Then connect the economic policies of president kenneth c and reagan in jfk at the reagan revolution. Look for the titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the future of book tv, on cspan2. Ible c [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]thank y thank you for coming out tonight. Another humidity is inching up. T thank you for coming in. Im glad we have the air conditioner going. Welcome. Make yourself comfortable. Before before i get started just a few housekeeping notes. If you could could take the time now to silence yourself on. While you have your phone out you dont have to turn it off, you can follow us on twitter and facebook, and instagram and signup for his f you have you have not already. You can visit our website. There you can find our events and signup for the newsletter so that way you keep on top of the great stuff we have going on like tonights event. I am the events director here at grammar books. Its a pleasure to welcome you and and elena this evening in her book why president s fail and how they can succeed. For thoset of you do not know, she is a senior fellow and government studies program at brookings. She is the founding director of the center for effective public management. She is also the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy school of government. In the new book, in the new book, she argues that president s today spend too much time talking and not enough time governing. Sounds like people we may know. Im glad she is here to share this very timely book with us. Please joinpis me in welcoming elaine to kramer books. [applause]. Thank you very much. Thank you you for coming up on this august night. I want to talk briefly about the books and read a couple of passages in the take comments or questions people may have. Ts there is a lot of books written about president s, right . How they communicate. How they camping, etc. There are very few books and this is one, few books and this is one, written about the president s relationship with the bureaucracy, or the permanent government. That, in fact he it o or she isn charge of. This book really focuses on that relationship. It is told through a series ofwi failures, which i call and this is a very technical Political Science turn, crash and burn. These are crash and burn failures that i talk about in the book. I say theyre totally a bipartisan book. I have two democratic president s, one republican president in it. It is not about party. It about party. It is about the job of the president. T the first thing i talk about is the iranian rescue failure in 1980. Some of you here can remembert that. Then i talk about, that was of course the carter administration. I talk i talk about three failures from themi bush administration. Risis. The 9 11, the iraq war and the financial crisis. Fi oh, and hurricane katrina, that is for. I talk about two failures from the obama administration, the Affordable Care act rollout and the failure of 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, andat going places, that they failed to take the time to think about the third step of leadership. That is implementing policy. In fact, i start at the book with a quote from Thomas Jefferson quote to the executiot of the laws is more important than making up then. Now if you think of leadership as three tasks, getting the answer right, the, the policy right, communicating that, and then implementing it, the argument i make in this book is that president s spend so much time on communication that it leads 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 businesss schools we call organizational capacity. In other words, is the federal government, is the piece of the federal government that you are taking this job too, is it capable. , is it capable. Is it up to the job . That you the president is asking it to do. To give give you an example of why there is this disconnect. Let me read you a portion. Whenever america gets a new president and Vice President , a team of government workers and the General Services administration is responsible for taking down the photos of the outgoing president and Vice President and putting up photosn of the new one. While the rest of the countries digesting the Election Results and slowing down for the holidays, this team is workingng overtime. Em repro they must get official photographs taken of the new leaders, have them reproduced in the thousands, and then they put them up in 8603 government offices in the united states. As approximately 250 embassies and consulates, and between 501,000 u. S. Military installations to the world, depending whether we are at war and how you count them. This is no small undertaking. As this which must be accomplished in the short amount of time. Just before until just after noon on argue wish and day. Is the symbolism the day after inauguration day, approximately 2. 7 million civilians and 1. 