So, thank you for coming in and im glad we have got the ac going, so welcome. Make yourself comfortable pair before we get started if you housekeeping notes. If you could take the time to silence your cell phone and while you have your phone that you dont have to turn it off. You can follow kramer books on facebook and twitter and instagram. Signup for our email newsletter if you have not already. We would love for you to visit our website at kramer. Com. And on our website you and bind their events and sign up for our newsletter, so that way you keep on top of the great stuff we have got going like tonights event with Elaine Kamarck. I am that events director here at kramer books and its my pleasure to welcome you in my pleasure to welcome elaine this evening for her new book why president s fail and how they can succeed again. For those of you that dont know elaine is a senior fellow at booking and the founding director of the center for effective public management. She is also on the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy school of government. And mr. Bell, elaine argues president s today spent much time time talking and not enough time governing. Sounds like some people we might now. Im so glad shes here to this share this timely book with us. Please join me in welcoming Elaine Kamarck to kramer books. ,. [applause]. Thank you for coming out on this muggy august nights. I went to talk briefly about the book, read a couple passages and then take any comments or questions people may have. There is a lot of books written about president s, how they communicate, how they campaign etc. There are very few books and this is one written about the president s relationship with the bureaucracy or the permit to government that in fact he or she is in charge of. So, this book really focuses on the relationship. It is told through a series of failures, which i call and this is a very technical Political Science term, crash and burn. These are crash and burn failures that i talk about in the book. I talk about its totally biased bipartisan book. I have two democratic president s, one republican president in its. Its not about party. Its that the job of the president. I talk about the first thing i talk about is the iranian rescue failure in 1980, some of you here can remember that. And then talk about that of course was the carter administration. I then talk about three failures from the bush administration, 911, the iraq war and the financial crisis. Also, hurricane katrina. I talk like to fill your strum the, the Affordable Care act rollout and the failure at the Veterans Administration to care for our veterans. What runs through all of these is that president s modern president s are so obsessed with talking and campaigning and going places that they fail to take the time to think about the third step of leadership, which is implementing policy. In fact, i start the book with a quote from Thomas Jefferson the execution of the laws more important than making them. If you think of leadership as three tasks, getting the answer right, the policy right, communicating that and implementing its the argument i make in this book is that president s spend so much time on communication that it leaves them little time to think about how they are going to implement the policies they want to implement. That involves understanding something that in the Business Schools we call organizational capacity. In other words, if the federal government, if a piece of the federal government that you are giving this job to, is it capable, is it up to the job that you the president are asking it to do, so to give you an example of why there is this disconnect, lets merely jew regional portion. Whenever america gets a new president and Vice President s, a team of government workers in the General Services administration is responsible for taking the photos of the outgoing president and Vice President and putting up photos of the new ones. While the rest of the country is digesting the Election Results and slowing down for the holidays, this team is working overtime. They must get official photographs taken of the new leaders, have them reproduced in the thousands and then make plans to put them up in 8600 and three government offices in the united states, proximally 250 embassies and consulates and between 500 and 1000 us military installations around the world, depending on whether we are at work and how you count them. This is no small undertaking as the switch must accomplish in a short amount of time from just before to just after noon on an operation day. The symbolism is immense. On the day after inauguration day, proximally 2. 7 million civilians and 1. 5 million military personnel who work for uncle sam come to their offices. The claims adjuster at the Social Security office in rochester, new york, the deputy chief in albania, the forest ranger at Yellowstone National park, the biologist at the center for Disease Control in atlanta, and the soldiers stationed in germany all see the same thing when they arrive, their new boss. They may not have voted for the new boss. In fact, they may hate him or her, his new team, his party, but they all know who the boss is. They have all entered Government Service knowing that whether they like the president or not, they work for the president s. Now, lets go to the white house. On the morning after the inaugural festivities, a tiger may be slightly hung over president and Vice President get to work. Plenty of new people around them to work for them. Most of them, however, are in military uniforms. They open the doors, flight helicopter, manned the watch and the guns that sit on top of the white house. What these new employees do not actually do is talk to the president. In fact, on that first morning after the inauguration, the people most likely to talk to the new president are the same ones who have