apple store and google play. c-span now, your front row seat to washington anytime, anywhere. >> good afternoon. i am the president of hofstra university. i welcome you with again to hofstra and to this very interesting presidential conference. this afternoon policymaking in the obama administration will focus on evaluating the nature and success of the obama team and its policies from different perspectives. from a former cabinet member and from journalists. as we consider our evidence. i will provide very brief introductions of our panelists for joining us in this conversation today. they don't really even begin to scratch the surface as you might imagine. the honorable jacob. as the director of the office of management and budget. actually a position that he had previously held in the second term of the clinton administration for management and resources. welcome, secretary. peter baker who is working very hard for us today. i think this is your third panel. responsible for reporting on the biden presidency, right now. he previously read about barack obama for the new york times and president bill clinton and george w. bush for the washington post. welcome back, mr. baker. chris whipple is an author, commentator and documentary filmmaker. one of his books explores the evolution of the white house chief of staff responsibilities in the past 50 years from nixon to the obama administration. his most recent book, the fight of his life inside joe biden's white house examines internal power struggles in the first two years of the biden presidency. and welcome mr. whipple. they are joined on the stage by professor rich haze and james sample from the school of law and of course who at this point needs no introduction. i will now handed over to begin this afternoon's conversation. thank you. >> thank you, president poser. thank you everyone for joining us today. it is very exciting to host this panel with so many distinguished speakers and by distinguished colleagues. we have spent a lot of time over the last day and a half examining president obama's election. his media coverage, his communication strategy. we have had two fantastic sessions today on foreign policy, u.s. transit relations. healthcare policy and foreign policy leadership and military intervention. and this is the session now where we get to talk a little bit about the decision-making behind the scenes. it is essential, i think, for political science it's only colleagues in the audience to understand how white house management influences the policymaking process and shapes the agenda and policies. that is what we are looking forward to discussion today. my colleagues and i, professor sample, we have prepared a series of questions. produce a volume with my coworker who we saw a moment ago. peter baker was here a few years ago for the george w. bush conference to present the journalistic perspective on what was happening, how reporters read what was happening in the white house. and chris whipple who we are delighted to welcome to hofstra and continue this partnership to talk about the research on several of your books but particularly the gatekeepers and the role of the chief of staff position managing and directing the policymaking process. to begin that conversation, i would like to start with a question for secretary lew. would you share with us from those experiences how the presidential decision making process as you thought was started and perhaps evolved through the two terms of the obama presidency? >> sure. it's great to be here again. it's great to be on a panel of people who all consider each other all friends. we will see if that the case about an hour and a half after talking. one of the things about having had the range of roles that i did, you see the process of the white house from different vantage points. there are different stakeholders in the process. even though everybody reports to the president directly or indirectly, it is quite intentional that you come into the process with a point of view and agency. and the decisions get made with all different perspectives being reflectors. at the state department which i won't spend a lot of time talking about. it's something you i'm sure have discussed at length this morning. a very formal organized process were stakeholders sit around a table, it goes from one level to the next. it gets to the point of meeting with the president. you are pretty sure that you have got the full picture at the end of it. whether it's the perfect decision or not, the process is well established to inform a decision with all points of view. nothing as clear as that exists outside of the national security setting. since the clinton administration, we have had a national economic council. we have seen more a less role with that as the coordinator. pulling all of the pieces together on the funding and the management. it's really a reflection of the president how all of the different interests are presented to him for decision on the domestic side. let me offer a vignette from each chair. i don't know how much time you want from the top. the year that this was perhaps the usual year, 2011 when i was there, a year when there was a grand bargain negotiation with speaker bader. it's a year when we were facing a potential shutdown or debt limits crisis. the entirety of my time at omb in that chapter was around those issues. the position that the most sensitive level, a very small circle of people directly involved. this is my perspective now from omb, for the white house to remain coordinated, the president had all of the views the president needed. the fewest possible people were in the conversation. which is not normal in a domestic issue. as normal and a national security issue. that a hard process to run. there probably was a little breakage in the white house that there were people who would've liked to be more involved. going from a group of 5 to 10 to 20, it's very hard to have a private conversation in washington. i think the consultation was effective. it gave the president what the president needed to move forward. but it probably was a little bit of a difficult process from the perspective of people who were not in the small circle. i was very much in the small circle. as a challenge. you have a trade-off. you want to have everyone's view but you can't have everyone know the president is having a secret meeting. as omb director, your job is to reach out and collect information. it doesn't have to be that someone of the white house staff says there is a meeting about riding a memo. you have to turn to the people who are working on it, count on them