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TRANSFORMATIVE PRESIDENTS9.8.08

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JOHN SHATTUCK: So good afternoon and welcome to the John F. Kennedy

Library. I’m John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on

behalf of our board, several of whom are here tonight, and our Library Director,

Tom Putnam, I want to tell you it’s my privilege to inaugurate an exciting series

of fall programs that will go on during a remarkable season that is going on right

now in our country. With the presidential campaign in full swing, we are going to

take a close look throughout the fall at some of the challenges facing our next

president. And tonight we’ve assembled an all-star cast here on our stage to

discuss the kind of leadership that will be needed if any of these challenges are to

be met. And tonight’s program is part of a special forum series around the theme

of our new Kennedy Library Exhibit, “The Making of a President,” which I invite

you all to visit at some point in our museum. The exhibit is made possible by

generous support from the AIG Private Client Group. I also want to thank the

sponsors of our Kennedy Library Forums, starting with the lead sponsor, Bank of

America, and our other generous forum supporters: Boston Capital, the Lowell

Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, The Boston Foundation; and our

media sponsors, The Boston Globe, NECN and WBUR which broadcasts all the

Kennedy Library Forums on Sunday evenings at eight.

On January 14, 1960, John F. Kennedy gave a speech about presidential

leadership. He gave that speech a few days after declaring his own candidacy for

president. And I think two things stand out about that speech. First, it seems truly

incredible that an entire campaign took place from the moment he declared until

the day he was elected within only 11 months, compared to the years of

presidential campaigning and maybe even decades that are going on today.

Even more interesting I think was what JFK, dismissed as we know by many

pundits as too young and inexperienced to be elected, what he had to say on the

subject of presidential leadership. He began his speech with a quip about the kind


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of president Dwight Eisenhower had been, who was to be his predecessor, of

course. And then he boldly went on to describe the president he intended to be

rather explicitly. And here is what he had to say and I quote, “The President’s

message,” referring to President Eisenhower, “reminds me of the exhortation from

King Lear that goes, ‘I will do such things. What they are I know not. But they

shall be the wonders of the world.’ In the times that lie ahead, the American

presidency will demand more than ringing manifestos issued from the rear of

battle,” he said. “They will demand that the president place himself in the very

thick of the fight; that he care passionately about the fate of the people he leads;

that he be willing to serve them at the risk of incurring their displeasure. For the

presidency must be the center of moral leadership in our country, a bully pulpit as

President Theodore Roosevelt described it, for only the president represents the

national interest and upon him alone converge all the needs and aspirations on all

parts of the country, all nations of the world.” Quite a statement.

Now, let’s fast forward to today and ask ourselves, what would it take to be this

kind of president in 2009? And how risky would it be to proclaim during the

campaign that is what you intend to be? John Kennedy certainly took that risk in

1960 and it paid off handsomely for him, not only in his election but some would

say, perhaps, in the judgment of history.

And I think to answer these timely and urgent questions we have an extraordinary

group of experts on our stage this evening. Let me introduce them to you in the

order that they are seated to my left. Joe Nye is the University Distinguished

Service Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the author of

a new book, The Powers to Lead, that explores the qualities of leadership needed

for the wise exercise of power in a wide variety of situations. His earlier book,

Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics published four years ago, has

had a very significant influence on the way we think about the exercise of

American power today. And Joe is no ivory tower scholar, having served in key


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policy positions in both the Carter and the Clinton administrations, most recently

as assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and before that

as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council and Deputy Undersecretary of

State. When he returned from Washington in 1995, Joe served for eight years with

great distinction as the Dean of the Kennedy School. And we welcome you back,

Joe, as a frequent speaker here at the Kennedy Library.

Cass Sunstein, seated next, has joined the Harvard Law School Faculty this fall

after many years at the University of Chicago. In the words of Harvard Law Dean,

Elena Kagan who recruited him, he’s “the pre-eminent scholar of our time, the

most wide-ranging, the most prolific, the most cited and the most influential.”

He’s the author of 15 books and hundreds of articles and has crossed academic

boarders throughout his career to offer insights on law, public policy, economics

and psychology. His new book has the intriguing title, and let me make sure I

pronounce this correctly, either Nudge or Nudge: Improving Decisions about

Health, Wealth and Happiness. And in it Cass offers a unique perspective, neither

left nor right, on many hot button issues today. He’s worked at the Department of

Justice, clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and has

been an expert adviser on legal reform in many countries including China, South

Africa and Russia. And perhaps, important for today’s discussion, Cass Sunstein

has been an informal advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Bob Kuttner is co-founder of both The American Prospect and the Economic

Policy Institute, two of the most respected centers of progressive political

commentary. For years he’s provided thoughtful analysis and criticism of

domestic and international economic policy, is a long-time columnist for Business

Week and is a writer for the New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and

The New Yorker. Earlier in his career, Bob was chief investigator for the Senate

Banking Committee and a staff writer for The Washington Post. He’s written a

number of widely-praised books and his long-time project -- self-proclaimed and I


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think well recognized -- has been to revive the politics of harnessing capitalism to

serve the broad public interest. His project has led to his new book, Obama’s

Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative

Presidency, which was published this month.

To moderate this discussion about leadership among presidents, I’m delighted to

welcome back to the Kennedy Library my friend Martha Raddatz, who is the

Chief White House Correspondent for ABC News. Martha is a three-time Emmy-

award winner and one of our nation’s most respected journalists. Before going to

the White House she covered national security and foreign policy for ABC News,

and before that for National Public Radio at the Pentagon, the State Department

and overseas, particularly in the Balkans where I was fortunate to meet her when

she was covering the war in Bosnia and I was serving as Assistant Secretary of

State for Human Rights. Martha began her career here in Boston, as all great

reporters do, as a reporter for WCVB TV. Last year I can say she truly electrified

our audience at a Kennedy Library Forum on Veterans Day, featuring her own,

wonderful book of the stories of American soldiers in Iraq and their families back

home entitled, A Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family. And I’m pleased

to say that the books of our three panelists that have just been published are on

sale in our book store and they will be signing them after the forum.

