let's see how that figures figures out. Interesting that they've taken Bill Daley in and tried to neutralize the sort of business criticism that you know still let's face it going to have the Chamber of Commerce against them. One of the things we're going to see over the next couple of years is the EPA and the president wanting to push things along on the regulatory front on the environment. You know the EPA is now. Because of the Supreme Court ruling has the power to regulate carbon emissions and CO2.

And so it's. Ain't they going to do it. You can't pass legislation to do it. What they do how they do it is going to be a point of extreme extremely contentious debate with the business community with Republicans. It will be part of the big government takeover all over again so I expect there to be a strong economic business candidate who maybe hopes they could step in if Sarah Palin stumbles. I just don't know what that stumble would look like because the bar is so low for her. I think. She has the flub a debate well she's done that. I mean or an interview she's done that accuse people of something outrageous. Now she's done that. Reality TV I don't know. It was an extremely abstract speech for something that was quite emotional. Mewes an interesting mix of of the emotional storytelling about the individuals

who who passed and of course the people who intervened to stop the gunmen. But the policy case was very abstract values and morals and you're quite right that what I thought was really interesting was that for 30 years more people on the left and on the right to some degree have say why is this guy. Why does this guy want to reach out to the other side. What's the point of being in the center. No one you doesn't get anything for it. Republicans don't vote for him anyway so what's the point. And here we made a moral case for reaching out and for working with the other side and the moral case was we should live up to the ideals and expectations of the people who believe in us not the least of which was that 9 year old girl that was very powerful. I am sure people are still going to say why the hell is he doing deals with or trying to be bipartisan or reach out to the middle. But that's what he believes

in. In the language of community organizing which is where he started out there's the world as it is in the world as it should be. It's a phrase that keeps coming up time and again with him. In fact when he won Michelle Obama's heart no less she fell in love with him she told me listening to him give a speech in a church basement about the world as it is in the world as it should be. I told her that she should find a more romantic story because. She insisted it was really romantic about Saul Alinsky the father of community organizing divides the world into those two things. At the time of the civil rights movement and he does it to say to his young organizers forget about the world as it is as a world as it should be rather forget about your idealism.

You need to be hard headed about power about how it's exercised about who influences people in power and you need to get to the heart of that and change it you need to be more like labor organizers and be tough and masculine and not like King who hated hated. That's an interesting time to be talking about this but forget that stuff. World as it is. Beats the world as it should be. Obama turns it on its head. He says you need to do both. He actually says you need to have the world as it should be in your head because otherwise you can't achieve anything you're not reaching for anything your goals are too low. And in fact nobody ever got anything done without a sense of hope. That's what hope message was all about. That's exactly what he was saying about that 9 year old girl. She believed in the world as it should be as a nine year old girl she was going to see a member of Congress thinking all the best things you could possibly think about a member of Congress. And we should

live as people in the public sphere along those lines even if we fail to meet them. By the way was also the theme of the Nobel Prize winning speech which is if you haven't read it if you didn't hear it because it was in the middle of the night here and you know morning or afternoon in Stockholm go read it because it really is an extraordinary speech and you should read them together in many ways because that speech is a sort of conversation with King who won the Nobel Peace Prize who was obviously anti-war. And here he is following in King's footsteps as the first African-American president as a Nobel Prize winner but also as someone who had just doubled and trebled the number of troops in Afghanistan as a war president winning a peace prize. So well does it as well as it should be play off each other. And again this is this is part of being a revivalist and a survivalist This is him saying I want it both ways. At times it doesn't work and sometimes it leads to better outcomes. To be sort of all one cares about it.

So I've drifted away if your question I have. Remind me where I've drifted away from. Oh yes. Should he be all high falutin. Yes I think you have to do both. Honestly I think you have to do both as a communicator he has to make it concrete as he did with the speech. He has to make it real for people. He cannot just be abstract but it's really remarkable that one of the things that really moved people was the abstract piece of that speech was the policy piece of that speech. It wasn't just that he did the memorial thing about telling these people's stories and their lives. He took it to another level and people responded to that in a way that if you believe what we say in the media I say all the time. It is not what people want to hear. You know politics should be

more. More visceral more simplistic. And here he was making it complicated. And yet there was an emotional reaction to that too. Ideals I think that's uniquely actually American. And he speaks to something especially American he was not a coincidence that he started out that speech with the words as an American. There are many people out there who don't think he is or don't think he shares American values and in fact he speaks to a unique set of American values which is an idealism an optimism a sense of reaching for something better if you gave that speech in Europe or in Asia. And you said we can do so much. People would laugh at you. They would just laugh at you and say Who the hell do you think you are. Start reaching so high because that's not what politicians do. Well I think that's true. I think it's extremely hard to be in government at a time when the economy is struggling so badly.