been talking to him for the past two years, his Close Campaign advisers. There will be some new faces. Every morning the cia sends over someone with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist 2 the president s daily brief, a compilation of the most sensitive this goingson collected covertly around the world. Some of these spies are undercover and are probably the only federal employee who dont want it when office on the morning after election day and see photos of the new president and Vice President s. But, most of the people the president sees every day will be the same people he saw when he was campaigning. So, right there you see the disconnect that begins very early on, really from the first day of the presidency. Was the president will have a hard time understanding, which frankly any human bead word is just how large and how complicated the government that they run is. No wonder that being human president s like to revert to what they always did before. They campaign. They talked, they gave speeches, they went on television, they appear to beautiful settings custom made for the camera. What they didnt do is figure out, what is going on in that organization down the streets are quite is actually happening across the river . What have people said about them for the past five, six, 30, 40 years . What do i need to know. Not surprisingly president s dont do that. They drove to do that. They keep on doing what they have been doing and in that they miss a couple of important things. One is that with the government this big someone always knows the answer. Someone knows the answer. Of the question is, when the president s be able to get the answer . Will he or she be able to figure out what the competing explanation are from vastly complicated questions . The second thing that the president doesnt really understand is that in the government this big at any given point time something is going very right and something is going very wrong. So, lets me read you another short excerpt from a chapter that i call spacewalk and crashing websites. On december 21, 2013, 2 americans, Michael S Hopkins and richard the struck you attached electrical connection errors from a malfunctioning cooling pump. This may sound very ordinary until you realize that the two americans were astronauts and the cooling pumps they were fixing was part of the International Space station 240 miles above the air. During their five and half hour spacewalk they were suits designed to protect them from the lack of auction, freezing temperatures in the cosmic dust that makes space and inhospitable place for humans, to say the least. Two months earlier on october 1, 2013, millions of americans in search of Subsidized HealthInsurance Law shown to new federal website hoping to buy insurance as easily as they could buy a plane ticket on expedia. Com. Or a book, or so they thought. To the dismay of the Many Americans shopping for Health Insurance and to the surprise of president obama and his top staff, the websites crashed, not once, not twice, but again and again and again over eight period of two long months. The press erupted in a frenzy over the inability of the federal government to build the website at the heart of the health care reform. They were joined by a polarized sitter surgery who wanted to buy Health Insurance that were endlessly frustrated and half of who saw the whole episode as we had more evidence that the government cannot organize a twocar funeral. The pundits pounced upon in the federal government could not do technology, but that government was hopelessly broken and yet no one seemed to notice the technological marvel of men walking in space to repair a space station that was accomplished in the same manner in which the healthcare. Gov the website was built. Federal bureaucrats at nasa contracted with a variety of companies from a littleknown company in massachusetts that made the space suits to boeing, the Aerospace Giant that designed and built some of the most a sophisticated components of the space station. In another part of the government, the one dealing with healthcare federal employees at the centers for medicare and Medicaid Services have contracted with Information Technology companies in the private sector to build the infamous website. The success of the spacewalk passed with little notice while the failure of the healthcare. Gov website ruined president obamas christmas, pushed his Approval Rating to new lows and convinced americans wary to be convinced that obama and the government he was in charge were hopelessly inept. So, why do we care about this . We care about this because when president s experience these largescale governmental failures, two things happened. One is that they are Political Capital goes way down. Known expected president obama to write the code for the website. No one expected jimmy carter to five helicopters into baghdad and rescue the hostages, but americans to expect the president to be on top of that apparatus of the government. Of course, a lot of these stories and here have president s who were just as surprised as everyone else, which shows a dangerous distance from the government they run. Second reason we should care is that every time we have a massive government failure city since were skeptical about government in the first place become more and more convinced that the government just cant do anything right. One of president clintons favorite saying and he still says it, actually, if you hear him on the tv these days he still says her from time to time was most people think that government cant organize a twocar funeral. It is so true and every time there is one of these big failures thats what happens. Now, im not arguing in the book that we can prevent all failures we cant and many of these things happen. What i am arguing is that if president s spent a little more time on governing