to reach out to get all the points of view. that requires trust amongst the parties. if you were to talk to the people who were in the room and not in the room at that time, you would get somewhat different stories about how well it was done. i think the president was well served. i think the president knew what every point of view was and the information in the end. i want to move to the year i was chief of staff. it's now my job to run the process to make sure everyone who needs to be in the room is in the room. it's also an election year. election year, there is an additional dimension to it which is there is a campaign apparatus that is not going to be running the government. the government has to be run. after understand what each other are doing and not cross the line in getting to each other's a's business in an appropriate way. we do that by having a daily conversation between people who knew each other so there were no surprises. we kept covering. we left politics in the campaign. i had one of peter's senior reporters in washington tell me, he had never seen a better coordination between the campaigned in a white house. there was no government decision that was made by the campaign. i think it's fair to say i don't think the white house suggestion where the president needed to be. everyone did their job with full transparency but appropriate boundaries. covering in that year but that you didn't take your eye off the ball. if i look on the domestic side, daca, deferred action for children was probably the major policy we drove forward that year. it was not a new start. the president had looked at it for two years, had been frustrated, found a world need to find the solution. that was a case where he tasked me, the new chief of staff, the white house cancel to start from scratch. told start from the old memos, don't start from the old legal analysis, start from scratch. we can read a new process. we brought all the stakeholders in. there were new players a fresh look. we came up with what became daca. it was not without its controversy. it was a question of whether or not what we did was going to be effective. it was a question of whether we went far enough. there were views that we should do more. there were views that we should do less. present for election, we don't have lots of time for long meetings with him. as chief of staff, i thought it was my job to make sure that absolutely every view you would care about scott to them. i remember one meeting in the chief of staff serbia office where i said, this is going to the present. is there any view in this room that needs to go to them. if i don't here in this room, i don't want to hear it afterwards through a different channel. i have the privilege of working for a president who cared about the process. i'm not sure that story will work in every white house. fill the blank with any specifics. it was a very important that everyone have their views represented and that it serve the needs of the president to make the decision with that knowledge. there was a hard decision as to whether not take what became daca in the second term. i think for all the right reasons, we went with the piece that we have the closest to 100% certainty it would be upheld if it was challenged. we did the second piece, i was in the white house of the time, it ultimately did not withstand the legal challenge. the first piece is still there. i think after 10+ years, it is going to be there. make a decision like this, if the president was just influence by doing the most you think you can do, he might have ended up doing less because it might've been all connected, in spite of going to the courts and might've been overturned. it was done in the kind of thoughtful, considerate way that is the way you make decisions when you have your lawyers, your policymakers, your advocates. all of the voices represented. you don't leave any stone unturned in terms of the risk. there was a risk that he had been too timid. we didn't know when we announced it whether it would be celebrated or criticized. we really didn't know. i remember having that conversation. it was one of the most emotional days i have had in public life standing there at the rose garden knowing we were changing the lives. we thought it was close to 500,000 but turned out to be close to 1 million young people and all of their relatives. i think the process serve to get us there. i'm going on for too long but let me just say one thing about treasury. we can come back when it's my turn again. treasury is a very different sleep in the white house but it is very close to the white house and you are very closely tied to the white house. it was very important that as a former omb director, former chief of staff, i did stay in a role where i looked like i was doing my own job. we were very self-conscious about how to organize and make it clear, i had a new portfolio. and i had to argue the treasury view and i wasn't imagining omb or the white house anymore. there were points of time where there was friction between what treasury thought was the right thing and with the people in the white house might've thought was the right thing. i can tell you as a treasury secretary, if it ever gets to the point where you can't walk into the oval office and tell the president what you think is the right thing, you ought not to do the job. you have a perspective that is different. and somebody else has to make the political judgment as to whether or not they are comfortable doing that. i don't think we have lost a major disagreement on that but there were sometimes when i was at back with the assignment, if you are not comfortable with what we need to do, come up with a way to solve the problem. you can't in government just criticize. you have to have a solution. in the white house has to be able to push back the agencies and say, if this is not the right way to do it, i think that appropriate. when we get to the what you learn from it, there's been a common thing and wipe sandwiches all the voices have to be heard and represented. a president is not well served if they only get one perspective whether it's political or pure policy analysis. and there are often disparate forces like lawyers who matter. if you take actions and step on a landmine and have it burn out, you don't accomplish very much. >> thank you, secretary lew. >> chris, welcome again to hofstra. in your multiple studies, what you think was most distinctive about the obama white house and why? >> let me begin by saying, i am really honored to be here at hofstra with all of you and to see jack again. to be with peter. proud father