So please join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library, Joe Nye,

Cass Sunstein, Bob Kuttner and Martha Raddatz. [Applause]

MARTHA RADDATZ: Thanks very much, John. It is great to be back here. I

feel like I come back here every couple of years now, and I see a lot of familiar

faces which makes me feel great. I have to say, being Chief White House

correspondent right now means I never get on the air [laughter] because it’s …

My mother actually called me and she said, “Tell me the truth. Have you been

fired?” [Laughter] So there’s very little difference between being a lame duck


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president and someone covering a lame duck president. [Laughter] But my perch

there at the White House has been fascinating for me. I’ve been there these last

three years and watching President Bush and his style of leadership has truly been

interesting. [Laughter] Having a national security background as well and

watching his leadership in the military, watching leadership at the Pentagon and

seeing what’s happening in the White House is really a fascinating look at history.

You probably all saw the Bob Woodward’s book that came out this week called

The War Within. I would pretty much describe it that way as well. The backdoor

and the behind-the-scenes goings-on at the White House is something to see. And

I’ve had a significant amount of time talking with people in the White House over

the years and seen that. So I am, myself, fascinated by leadership and what it

means and what it has meant throughout history and what it takes to be a good

leader.

And certainly, in this campaign season it’s something we are all thinking about.

We are going to try not to make this too partisan today and really, truly talk about

transformative presidencies. I know we are here in Massachusetts [laughter] and I

know the panel seems a little stacked [laughter] but we are going to do our best to

look at it in a non-partisan way, which is impossible at some point and they will

go off on that.

I want to start with you, Cass, if you will, and talk about historically what we see,

who we saw as transformative leaders, transformative presidents.

CASS SUNSTEIN: I think the obvious ones in the 20th century are Johnson,

Reagan and Roosevelt, with Johnson being maybe the least obvious of the three.

And maybe the way to make some purchase on this is to distinguish between

transformative presidents who are driven by ideological commitments as Johnson

and Reagan were. The country was on notice, certainly with Reagan’s campaign


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and shortly after Johnson’s succession to the White House that we had someone

with a set of commitments that would leave the country fundamentally altered if

he succeeded.

There are others who are not ideology driven but who are crisis driven. And here

the leading example really is Roosevelt who ran, not as a transformative president

but as a kind of upbeat guy who knew the country was in trouble. But we didn’t

have a large set of ideological commitments that FDR was speaking for in the

campaign. So I see those as three exemplars, the 20th century exemplars and see

the distinction between crisis driven and leadership driven.

We’d also, I think, with respect to transformative presidents want to make another

kind of distinction between the visionaries -- people who run with a large scale

vision -- and the incrementalists, who run even if they speak at times about large-

scale change, who really are by nature, incremental types. We think of obvious

examples, Bush, one, I think Carter, two, were just by nature incrementalists. And

for all their occasionally large talk, it was clear that they didn’t have anything

significant in mind.

One final distinction, if you will permit -- this is what lawyers like to do, make

distinctions -- is we can think of transformative presidents who have kind of

substantive vision of the direction in which the country should go. More reliance

on markets, less use of regulation as a tool, more protection of poor people, a

different relationship between the US and the world, that would all be substantive

stuff.

And others who have either by virtue of their substantive commitments or kind of

independently a set of institutional changes they want to bring out, such as a

greatly strengthened presidency. Bush after 9/11 really wanted that. Or a weaker

national government in favor of a stronger set of state authorities, as Reagan did.


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Or a Supreme Court that was more deferential to political processes as Roosevelt

wanted.

So it is probably important to keep in mind through the discussion the difference

between changing our institutions and changing our substantive commitment.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Okay, Bob, which bring us to where we are now, today.

And when you look at McCain and when you look at Obama, what challenges do

they face and what are the possibilities of having a transformative president?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, if I may, let me pick up on …

MARTHA RADDATZ: Do. Go ahead, please.

ROBERT KUTTNER: … a little bit on some of the things Cass was saying. I

think a transformative president typically occurs against a background of crisis.

And I think Cass is right. Sometimes the president has a very deliberate agenda,

as Lyndon Johnson most clearly did. Other times it takes a president a little time

to find an agenda, although I think Roosevelt found it within a matter of weeks

and became a transformational progressive, even though on the campaign trail he

was for a balanced budget. He was against public works. He was even against

deposit insurance. I mean he was. In fact, a Republican, Arthur Vandenburg(?)

had to conspire with Roosevelt’s own vice president and sneak the deposit

insurance into what became the Class-Degal Act, which Roosevelt almost vetoed.

So a lot of things we think of as quintessentially Rooseveltian he had to come to

because of the forces around him, because of the crises that he inherited. And I

think the relationship between reformist groups in the country and the presidency

is a big part of the story.


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Of course, the other great transformational president I think is Lincoln. And in

each case, you have a social movement. The abolitionist movement in the case of

Lincoln, the industrial labor movement in the case of Roosevelt, and a lot of

progressives in Congress and, of course, the civil rights movement in the case of

Johnson—pushing the president to be more radical than he intended to be. And, in

some cases, Johnson being the quintessential one, the president himself sends a

signal, as Johnson did to King, that he wants to be pushed by the movement.

After all, the Congress that passed the ’64 Civil Rights Act was the same

Congress, the same 88th Congress with the conservative southern Democrats, that

had refused to pass the same bill that Kennedy introduced. And it was Johnson’s

ability to work in tandem with, sometimes against, but playing off of the energy

of the civil rights movement and coupled with his legislative genius that allowed

him to transform how the public thought of the civil rights agenda.

Now, this is a long-winded way of backing into the question that Martha posed.

The book that I recently wrote, Obama’s Challenge, was stimulated by an article

that I failed to get Doris Goodwin to write on 2008 as a potentially transformative

moment. And she, instead, agreed to sit still for an interview, which we did. And

we both felt in that interview, which was the germ of this book -- which is

dedicated to Doris -- that Obama faced both the kind of crisis that could be a

transformative moment, and had things in his character that might allow him to be

a transformative president, if he could first get elected.