5 million military personnel who worked for uncle sam come to their offices. Ty the claims adjuster at the Social Security officer in rochester, new york, york, the deputy chief of admissions in albania, the forest ranger in the national park, the biologist at the centers for Disease Control in atlanta, and the soldiers stationed in germany. They all see see the same thing when they arrived. Their new boss. They may have not a 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 volunteered entered Government Service that they work for the president. Now on the morning after the inaugural festivities, a tired and may be slightly hung over president and Vice President to get to work. There are plenty of new people around them who work for them. Most of them, however, are in military uniforms. They they open the doors, fly the helicopter, man the guns that sit on top of the white house. But these new employees do not actually do is talk. They do not 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 advisors. There will be some new faces. Every morning morning the cia sends over somebody with aed to briefcase handcuffed to his wrist to present the president s daily brief. The compilation of the most sensitive goingson collected overtly and covertlyer around the world by american spies. Some of the spies are are undercover and are probably the only federal employees who do not walk into an office on the morning after election day and see photos of the new president and Vice President. But most of the people the samel presidencies everyday will be the same people he saw when he was campaigning. Th so right there you see the disconnect that begins very early on, really from the first day of the presidency. But the president will have a hard time understanding, whichr frankly any human being would, 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 campaigned. They talked. They gave speeches and went on television, they appeared in beautiful settings, custommade for the camera. What they did did not do is figure out, what is going on in that organization down the street. What is actually happening across the river. What have people set about them for the past five, 15, 40 years. What i need to know . Not surprisingly, president s do not do that. Ing they dont do that. They keep on doing what they have been doing. In that, they they miss a couple of important things. Let me mention right now. One is that with the government this big, somebody always knows the answer. Somebody knows the answer. Tion the question is, will the president to be able to get the answer. Will he or she be able to figure out what the competing explanations are, quote vastly complicated questions. The second think that the president does not really understand is that in the government this big, at anyha point in time something is going very right and something is going very wrong. Let me me read you another short excerpt from a chapter a call spacewalk and crashing websites. On december 21, 2013 tohael americans, Michael Hopkins and richard. [inaudible] were attaching electoral connecting from a malfunctioning cooling in cooling pump. This may sound very ordinary until you realize that the two americans were astronauts and the cooling pump they were fixing was part of the International Space station, 24. During their five and a half hour spacewalk they wore suits designed to protect them from a lack of oxygen, the freezing temperatures, and the cosmicth dust that makes space and inhospitable place for humans. Two months earlier, on october r 2013, millions of americans in search of subsidize Health Insurance logged on to the new federal website, healthcare. Gov, hoping to buy insurance as easily as they could buy a plane ticket on expedia. Com or a bookl or so they thought. Instead, to the dismay of the Many Americans shopping for Health Insurance and to the surprise of president obama and his top staff, the website crashed. Not once, not twice, but again, again, and again, but again, again, and again, over a 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. Governme they were joined by a polarized citizenry, half of whom wanted to buy Health Insurance and were endlessly frustrated, and half of whom saw the whole episode as more evidence that the government cannot organize a twocar funeral. The pundits pounced. Saying that the federal government could not do technology. Government was hopelessly broken. Broken. Yet, no one seemed to notice the technological marvel of men walking in space to repair us base station for and accomplish the same manner in which the healthcare. Gov website wasfederl built. Federal bureaucrats at nasaco contracted with a variety of companies from a littleknown company in massachusetts thatui made the spacesuit, to the Aerospace Giant who designed and built some of the most sophisticated components of the space station. Ye in another part of the government, the one dealing with healthcare, federal employees at the centers for medicare andithi Medicaid Services had contracted with its Mission 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 ruin president obamas christmas, pushed his Approval Ratings to new lows and convinced americans ready to be convinced that obama and the government he was in charge of were hopelessly ineptr so, why do we care about this . We care about this because when president s experience these large scale governmental failures, two things happen, happen, one is their Political Capital goes down, nobody expected president obama to write the code to the website. Nobody expected jimmy carter to fly the helicopters into baghdad and rescue the hostages. But americans do expect the president to be on top of the apparatus of the government. Of course, a lot of the stories in here have president s who are just as surprised as everybody else, which shows a dangerous distance from the governmentf they run. Another reason we should care is that every time we have a massive government failure, citizens who are skeptical about government in the first place become more and more convinced that the government just cannot do anything right. One of president clintons favorite sayings, and he still says that actually if you hear him on the tv these days, hehe will will still save from time to time was, most people