and a little less time on talking, they might reduce the probability of failure. So, as we go through the case studies in the book, in each instance the following thing happens, there were multiple warning signs that the piece of government that the president gave the job too, whatever the job was, multiple warning signs at that organization was in trouble. Was it just simply in trouble. Poor president carter was confronted with a military wherefore for decades before the attempted rescue mission highlevel military commission had, in fact, argued that the government us military as constituted could not do joint exercises. They could not put forth a joint plan in battle. Also, what happened is that all of the special courses were dismantled in the decades before jimmy carter became president. So, he then proceeded to order a rescue mission im a which is dependent on the three branches of the military cooperating with each other and with no real special forces command. Now, we have a full special command. Of that failure was one of those big crash and burn failures and because it happened in president carters first term, in fact, he lost the election to reagan not fall. It happened in april. He lost as some of us remember bigtime in november. The fact is that there were so many warning signs along the way. In each of the stories that i told the book, there are plenty of warning signs that failure is likely to happen. So, let me just pause by going to the second part of the book and how they can succeed again. I want to talk about two things here. One, the organization of the white house itself. The white house is not organized to understand the governments they run. It gives lots of attention to communication, lots of attention to politics, lots of attention to the formulation of policy that is a president ial priority, but very little attention to the executive branch of the government, which is massive and which as i argue in this book president s need to understand. So, the first recommendation of how they can succeed again is a very sort of organizational one, which is they have to be beef up the Department Cabinet affairs, stop thinking of cabinet secretaries as people who make speeches on the message of the day, which is frankly what they think of cabinet secretaries in the white house and understand that the cabinet secretaries are their ambassadors to this mammoth organization. Secondly, along the technical lines as i advocate on Early Warning system set up in the white house so that president s can understand what might be going wrong out there because it does it matter. , when one of these things blow up it doesnt matter if it started under the under other guy. The current president takes a hit; right . The current president gets all the complaints and loses Political Capital account passed the rest rest of their agenda and will lose midterm elections or sometimes lose the general election, so it really doesnt matter when it started. What matters is when it blows up and Early Warning system would prevent that. Finally, with what really need to today, we have a primary system, a nomination system the house many good aspects to it, but it differs from that oldfashioned nomination system in one critical way. We used to nominate president s within Political Parties by conventions propose only of those superdelegates. For more most of american history, that is how primaries if they were held at all did not matter. Roosevelt was nominated by superdelegates. Kennedy was also, eisenhower was, etc. When we moved to a system of primaries, many advantages to that, much more open system, but we lost something. We lost what i call pure review and political scientist call pure review. In other words, the electorate was not in the same business of government and governing whereas in the older System People picked the president and were in the same business. So, i like to tell the following imagine a imaginary story. In 1960 decade and he had to win the support of governor lawrence of pennsylvania in order to win the nomination. Because governor lawrence controlled the delegates from pennsylvania. You can imagine that between jack kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and his whole campaign there were many smokefilled rooms with cigars and brown liquid being consumed and you can imagine that the talked about real things. They talked about could he win. They talked about could he govern etc. I want you to imagine donald trump is being enough room with the equivalent of governor lawrence and lighting a cigar and drinking his whiskey and saying, oh, yeah im going to build a wall and make mexico pay for it. Of the governor would say being a person who has run a government would say, what. What are you smoking that cigar, okay im in it just wouldnt pass the smell test. We have lost something of pure review. The only pure review we have in that this is a very close, but it is in the press these days. The press has fallen victim to the click date, you know, society where they just want clicks and clicks and clicks, so they are not very interested in drilling down on what a candidate knows or how realistic his or her plans are. I dont have as clear an answer to that problem is i due to the first one, to the organizing of the white house. But, it is clear that we have to do a better job of evaluating, not just what president s say, but can they do it because when they cant do it, when they failed to implement those failures are so big that all of the spinmeisters in the world and all of the slick and people and all of the Great Television producers cannot get them out of trouble. Thats what these failures are about in american history. Thank you very much and i will take comments and questions. [applause]. Yes, right here. Elaina, im writing a book about the 1960 democratic nice to have you here. Through the eyes of the stephe