And I think it’s interesting that a lot of people, a lot of progressives like me,

looked at Edwards, looked at Hillary Clinton, and looked at Obama. And if you

just parse it out in terms of their stands on issues, Edwards was the most

progressive; Hillary was a little more progressive on a lot of issues; Obama was

the most centrist. But I think a lot of liberals gave him a pass on the issues

because they saw in him the seeds of a potentially great leader. And I think

whether he would be a great president if elected and whether he manages to get


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elected, are increasingly becoming the same question. Does he have the nerve to

stand for transformative change, in this case economic change? I mean what you

have today is you have a very serious financial crisis on top of a slow-burning 30-

year, not a crisis but a weakening of the economic security and economic

prospects of ordinary Americans. If he can make that the theme of the election,

he wins. And if he can make that the theme of a presidency, he could be a

transformative presidency. If he fails, as so often is the case, cultural issues --

most recently symbolized by Governor Palin -- will once again trump economic

issues. And I think that key question, whether he rises to the occasion both as a

candidate and a president, will determine whether he gets to the White House and

whether he is a great president or whether the economic crisis that he inherits will

swamp him.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Joe, do you want to just pick up on that?

JOSEPH NYE: Yeah, I would pick up on Cass’ good list. I would just add

Woodrow Wilson in the 20th century. And on the question of whether a

transformational president is somebody you can judge during the election

campaign, you’ve got to distinguish style from substance. You can have an

inspirational style but not somebody who is really trying to change things in a

deep, substantive way. I think Bill Clinton fits that, very inspirational in style but

wasn’t really going for major transformation.

So we as voters then have to face the question of, how can you tell? We have a

history in this country of presidents who run on one thing and do another.

Remember Woodrow Wilson said, in 1916, “I kept you out of war.” Within four

months we were in war. Lyndon Johnson, also; Franklin Roosevelt as well in

1940, Lyndon Johnson in ’64 -- we have a long history of having campaigns in

which we hear one thing from a president and wind up with quite the opposite,

often quite soon after the event.


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I think the interesting question for us as voters, as we try to judge whether a

president is going to be transformational or not, is to try to get hints from either

their biographies or the way they’ve run their campaigns as to what their

emotional IQ is going to look like. Now, emotional IQ sounds like a fancy term.

You all know what IQ is. It’s the ability to do well in the French school system of

1890. [Laughter] You know, math and spatial relations. And psychologists show

it can account for 20% of success in life. Of the missing 80%, part of it is

emotional IQ, which psychologists who study this argue is the ability to master

your emotions and use them to attract others to get things done.

And that’s a very important dimension because no matter what the candidate says

about change or the change that he is going to make, the question is is he going to

have the emotional IQ to be able to pull this off. And in that sense, I think it is

worth remembering -- to pick up on a point that Cass made -- which is Franklin

Roosevelt did not have a plan for solving the Depression. He did not have a plan

for anything. He experimented badly, going from one thing to another, often in

contradictory ways. But he had a sense of who he was, what he wanted to do, a

sense of direction. And there is the famous story that when Chief Justice Holmes,

Oliver Wendell Holmes was introduced to the new president he was asked, “What

do you think of him?” And he said, “Second class intellect but first class

temperament,” which in modern terms would be great emotional IQ. And I think

the important thing then for us to try to judge is, not are one of these people

saying exactly how they are going to change but are they going to be able to pull

it off and carry it out.

My own feeling is, if you look at the current campaign, if you look at Obama and

McCain, both of them -- now that McCain has adopted the change slogan and is

back to being the maverick candidate -- they are both saying that they are going to

bring about change. But then you have to go back and look at a combination of


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biography, how they used their campaigns, how they have mastered the crises

they have seen, and will they have the emotional intelligence to actually pull this

off.

I’ll express my biases here. I think Obama probably wins on that score. I think

that McCain is admirable. I know him. There are many things I like about him.

But if I look at his temperament and I look at Obama’s temperament, I have a

suspicion that Obama probably has more of that emotional intelligence. McCain

has a reputation for having a ferocious temper. He often shoots from the hip. He

pulls Hail Mary passes in his campaign.

If you compare that with the way Obama dealt with the Jeremiah Wright issue, of

turning lemons into lemonade with one of the best speeches we’ve had about race

in America since Martin Luther King—I think that tells you something about

whether this is a person who will be able to master the emotions to bring about or

implement the change that he talks about. As I say, I’m speaking as somebody

who has a preference, but I’m trying also to …

MARTHA RADDATZ: Like I said, the panel is a little stacked.

JOSEPH NYE: I’m trying to put this in historical context so that we realize that

the things that are said in campaigns really don’t tell us voters what is going to

happen. And we are looking at these other signals to try and get the answer.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Can I also bring up—when we talk about history and

we talk about Franklin Roosevelt, they didn’t have bloggers. They didn’t have 24-

hour news cycles. I know we talk a lot about the 24-hour news cycle, but this

campaign has seemed just extraordinary to me about how quickly issues are in the

news and they are out of the news, that the depth is very different in covering this


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campaign, that I don't know that voters really understand the issues and where the

candidates are in this.

So when you say, if he manages to take the economy and put that in the lead he

will win, how can he do that? How do you transform, how do you lead, how do

you run a campaign in this environment?

JOSEPH NYE: I think, to some extent, you have to go negative in the best sense

of the word. The past eight years have not been very good for ordinary people.

And I think Obama has the skills to be what I call ‘president as teacher.’ There are

lots of teachable moments. In the past week we just had two of them. And even in

the era of sound-bite television and very short statements—for example, you

could have taken the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac bailout and said, “Ladies and

gentlemen, this is the fruit of 30 years of conservative ideology, which is not only

wrecking the mortgage market, but the spill over from the wreckage of the

mortgage market is wrecking the economy, is wrecking financial markets. And

this was a public institution, invented by Roosevelt, doing its job very well until it

was privatized and the wise guys got hold of it, and used it as a way to enrich

insiders and destabilize the whole mortgage market. And if you want more of the

same you should vote for John McCain.” There are teachable moments in what’s

going on throughout the economy that, as a Democrat and as someone who really

admires the potential of Barack Obama, I would be happier if I saw him seizing

more such teachable moments.

And I want to turn to Cass if I may because Cass has described, as quoted in a

recent New York Times Sunday piece, Obama as something of an incrementalist,

something of a hybrid, partly Chicago economist who respects markets. And I

would submit, given what is going on in the economy, if he is going to be elected

and if he is going to be a president who is not swamped by the economic travails

that are still to come, he is going to need to be more than an incrementalist. So I


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wonder how you combine his incrementalist temperament and his … Excuse me

for stealing your role.

MARTHA RADDATZ: No, that’s fine, fine, fine. I’m just here to facilitate.