of the award winner theo baker. i've just done a book about the biden white house. it's often said that joe biden's first chief of staff could do any job in the white house. he could be white house counsel. he could be communications director. he could do almost anything. jack on the other hand did almost every job in the obama white house and did them awfully well. peter well knows that bad things can happen when a white house chief of staff decides to become treasury secretary. back in the reagan area after four years of chief of staff, so desperate to get out. he swapped jobs with the treasury secretary and what was without the worst job swap in american history. if no courses that the iran iraq to shortly thereafter. it never would've happened on jim baker's watch. to answer your question about the obama white house, one of the things i would say wearing my hat as author of the gatekeepers is that every president learns sometimes the hard way, you cannot govern effectively without imparting the white house chief of staff as first among equals. and also to tell you what you don't want to hear. barack obama was a student of history unlike some other presidents we have had recently. obama understood the importance of chief of staff. one of my favorite stories concerns the time that obama was campaigning a month before the election. he was in reno nevada. he called a secret meeting of staffers that included david axelrod, valerie jarrett and all of bill clinton's almost all of bill clinton former white house juice. anyway. the point of this, the reason it was secret was because obama didn't want to be accused of measuring the drapes in the oval office before he was elected. but he knew how important it was to figure out who his white house chief would be. unlike some other presidents. who was on the phone call, obviously, kind of unforgettably , the first thing he said was, listen. leave your chicago friends at home. they will only cause you grief. everybody on the call was from chicago practically. david axelrod, valerie jarrett, bill daily. he did not take that advice, needless to say. i think a good choice at the time. my point here is once again that presidents often learn the hard way that you have to empire the white house chief. obama understood this from the beginning and that was one of the reasons i think including his good choices of chiefs of staff over the eight-year period. one of the big reasons for his success. >> thank you. i just like to say, we've missed you since this morning. secretary lew spoke about the buttoned up very disciplined small circles in the administration. back and be great for running a government. not necessarily always conducive to journalists getting access. i'm curious about what the challenges of the obama administration were and what the opportunities were. >> unless one of the people in the media as my friend. and brings a tape recorder. thank you very much. i am planning to spend the rest of the semester here but i am glad to be here again for this wonderful panel. thank you for including me. and president poser for sponsoring this whole thing. what you heard jack lew say a couple of minutes ago, you heard him describe an election- year process where the chief of staff helps run the government and the campaign once the campaign. that what's happening right now. they actually call it the jack lew model. maybe there's a plaque on the door or something. the jack lew model is chief of staff deals with the world basically because there's a whole lot to deal with as it is e alwithouys people in the room they talk to people in the room. we heard a lot of what happened. that doesn't mean we heard everything. what i discovered doing books after, i think that the reporters who are in the press room and during the daily reporting, i say we 5% of it. that my guess. 25, 30% what is really going on in the white house. it's only afterwards forms like this, through archives that have actually come available, you really start to learn a whole lot more. as a reporter, that very frustrating to learn how much we didn't know at the time. i will say that one thing we learned and this is to about the obama white house is much as anything else, when the white house tells you know, that not happening. not only is it happening, it's happening so much more than you thought. no, the secretary of health is not fighting with the secretary of our culture. oh, my god, they hate each other. you will discover after the fact that they literally went into a gymnasium. the things that get out to the price by the time they get out to the press have been so softened that you don't really get the full extent of it. we are only keeping up the vapor trails of whatever is happening inside. at times, you do get a pretty decent opportunity to follow things. the best example is i think something we talked about this evening. in part, it's because president obama ran such an extensive review. 10 or 11 meetings, something like that. >> it felt like 100. >> it felt like 100. exactly. for the professor and the students here, it felt very familiar. he was not going to sit there and have one meeting and say, okay, let's do it. he wanted to go through every single interpretation and try it again. something like 50 products or something like that. just during that one review. it was meticulous. it was thorough. it was exhaustive. it was sort of a case study. you like to really think things through to the point where staff really wish she would go ahead and make the decision. you could never accuse him of not having spent time before that because that tends to drag on that there were opportunities for reporters to pick up on things. we would pick up on things are enough review. we picked up that biden was not for a surge in afghanistan. that cannot. we picked up on the concern. at least that was the concert inside the white house whether the military would agree with that characterization. we did pick up on a lot of those things at the time. it is hard as a journalist because they were to be able to have the confidence of the prophets. it is my job not to let that happen. and to be aware of how much we don't know it to be careful when we report that we don't overstate what we know. >> thank you. i think we can open this up to some questions for the whole panel and see how they respond. i will start with what following up on what each of you has said. you have each spoken about how the obama white house function. what differentiated from predecessors and successors. what are some of the lessons that you see i
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