The country needs it, the Democratic Party needs it, I need it. More has been made of that than should be. He told me what would happen to the Clinton stimulus bill the day it was put forward. Well, if you were to ask me for a moment when looking back on it, one could perhaps see that we were moving into a new period of partisanship, I would have chosen instead the [Robert] Bork battle, which I think changed quite dramatically the whole process on Supreme Court nominations and the grounds on which they were debated. Having said that, I dont believe that affected the partisan approach to it. Secretary [William] Simon spent hours with me, which is quite odd in retrospect since I was 32. Oh, in the bill itself? I have a very old-fashioned view about that. Certainly, when he captained it, it was a different party than it had been for the previous 50 years. In retrospect, a limited, very grudging change. I began to see on pickup trucks around Charlottesville, very soon after Clinton became President, Impeach Bill Clinton and I dont thinkI remember Impeach Earl Warren signs, Im that old. So I had that meeting with Clinton. The office on Vermont Avenue probably opened between two and three weeks thereafter, lets say, picking a time, the 25th of November, just guessing, 20th to 25th. Well, the war room, first of all, was operated quite differently from the National Economic Council. The only reason I think it worked was Bob Rubin, who had the skill and the temperament to make it work. Founder and Senior Chairman | So it became effectively a simultaneous multilateral and bilateral summit because it became the setting for Clintons direct discussions with the Japanese Prime Minister. So if you survey the 50 most senior people who ever served in the Clinton administration, about 25 of them will say welfare reform was a great triumph for the President, about 25 of them will say he just caved. But at the end it was breathtaking. Everybody was sitting in a room for the endless hours that have been so widely written about, which was quite a chaotic, disorganized process and not particularly Presidential process. So I knew a little bit about what was worth doing and what wasnt. How difficult was it to do what you were doing in an environment where Mario Cuomo was sort of floating around trying to figure out. Its fashionable for conservatives to say that the recovery had already begun on George H. W. Bushs watch and that if we just stood aside, the same results would have occurred, but those werent the economic forecasts we were looking at at the time, nor do I believe that school of thought to be accurate, but thats another matter. Well, about ten minutes later President Clinton called me. He thought he could win over the majority of the Democrats, for example in the House, on NAFTA. WebRoger Ebert March 07, 1978. Sure, Greenspan was in favor of deficit reduction, so when the administration came forward with an actual deficit reduction plan, which, as we all know, was a bit unexpected, Greenspan supported it, testified for it and so forth. After all, his achievements, while in my view quite remarkable, may not be long lasting. Youre working on prospective personnel issues? They just called someone in the war room and they had an immediate answer or immediate access to whatever they needed. We can go into that in a little more depth, the pure politics part of it. You sit down with the leaders of your own party in the Congress, ultimately with the entire leadership, and then you learn a little bit about the realities that you face from the legislative point of view. Do you have anyyou were sort of one of the casualties of this campaign, but was the Whitewater thing separate from this hate stuff? But the burden of my question was it would be a lot of the people whod voted for the economic package that youre putting in this position, right? But the next day, Monday, I was on a plane to Waco, Texas. So he got people to serve for a long time, even if they were not intensely loyal to him. Its the biggest story in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the whole thing. It was the usual degree of difficulty that early, not really greater because he was from Arkansas. He was quite in the minority at the time. It wasnt difficult at all because Cuomo was a polarizing figure. In the Carter administration, there was no real sense of what the Federal Reserve really was, what it did, how to deal with it. Before you get into that, can I ask you another question about the arrangements on the 1993 budget? I think Bush inspires greater loyalty than Clinton, just does. The Senate Finance Committee is the most powerful committee, Bentsen had been chairman for quite a few years, was seen universally as a very effective, powerful chairman. Way back in season one of Shameless, Fiona got a housekeeping job at a hotel. Then later in the process I was asked if I would go do a war room for healthcare of the type we did for the budget. How did the second transition compare with that first one in terms of cooperativeness, in terms of being organized and. This giant controversy erupted over that. But in any event, the cooperation in both cases was optimal. Can you tell us about how that unfolded, your perceptions of Mrs. Clintons role in all of this? I remember sitting there, thinking to myself, This guy just did something that I could no more imagine myself capable of doing than I could jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. They were using very powerful weaponsI think .20 caliber weapons. I mean, it can be in private, it can be in print, it can be any other way. You had the bilateral talks with the Japanese and the G7 format. I was not involved in the decision as to the sequencing of healthcare versus welfare reform. A lot of people didnt realize and I didnt entirely realize the regulatory responsibilities of the RTC at the time. I think Clinton recognized that, by virtue of his being an outsider in Washingtonhe never served in Washingtonhe needed a link to the Congress, a really superb link, of the type that Bentsen afforded, especially since Clintons