JOSEPH NYE: … his desire to bridge differences, his desire to not have too

sharp a partisan edge with the enormous economic task that he is going to have to

confront if he is going to be elected.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And, actually, I’m just going to steal it back for a

second. And add to that, too—one of the things I have noticed about Barack

Obama in the last few weeks, is the candidates, because of what’s happening, get

tentative—and how they battle that. They have to calibrate what they say. And do

they lose who they really are and how do you deal with that? So if you can answer

both questions.

CASS SUNSTEIN: I’m thinking that this mild-mannered law professor, I found

my picture on Keith Olbermann is like the worst person ever. [Laughter] So I’m

acutely … You didn’t see that episode? Is it called an episode of Keith

Olbermann? You didn’t see that episode of Keith Olbermann, I hope? Okay.

MARTHA RADDATZ: We will be sure to find it on the Internet.

CASS SUNSTEIN: All right. There are a couple of points here. One is about

Obama’s incrementalism and the other is about the 24-hour cycle. And they might

be thought to be related, yes? I don’t believe I used the word “incrementalist” to

describe Obama. And I wouldn’t use that term either for him or for Senator

McCain. So one thing interesting about the current race -- neither is, by nature,

and incrementalist. I don’t think that is the right word.


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What I would describe Obama as, and I don't know that this term applies to

McCain but it might, is a minimalist in the following sense -- in the sense of

Justice Felix Frankfurter, of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. That is, minimalists in

Obama sense don’t like to tell people that their deepest commitments are crap.

[Laughter] Minimalists like to proceed in a way that takes on board rather than

repudiating the deepest commitment of their fellow citizens.

Now, this approach to governance isn’t typically associated with our

transformative presidents. So if you think of Reaganism, it is captured I think by

an idea, a term, which is the Constitution in exile, a term for the Constitution of

the 1930s, 1930, before Roosevelt got there. So much of Reagan’s program was

really thinking the Constitution went off the rails in the New Deal and we needed

to return to a pre-existing system.

For Roosevelt, it was the second Bill of Rights, which is, I think, his greatest

speech, which suggests a right to education, a right to a decent job, a right to a

home, and believe it or not, a right to healthcare. Roosevelt urged in 1944, which

he understood basically retrospective on what his presidency was about. So there

it the Constitution in exile. There is the second Bill of Rights. And for Johnson it

was the great “We Shall Overcome” speech. And none of these three were

minimalist in the sense of attempting to take on board the commitments of

citizens who repudiated the values for which the official in question was thought

to speak. But Obama, I believe, is a minimalist. And this is what probably irritates

Bob a bit and frightens him, in the sense that he doesn’t want to say to people of

any kind, “What you think is wrong and we are going to go in another direction.”

He would prefer to say, “What you think most deeply is compatible with the

direction we can share.” Yes?

Now, that needn’t be incrementalist, because Obama is something new in

American politics. I don’t think we’ve seen a presidential candidate like this. He


PAGE 15

is a minimalist as Clinton occasionally was, too, but he is also a visionary as

Clinton never was. And visionary in the sense that he believes in many domains,

large-scale change is necessary, indispensable, possible. So in the domain of

energy independence and climate change, Obama really wants to reorient practice

in a way that is not like Clinton, not like Bush I, not even like Bush II, except in

some ways after 9/11, in its size. But what he wants to do is to rely on markets

and to tell the skeptics, “We are going to use market incentives. The Republicans

were right all along to reject command and control regulation, and Paul Krugman

hated that, said the Republicans were right on that. We’re going to take on the

market enthusiasm in the interest of our goal, which is less reliance on forms of

energy that simultaneously endanger national security, hurt the economy, and

threaten to change the world’s climate.”

So what I would say about Obama is he is a visionary minimalist, really. He is, it

happens, someone who has spent a lot of time at the University of Chicago and

someone who very much appreciates the power and the values associated with

free markets. He wants to use them rather than to reject them.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Will the gentleman yield for a question?

CASS SUNSTEIN: Yeah. Yeah.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And then Joe is going to jump in here.

ROBERT KUTTNER: I think command and control is one of the most

successful straw men inserted into debate by the right wing. And I think it has

been so successful because it has even captured the vocabulary of people as

brilliant as Cass Sunstein. I mean it seems to me, if I may, that if you are … take

the acid rain amendments of 1990. If you are saying that over the next 30 years

sulfur dioxide is not going to exceed X, and we are going to use market


PAGE 16

mechanisms to get there, that is not the free market. And it was Sir Nicholas

Stern who said that global climate change is history’s greatest change of market

failure. And it is. And I think it is terribly important for people who believe in the

mixed economy, as Cass does and as I do, and who believe that markets often fail,

not to be so cowed by Chicago-speak, that we try to argue down Chicago

economics in the idiom of Chicago economics and in the course of so doing,

validate 95% of their premises.

CASS SUNSTEIN: If I …

MARTHA RADDATZ: I want Joe to jump in here, too.

JOSEPH NYE: Just to get in on this. I think this quest of market-non-market

may be a little bit overblown. The question is, how do you combine the two. It is

like hard and soft powers, how do you put these together? One or the other is not

enough. To be smart power you have to be able to combine. And that often means

the intuitive sense that a leader needs, that call contextual intelligence as to how

to take moments and use them.

A good example is I just reviewed Tom Friedman’s new book on the front page of

The Washington Post Book Review yesterday. He calls it The World is Hot, Flat

and Crowded. And the argument basically is that we have to do something really

serious about the issue of renewable energy. And he makes the point, which I

think is correct, that if George W. Bush had declared a USA Patriot tax of $1 or

$2 dollars a gallon on gasoline, we would be paying the same price for gasoline

today. But instead of OPEC collecting those taxes and using it for our enemies,

we would collect those taxes and invest it in renewable energy.

That’s a question of leadership, of knowing when to use market, non-market,

when government can intervene. And that contextual intelligence is I think


PAGE 17

absolutely crucial. So I think there are things that can be done. And the interesting

question early ’09 is whether McCain or Obama, whoever is elected, is going to

have the guts to use that moment to say, “We have a major problem, a major crisis

on energy and environment and we have got to do something.” I mean the market-

non-market to me doesn’t capture that. It is a question of how does a political

leader mobilize people to see that there is a major crisis.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And, Joe, if you will go on a little bit more about that

between soft power and hard power and you write about this, I know, and that

combination in finding the middle of that leadership, if we can sort of get back to

that leadership idea.