think the government cannot organize a two car funeral. Y tim and, it is so true. Every time there is one of these big failures, that is what happens. Im not arguing in the book that we can prevent all failures. We cant. Many of these things happen. But 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. T there were multiple warning signs that the piece of the government that the president gave the job to, whatever the job was, multiple warning signs that organization was in trouble. It was just simply in trouble and not up to the job. Onfro president carter was confronted with the military where for four decades before the attempted rescue mission, highlevel military missions had in fact argued that a government with the u. S. Military is constituted could not to joint exercises. They cannot put forth a joint plan in battle. Cial also the special forces were dismantled in the decade before jimmy carter became president. So he then proceeds to order a rescue mission which isy coop dependent on the three branches of the military cooperating with each other, and and with no really special forces command. Now we have a false gale special forces command. A fullscale. Because it happened in carters first term, it happened in april he lost, some of us remember big time in november. The fact is, there were so many warning signs along the way. In each of the stories that ii tell in the book there are plenty of warning side signs that failure is likely to happen. Ey ca 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. One is the organization of the white house itself. The white house is not organized to understand the governments they run. It gives attention to communication, lots of communication to politics, lots of lots of communication to the formulation of policy that is a president ial priority. But very little attention to the executive branch of the government, which is a massive and to which i argued in this book, president s need to understand. N so the first recommendation is an organizational one which is they have to beef up with the department of affairs, stop thinking of cabinet secretary that they can make speeches of the day and understand that the cabinet secretaries are there ambassadors to this man met organization. Secondly, like the technical lines as i advocate an Early Warning system set up in the white house so that president s can understand what might be going wrong out there, it doesnt matter. When one of these things it blows up it doesnt matter if it started under the other guy. The current president takes the hit. The current president is the one that gets the complaints and loses Political Capital and cannot pass the rest of their agenda and will lose midterm elections are sometimes lose the general election. It really doesnt matter when id started. Event th what matters is when it blows up. An Early Warning system would prevent that. And finally, i propose what wei are living through today, we have a primary system,ect nomination system that has many good aspects to it. But it differs from the oldfashioned nomination system in one critical way. We used to nominate president s within Political Parties by conventions composed only ofe those super delegates. For most of American History that is how, primaries if there held at alternet matter, roosevelt was nominated by superdelegates, kennedy was, eisenhower was, etc. When we moved cetera. When we moved to a system of primaries, many advantage to that, it was much more open system. We lost or something. What something. What we lost was what i call your review. And the scientists call peerreviewed. In other words, the electorate was not in thee same business of government and governing, where as in the old system of the people pick the president was in the same business. So i like to tell the following imaginary story. In 1960, jack kennedy had to win the support of governor lawrence ofer pennsylvania in order to win the nomination. Igars and governor lawrence controlled the delegates from pennsylvania. You can imagine that between jack kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and his cocampaign, there was, there was many smokefilled rooms with cigars and brown liquid. You can imagine that they talked about real things. They talkeded about about could he win, could he governor, etc. I want you to imagine donald trump being in a room a room with the equivalent of governor lawrence. Im lighting has a garden drinking is whiskey a thing, oh yeah im going to build a wall and make mexico pay for it. Eisenhower would say, being the person that has run a government would say what . What are you smoking in that cigar . Okay. It just would not pass the smel test. So so we have lost something with peerreviewed. The only peerreviewed that we have, this is not really very close is in the press these days. At the press has fallen victim to the click bait society where they just want clicks and clicks and clicks. Theyre not very interested in drilling down on what a candidate knows knows or how realistic his or her plans are. I do not have as clear and answer to that problem as i do to the first one, to organizing 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. When they cannot do it, when they failed to implement, those failures are so big that all the spinmeisters in the world and all the click add people and all the Great Television producers, cannot get them out of trouble. That is what these failures tell us about recent American History. Thank you you very much. I will take comments andnt questions. [applause]. Yes. Right here. I am writing a book about th