first priorities were economics.The Senate Finance Committee was going to be, more than any other single place, where the action was. You had been given a portfolio before that time? When we then proceeded on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which was the next very dramatic moment. What did you find on the ground when you got there, if I could? It was hard to make any progress at all because the Japanese really didnt want to agree to any of this. Did Senator [Edward] Kennedy figure at all as a help or a hindrance or what in the budget battle, he wasnt really a key player? Erskine Bowles had to testify and so forth. Were there follow-up meetings with Japan that you were involved in after the summit? I made two trips to Little Rock. It wasnt difficult. So there wasnt all that much time, maybe ten days, twelve days, between opening the office, showing up down there and then having the Treasury Secretary and the rest of the members of the economic team chosen. Here we are in June 2003 and the election as we all know is November 04, so its 16 months or so Then, that sent the ball in motion so to speak, in terms of that being the focus of discussion, although the senior members of that group were pretty united on the fact that we should make a real effort on the deficit. Sometimes without him and sometimes with him, but if Mrs. Clinton was there, everybody else was. Youre only there because he allowed you to be, and you owe him a debt of gratitude for that because without him no service, and without service your life is less. There were no violations of ethical guidelines, there was certainly no legal violation, and that proved to be pretty meaningless in the context of the uproar. Certainly the appointment of someone with the stature of Rubin signaled that this was not going to be a junior level kind of a thing and it was not going to be headed by one of the usual powerful people, OMB [Office of Management and Budget] or Secretary of the Treasury. Youve been good to give us so much time. By and large Bentsen talked to Clinton when Clinton called him.That was the way it worked. Maybe we ought to move to the actual setting up of these priorities and the choices made and that process, from post-election into the actual post-inauguration time. But I didnt know where the President was on NAFTA. His Presidency itself I think was a very strong one, but it doesnt make it into the top five or six. I taught at Georgetown for a little while, and the distinguishing features of the students that I would have had ten or twelve years ago were that they had a high degree of interest in national and international politics. So maybe among the so-called populists there was a lot of anxiety as they saw this axis, the Bentsen-Rubin axis, develop and recognizing that both were relatively conservative. [laughter]. Rubin was well known as an economic conservative, and Bentsen, of course, had a very long legislative record, which was in the same direction. Was there a perceivable influence from your perspective on having Perot in the campaign, making the deficit an issue from his vantage point? Were they talking broad strategy, were they keeping whip counts? As I recall, Al Gore wanted it, cared a great deal about it, to some considerable degree got his way on it. The Clinton process was much more flexible, and I think better, than the Carter process, but that reflected the personalities of the two men. It will be differences of style, differences of perception. Were you privy to the conversations that he had? Thats why the current President may turn out to be lucky. I knew what the ATF was, but not much more than that. We were both quite active in student government. But the other approach for a short-term stimulus would be to do what this President did, or maybe it was the Democrats that forced him to do when he took office, which is refundable credit that goes out in the middle of the summer of your first year in office. Im not sure it makes entire sense, however, to judge or to assess a Presidents contribution by the standard of those who are given, in effect, a free gift of power to deal with a crisis. You say you knew Rubin well, but did you have a sense that in the other places where economic policy-making is made there was ever any tension over this kind of an arrangement? That was a period during which [Boris] Yeltsin was just coming onto the stage. Ive seen it happen so often in business as well as in government. Then it went down to defeat. No. In fact, Carters very first initiative was his stimulus program, neither of which incidentally succeeded, both of which were dropped and failed entirely. When we took office and took a hard look at the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought. Eventually they did, but it wasnt because of this agreement, big macro forces had them do it. The hearings process really kind of kicks it off. So in the early period, Id have to go back and look at when the President laid the legislation forward, but I want to say it was first of March or something like that. Are you including in this the difference of approach between the campaign-oriented, the political people, and the policy people, as well as the differences among. My view, theres no single answer to that at all, but if I were to list the elements of my response, the first one would be post-election. Was there anything particular in his record in Arkansas that became sticking points with people in the community that you were attempting to raise money from? I follow it pretty closely, and I have a hard time figuring it out. I thought, All right, well get half a loaf. I dont really think Whitewater, at least this part of it, was terribly different from some of the other such situations that weve all seen, whether its the John Tower hearings or its Bert Lance or whatever it is. You had been designated the chief operating officer of the RTC [Resolution Trust Corp.]? The campaign, making the deficit estimates, they were considerably worse than we had thought Japanese really want! 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