JOSEPH NYE: Well, I think the interesting question for a leader is to know how

to both be decisive but also attract people to a vision. I mean George W. Bush had

a vision and his father was criticized for not having a vision. Yet if you look back

at it, George H.W. Bush, Bush 41 had one of the better foreign policies we’ve

seen in the last 50 years. And George W. Bush I think has had one of the worst.

And you could say, “What’s the difference?” And I think the difference is how

they conceived of leadership. Bush 41 conceived of the leader’s role as making

sure that he got all sorts of advice from all sources and acted accordingly. And he

presided over the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany and the

expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait extraordinarily well, very deft. And

this was a man without, in quotes, “a vision.”

George W. Bush said the role of the leader is to have a vision, to appoint a team,

to delegate to them and to be the decider, the ultimate decider. But if your vision

is grandiose -- transforming the Middle East by coercive democratization -- and

your team is deeply divided, as his team was, and you don’t police the

delegations, and you don’t know what information is coming to you, you wind up

with a foreign policy we wound up with.


PAGE 18

So here are two presidents who are genetically as close to each other as any we

are ever likely to see [laughter] and yet had totally opposite foreign policies. A lot

had to do with their leadership styles.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Coming at it …

JOSEPH NYE: Forty-one had it.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Joe, and anyone, coming out of the Bush presidency,

then, what are challenges—is it easier to be a transformative president now? I

mean because of how America looks at George Bush and how bad his ratings are,

what does that set up for the next president?

JOSEPH NYE: Well, George W. Bush saw himself as transformative. George

H. W. Bush didn’t. And yet, ironically, George H. W. Bush provided over a huge

transformation in American foreign policy for the good. And George W. Bush, to

the extent there was a transformation, it was for the worst. I think you have to be

awfully carefully about the way we throw these terms around. It has a lot to do

with the style of the president and the style of leadership. Does he know how to

combine hard and soft power? Does he reach out for all sorts of information? Is

he open to ideas? And that’s the kind of thing, I think, we should look at as we

judge who we think will be most successful.

MARTHA RADDATZ: But, Bob, when you look at the American public and

where the American public is now after the Bush presidency, and factor that in to

what a leader has to do and how that changes.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, I think the American public is looking for

definition. I think the average citizen is very frustrated about his or her daily life


PAGE 19

economically, everything from the insecurity of healthcare to someone having to

choose between a sick child and the security of a job. And things that ought to be

politicized have been de-politicized both by Bush’s ideology and by his

performance. You have a kind of … You remember revolution of rising

expectations? We have a passivity of diminished expectations. Things that were

once the province of politics have been de-politicized.

And so, I think a leader, whether it is McCain or Obama who can give definition,

political definition to what people are experiencing in their private lives, could

mobilize public sentiment and turn public sentiment into a powerful ally as the

great presidents did. Certainly Roosevelt, certainly Johnson on civil rights,

certainly Lincoln. And that to me is the key question. Otherwise, pocketbook

frustrations are going to continue to be privatized and people are going to blame

themselves for failing to make the right decision, getting into the wrong

occupation at the wrong time, making the wrong bet on the wrong employer as far

as healthcare is concerned and not seeing this as something that is a province of

public policy.

I wanted to give Cass a minute to argue back because I hit him with some fairly

fierce charges.

CASS SUNSTEIN: Well …

MARTHA RADDATZ: He seemed pretty unruffled.

CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, I’m pausing over actually a good point Bob made,

[laughter] which was the relationship between energized social movements and

transformative presidencies. And so a hypothesis we might provisionally adopt is

that a pre-condition for a genuinely transformative presidency, as opposed to a


PAGE 20

successful presidency, is an energized social movement that has particular goals

in mind. And then that relates to the present moment, doesn’t it?

We would want to ask whether in history all of our transformative presidents

haven’t been vehicles in one or another sense of social movements that reach their

peak at the time when the person occupied the office. On command and control,

evil, bad and markets being enlisted for public good, desirable—on that

dichotomy, which Bob doesn’t love, I guess all I want to say for present purposes

is that I use that not to celebrate University of Chicago economics or to batter

command and control, but to get some understanding of Obama’s approach in its

early stages, admittedly. And where the approach seems to be one that attempts to

take on board people with multiple, different commitments. And to say to people

who are alarmed at the prospect of an Obama presidency, “What you care most

about, I’m interested in, too.” Yes? That’s the minimalist dimension.

And what I wanted to have at twist for that, which does fit, I think, Obama’s own

style, is that this is not associated with incrementalism. On the contrary, that I

think his bet, which is very different from the standard left and I think the

standard right -- though you could imagine a conservative version -- his bet is that

the best way to get large scale transformation is in a way that takes on board

others. That otherwise the legislature is too badly split; citizens are too badly split.

For energy, for foreign policy we need to have a sense that people with their

divergent commitments can go along.

Now, that doesn’t take a normative stand. I’m not saying that Bob is wrong in

what … I happen to think he is. But it doesn’t matter whether he is or not for this

to be an adequate description of what Obama is up to.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Can I just have …


PAGE 21

MARTHA RADDATZ: Yes, you may. I will yield the time to you.

ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, I think what is interesting is that, although

Roosevelt and Johnson built very broad coalitions by being respectful of people’s

yearnings, there were also bad guys. There were economic royalists in Johnson’s

cosmology, just as there were southern racists. And Johnson was willing to say

there were people who were outside of the vision that the Good Society stood for.

But he was willing to mobilize everybody else. And I think if Obama is for

transformative change in, say, energy use, and he relates that to people’s desire

for affordable, secure energy and can do it in a way that co-ops or brings in

people who think his values are different, more power to him.

At the same time, there are some people who are enamored of gas-guzzling SUVs

who may, de facto, be somewhat outside that consensus. And the question is do

you try and make the consensus so broad that it turns out to be meaningless. That

is a tightrope act that I think that the best politicians have done very well. You

split the opposition but you don’t split the difference. You define an embracing

vision that includes the vision of most people. And to me, that’s the stuff of

transformative leadership.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Joe, I want you to talk about the fact that either one of

these men, if they are president, and you too, Cass, because I know you have

written about this—that there is room to disappoint in how you deal with the

public. And probably in particular, and people have told me Obama, I mean

people covering the campaign, some of them said, “You know, these crowds, they

are enormous. They are so excited. If he gets in, there is enormous room to

disappoint.” So talk about a little bit, both of them as objectively as you can over

there.