But what's interesting though one of the ways you give reassurance is to is to explain things and they're at a point now where they can tell a good story. Not because they're good storytellers but because of all the things are still bad for many many people then nowhere near what they were in that first sort of six months of the presidency. The stock market bottomed out in March of 0 9 at six thousand six hundred. Now it's eleven thousand seven hundred or so it's up 70 or 80 percent in 20 months. Unemployment is still high but it always lags. So there would be even higher unemployment in the upper Midwest were it not for what this administration and the last administration talk about being bipartisan something he says with Bush to save the car industry was no small achievement.

In fact most people just predicted the whole thing was a waste of money. In fact the new House Republican leadership said that they should just let the whole thing go under. So try selling that to Michigan in 2012. GM was finished and yet just of month or two ago it was the biggest IPO the stock market offering in American history. And I think that's a story they have to tell part of the reassurance as you come out of a bad recession is explaining how far this country has come in an extremely short period of time. Nobody predicted that within less than two years the stock market would rebound. The job market would turn around. It just didn't feel like that would have happened. And if you can do that in two years just think what this country could do in another two years. So one of the things people look back on of course everyone says History plays and memory

plays tricks on you. He should be more like FDR. You know I said to I said to Joe Biden as I was interviewing him for this book. With the Recovery Act his job is to sort of sell the Recovery Act Biden said. They didn't sell the Recovery Act in the right way they talked about saving or creating jobs he said that's not what we should have said we should have said we're saving people from the abyss that's what we were doing with all the benefits and the firefighters jobs in the state budgets. Unemployment benefits. And I said well why didn't you come up with you know Hoover Dam Hoover Dam project a big infrastructure thing. And in a rather salty terms since it's just streaming on the Web and my kids might stumble across it he said basically give me a break. You know you give me you know how long it took to build the Hoover Dam. He said You give me five or seven years I'll build you a Hoover Dam. But we didn't have that luxury. So

they didn't find a message they didn't find a story line but they have one now. And and that's part of the reassurance that I think you're right. People are looking for a very troubled economic time. Him being unconventional though is always going to be on cycling. He is not a conventional Democrat. He's not a conventional African-American politician. His I remember coming walking into one of his top campaign people in 2008. And I just say you know it's lunchtime I said to him as we were walking past each other how's it going. The guy said well it will be a lot easier. If you want black and cold Barack Hussein Obama. That's a fact of life. It's a fact of life. So I think people are going to be struggling to put him in context for many years to come. I've always thought that the enduring question about this president is going to be

who is he. It's an identity question just is the enduring question about Bush is going to be you know was he stupid or why did he invade Iraq. You should buy decision points by the way also by Crown. It's also a great publishing house. So enduring questions are going to be there. But remember again this weekend he's not Martin Luther King OK. So I raise this comparison not because I think he's an icon or he's a great historic leader in the same way. But when King was alive opinions were sharply divided about who he was and what he represented was he the sign of hope or a dangerous radical who was undermining America. And and we see an extremely polarized debate about this guy now. He is not just a repeat in case someone just clicked on the web link. At this point I am not saying that he is actually like Martin

Luther King but unconventional politicians who break the mold take sort of years to digest and understand and I'm sure you know someone will write a book and come to this bookstore in 10 years because this bookstore is still going to be here and thriving in 10 years and they'll say well we finally figured him out. And and by then you know you're going to have two thirds of Americans saying they voted for the guy whether they did or not. So it's early in the story and I'll just end on this some people said How come you're writing another book so quickly about this guy and my extended response quite generally was well it's not like nothing has happened. You know I promise you I won't be writing one every year but at least I promised my publisher on my and my family that. But this story is only just unfolding and it

will take a long time to figure out who he is and how we have changed as as we've gone through this because the country is changing all the time. Nothing is static. So thank you for having me thank you for your questions.