PAGE 22

JOSEPH NYE: Well, I think if you look at the risks for a McCain presidency, it

will be whether the change that he has now picked up as a slogan or theme for the

last two months of his campaign is something he is able to build or do with the

constituency he has. I don’t think he has a constituency for change that would

achieve what Cass or Bob said. So his big danger of disappointment is he will

come in and find that, you know, if he is serious what he said about energy, that

drilling isn’t going to be sufficient. If you look at the question of what you are

going to do with nuclear, it is a good idea but it takes a long time.

And that we are going to find we are as much a prisoner of imported oil as we

were before he came in. That leads to disappointment. I think it’s going to take

something of a major rallying of people to the idea that we are selling the rope to

hang ourselves as a people. That as we transfer more and more resources to oil

regimes in the Middle East, where it leaks out to terrorist groups, we are

endangering ourselves. So not only are we endangering ourselves in the long run

through what we are doing to the climate, we are endangering ourselves in the

short run by taking these resources, tax resources, and transferring them to OPEC

countries instead of using them at home to provide adequate subsidies that you

can move more quickly on renewables and move down the learning curves so that

they do become market sustainable.

Obama I think would have the disappointment factor, too. But if he addresses it

more clearly in the campaign as something that is going to be a major issue, that

he takes this seriously, that this is going to be something that he will work on, he

may have something of a mandate. I’m not sure McCain has got as much of a

mandate on that issue.

So just taking that one, particular issue, which certainly was a major issue at both

the Democratic and Republican conventions, I think the question is whether the


PAGE 23

underlying constituency is going to be there for McCain on that as opposed to

Obama. Thought both will run into resistance of special interests.

CASS SUNSTEIN: It’s a fabulous question. And it has interesting asymmetries

between McCain and Obama. So the question is if McCain is elected, what kind

of disappointments would there be. There is one that is maybe important to

underline, which is the social conservatives who are now so energized by the

prospect of a McCain-Palin presidency will be very disappointed if in four years

Roe against Wade is still the law of the land and the Supreme Court hasn’t been

even more dramatically shifted in their preferred direction than it has been since

1980. So there is a lot of rage out there on the part of some of the most

enthusiastic, current supporters of the McCain presidency. At the betrayal, as they

understand it, of the Bush-Bush presidencies. They supported him. They worked

hard for him. They didn’t get what they wanted. Gay marriage is lawful in

Massachusetts and California. There’s no constitutional amendment going the

other way. McCain himself apparently doesn’t want one.

And on an issue where McCain does have very strong convictions, that is he

wants Roe against Wade to get overruled and his campaign site says he wants to

start there and then to stop abortion at the state level, too. If he can’t deliver that,

that’s going to be a terrible disappointment. The other one, which is less tractable

I think, is if the economy continues to be difficult. Then economic interest, the

thing McCain is more hopeful for economic recovery than Obama because in their

view, McCain is more market friendly and growth oriented. If that just doesn’t

happen because of what appears very possible, the sub-prime crisis will create

economic trouble for a number of years. They are not going to have a place to go.

But they are going to be very upset and have a number of proposals as,

incidentally, President Bush has too, face a number of proposals from, e.g., the

American Enterprise Institute, Cato, and so forth. And they are going to be struck

if the president and dismayed if the president says, “No. I don’t like that idea. So


PAGE 24

there’s a real risk for a McCain presidency both on the social issues and on the

domestic ones, too.

On Obama we have a little more data points, I think. And you maybe heard a little

of one from Bob. There is a sense, at least on … We can think of two different

kinds, maybe, of Obama supporters: people who think that the country has been

in a terrible era of polarization and relevant inaction, not total inaction but

relevant inaction; and the fights of the sixties, when were they, and the nineties,

we can kind of remember them, are dominating a world, which is just so radically

different from the world that gave birth to those struggles. So the idea is go

beyond them. That is one kind of Obama supporter.

There is another kind. Let’s call it the left with a capital “L” which says that, “It’s

our turn now. And Obama is our guy because maybe he privately believes these

things or we see enough in his progressivism, see healthcare, his concern for the

earned income tax credit, a market friendly approach to poverty, a concern for

their earned income tax credit—that he’s going to be compatible.” We see a little

bit in the last months of a feeling of betrayal already on the part of the left with a

capital “L” that Obama voted in the end for the telecomm immunity bill. It really

wasn’t that, but that was a component of it. It was a president limiting bill that

also had telecomm immunity. Obama was for it.

He is for the death penalty. He said so after the Supreme Court decision this term.

It wasn’t the first time. He’s said so before. And he said the second amendment,

in his view, confers to the individual the right to have guns. That is not the first

time he said it, by the way. But the left, some aspects, some numbers of the left

say, “Betrayal.” They say, “tacking to the center.” It’s actually on those issues not

so. These are long-standing beliefs of his. But there is a risk that Obama will

disappoint the left in those domains in which he doesn’t agree with them. And

also, of course, there is a risk that his form of visionary minimalism will be


PAGE 25

blocked by special interests. We might not get healthcare. We might not get a

reform of the sort he wants. People will say we voted for you and we didn’t get

what we wanted.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Joe, I just wanted to ask you one quick question and

then we will go to questions out here—and that is war and leadership. When

either one of these men takes office, if the war goes badly in Afghanistan -- aren’t

I so in the middle there -- if the war goes badly in Afghanistan or another war

starts up somewhere, how should a leader handle that? I watched George Bush

and certainly from my vantage point, I didn’t appreciate not being told what I

thought was actually happening on the ground and being blamed for the war as a

member of the media. But how do you handle that? How do you get a nation

motivated, behind the troops, tell the truth if it’s going badly?

JOSEPH NYE: Well, I think we have an object lesson of how not to do it over

the last seven years. But the great danger we are going to face, I think, is how we

are going to handle Iran. And I think there has to be a pretty open discussion

which the American people feel that they are given full facts. And that every

effort is made before we wind up getting into something which could unite our

enemies and create a major fiasco. So I think there is a little bit of this in the

campaign, at which the two candidates are talking about Iran, with Obama saying

much more about discussion and being more open. But I think that is likely the

case.

MARTHA RADDATZ: I think that is the likely case, too. But I would sort of

address that issue, or maybe someone else wants to do that, address that issue of

leadership when things are going poorly.

JOSEPH NYE: Oh, when things are going poorly, I think the answer is you tell

the truth. We’ve learned what happens when you don’t. It comes out anyway. But


PAGE 26

could I put a footnote, Martha? Cass’ thoughts stimulated for me on this question

of disappointment. America needs to get its good reputation back. Our soft power

depends upon our being seen as a land of freedom, not in the rhetoric of the

second inaugural address but in the way we behave. And so long as we have

Guantanamo and torture on the books, we’re not going to recover our soft power.

What worries me is that if this becomes a partisan issue that an Obama presidency

will be tied by the Congress and not be able to handle it. And a McCain

presidency, even though McCain has been admirable about this when he was a

Senator, is going to find that he can’t do anything about that. I would love to see a

situation where the two of them were to say, “You know, why don’t we agree to a

bipartisan commission of jurists or constitutional scholars to bring whoever is the

victor on January 21st a proposal for what we do with Guantanamo?” And just

saying “close it,” isn’t enough because that’s easy. What do you do with people

who are there. There are some of those people who we do not really want to let

go, Kalid Sheik Mohammed and others. What is the principle on which we are

going to deal with these people and how are we going to set this up? And if we

could find some way to get this out of the partisan rat race and I think that would

avoid a major disappointment, which would undercut either one of them after

January 20th.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Cass are you dying to speak? Because I read George

Bush’s body language and when he does that, I know he wants to speak.

[Laughter]

CASS SUNSTEIN: Thank you so much. I’m pleased to say I wasn’t dying to

speak. So in that respect …

MARTHA RADDATZ: See, there you go.


PAGE 27

CASS SUNSTEIN: My body language and George Bush’s are not the same.

MARTHA RADDATZ: [Laughter] Do you have something quickly to say?

CASS SUNSTEIN: I think the most obvious risk of disappointment is if the

economic slide continues and the president, whether it is McCain or Obama,

doesn’t find a way out of that. My own view is that it is going to require

transformative policies. And if the economy is still not doing well in 2010,

whoever is fortunate enough to be president is probably going to lose seats in the

mid-term anyway, lose even more seats if the economy is in a severe recession.

And I think that’s more important, ultimately, than whether the base is

disappointed because the president hasn’t gone quite as far as the base would like

him to go.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Okay. Now, let’s open it up for questions out there.

Maybe somebody will be asking about the transformative vice presidency.

[Laughter]

CASS SUNSTEIN: Well, we had that with Cheney. Well, we answered all the

questions.

MARTHA RADDATZ: No. I have a feeling you are going to get a few here.

This is a crowd that likes questions.

AUDIENCE: Hi, there. My name is Jackie Lead(?). I live in the town of Natick.

One of my great frustrations is that Washington doesn’t listen. They don’t listen

to us any more. Those anthrax murders were the end all of anyone in Washington

listening. Your mail doesn’t go there. Who can find an address or a telephone

number for someone in Congress? You can call the White House common line.

My friend Marsha Kaufman and I do it pretty frequently but we have no assurance


PAGE 28

that anyone listens. So I want to ask the panel, what’s the responsibility of

whoever the democratically elected leader of our country, what is their

responsibility to listen to us and how do we do that? I’m open for ideas. Thank

you

MARTHA RADDATZ: Joe, why don’t we go to you on that one?

JOSEPH NYE: Well, I think a successful leader is able to realize that leadership

is an interactive dance with followers and that requires listening. That when the

leader just uses focus groups or polls or whatever as a substitute for listening, it

doesn’t really get there. An effective leader has to have a feeling of what’s going

on, how different people are reacting. And I think in that sense, if you look at

somebody like Franklin Roosevelt, what was fascinating about him was the way

he kept many strands of information coming in to him from all sources at the

same time, often contradictory.

I mean he often found ways of … as he said, he always had many balls in the air

and he wasn’t quite sure as a juggler how many of them were up there himself.

But he had different strands of information coming in to him from all directions.

And it wasn’t just his cabinet or by a hierarchy. And I’d like to see in the style of

the next president that capacity to reach out, to hear people from different

reactions and not just have it homogenized by polls that come through the

political director’s office.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And, you know, if you put a check in your mail, you

will hear back from them [laughter]. Time and time again. It works all the time.

Sir.

AUDIENCE: Yes. You know, we’re stretched so thin militarily that when a

crisis comes up that involves Russia, we are in no position really to act. A Russian


PAGE 29

intellectual once observed a number of years ago that Russia and the United

States have much more in common with each other than they have adversarial

situations. And he suggested that the United States should become an ally of

Russia. They should become an alliance and they could use that alliance to fight

off terrorism, for instance, and they could use that alliance to perhaps curtail the

Iranian nuclear position. So I was just wondering if one of the presidential

candidates were to say, were to advocate that. That instead of confronting Russia

with missiles in Poland and trying to get Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, that

we make an alliance with Russia and try to use them to curtail the threats to world

peace, which is represented possibly by Iran and by the Middle East, Middle East

nations.

MARTHA RADDATZ: It seems a bit more of a foreign policy question than

leadership, but I’m going to let Joe take a crack at that.

JOSEPH NYE: Russia is going through a difficult spell right now. They are

going through an extreme nationalist reaction against what they see as the

indignities of the 1990s. And they are blaming a lot of it on us and on the west. If

we play this for the short run and we kick them out of the Group of 8 and find

other ways to ostracize them, we will feel better but it’s not clear that we are

going to be better off in five to ten years.

We ought to be asking, what are the things we can do to show our displeasure to

Russia for its invasion of Georgia, which is unacceptable, while also showing

there is a way in which they can be partners in the long run if they improve their

behavior. I think aid to Georgia makes sense to show that Russians can’t destroy

Georgia. But also finding ways to deal with the Russians in a more constructive

sense that you described makes sense. And I think that’s going to be a difficult

and important balancing act for the next president.


PAGE 30

MARTHA RADDATZ: Okay. Let’s go over here.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I am wondering about our common understanding, or is there a

common understanding of transformation? Is it transformation of character or

direction? Is it personal or cultural? And is it top down or bottom up?

MARTHA RADDATZ: Great question. Do you want to …

CASS SUNSTEIN: Yeah, I think that historically, for me, the test of a

transformational president is whether the president has succeeded in achieving

change that was thought impossible at the beginning of that president’s terms. I

mean Lincoln set out to save the Union and ended up freeing the slaves. No one

would have thought in 1860 that Lincoln would be able to do that. No one in

1963, after President Kennedy was assassinated, thought that Johnson would be

able to achieve 100 years after the fact the redemption of what Lincoln attempted

to do.

And I think in 1932, not even Roosevelt thought that he would cure the Great

Depression by transforming the relationship of government to the private sector.

And I think in the course of achieving these transformations, all three of which I

happen to approve of, there was the interplay that all three of us have referred to

between the people and the leader, and the transformation in the leader’s own

goals, and the use of social movements, and the invigoration of democracy.

And although Reagan achieved a transformation that I don’t happen to approve

of, it involved the same dynamic of rallying a mass movement and changing the

public’s view of what the appropriate role of government is in the life of society

and the life of the economy. So it involves energizing citizens. It involves moving

beyond where the president thought we needed to go. And in many cases it’s

change for the better. In some cases it isn’t.


PAGE 31

AUDIENCE: Hi. Within the context of transformation, I’d like to just point out

that 85% of the people in the United States are very unhappy with their

government. About 90% of our representatives and senators are almost always

automatically re-elected. I think there is a bit of a dichotomy there. And the other

point is this: if we try to pass a constitutional amendment, that’s almost

impossible because the small states have such a dominance in the Senate that they

would automatically block one.

So I believe an opportunity for a president to transform the country would be to

figure out how to solve that problem. I’m not sure what the solution is. But within

the context of that, I’d like to hear your thoughts on what you think the

opportunities are for a president to transform the country.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Cass?

CASS SUNSTEIN: Okay. Thank you. That’s a great question and it’s a great

piece of data that the people don’t like the government but they vote for their

representative. Maybe the best explanation is they know their guy. And they

think, “This is my representative and unless there is something badly wrong, I

know the person’s name. So I like to vote for people whose names I know. And

the person probably isn’t a disaster, so maybe delivering some benefits to the

area. But I don’t like the collection of people up there.

So it is not really as incongruous as it seems to think that the local person is fine

but the collection isn’t good. On the constitutional side, you’re right. It’s very

hard to get constitutional change because you need either through the national

legislature or through the states a strong majority. But we might overstate the

indispensability of constitutional change to transformative government.


PAGE 32

What Reagan did was as significant as many constitutional amendments on

substantive counts and on terms or our institutions. Things were radically

different after Reagan than before. And the same was true of Roosevelt and

Johnson. There is some effort among the law professors to describe each of the

three just mentioned of having engineered a constitutional moment. And while

that is probably more metaphor than reality, it’s the right metaphor. So they did

do the equivalent of what in other nations would be a constitutional change. It had

a foundational quality to it.

We have two opportunities in the domestic domain right out front that this

election presents that maybe one or the other of the candidates will engineer it.

One is healthcare reform in a way that would vindicate Roosevelt’s claim in ’44

that healthcare was a right. So most Americans now believe that healthcare is a

right. And that would be like a constitutional change with a small “c.” That’s one.

And the other is transformation of the energy sector in a way that takes account of

economic, national security and environmental needs.

Interestingly, both the Republicans and the Democrats have that as one of their

top issues. And there is a possibility there.

ROBERT KUTTNER (?): I would just add that one other explanation for your

paradox is that until fairly recently, both parties at the state level colluded in the

creation of safe seats. So that if a state is split 50-50 among Democrats and

Republicans, instead of everybody going after each other hammer and tongs every

two years, you say, “Okay. You take those three safe seats. I’ll take these three

safe seats. We will draw the district so that our three guys always get elected and

your three guys always get elected.” And I think that bears some of the

responsibility, too.

CASS SUNSTEIN: If I might just add one more comment.


PAGE 33

MARTHA RADDATZ: Just quickly. I just want to get as many people as we

can.

CASS SUNSTEIN: I just wanted to say this. You posed two concepts before,

economic needs for the country and the other one was energy needs. And I

believe that combining those two ideas is perhaps one of the best opportunities we

have for transformation.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Thank you. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I wonder if you could speak to how either candidate is going to be

able to work with Congress. I mean I can assume Obama can work with the

Democrats. And he’s stated he can work across the aisle. I don't know if he has a

track record. But McCain says he is going to go and clean out the swamps and get

rid of the alligators and he’s a maverick and he doesn’t agree with what the

Republicans have been doing. Who is he going to work with? [Laughter]

MARTHA RADDATZ: Which could bring us to the campaign, the same as

governing, too. Yes. Bob, Cass? Who wants to go with that one?

CASS SUNSTEIN: I think Obama—I mean, independent of who wins the White

House, the prediction is that the Democrats are going to pick up seats in both

houses. And if you have Obama’s history of working across the party aisle, which

he really did rather well in the state legislature in Illinois, you really only need

about 57 or 56 even in the Senate and you can do it. House, the Democrats have

been much more disciplined lately than they had been previously. McCain,

barring a complete upset and a Republican takeover of Congress, would have a

much tougher time, unless he is deceiving his own base and reverts to being the

independent that some people thought he was.


PAGE 34

MARTHA RADDATZ: Okay, over here.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Can you define the difference between professional, truthful

reporting and propaganda?

PANELIST: Martha? [Laughter]

MARTHA RADDATZ: Go ahead, you guys, Bob?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Yeah. I wear both hats. I do a little bit of each.

[Laughter] I think objective …

MARTHA RADDATZ: That’s not a loaded question or anything, is it?

ROBERT KUTTNER: Objective is an over-used term. I think any reporter

draws conclusions. And if you’re afraid to draw conclusions from the facts that

you find in the course of your reporting, you’re not a very good journalist. There

is the classic parody of Hitler murdered six million Jews, but he built the

Autobahn. And you can be so objective that you miss the point utterly.

I think propaganda is a willful disregard for the truth to prove a point. And I think

most professional journalists try to get the story right, try to be evidence-based,

even though getting the story right means sometimes drawing conclusions that

produce discomfort for one of the other players. But I would really like to hear

what Martha has to say.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Oh, really. I mean I agree with him to a point.

Journalism is changing so much. I mean what worries me more than anything is

that the public, in their minds, doesn’t distinguish between different news


PAGE 35

organizations, bloggers. I mean I go crazy sometimes watching cable news and

hear people talk about Iraq, who have no idea what they are talking about. And

that is not to say cable news. But there are people on the sort of 24-hour cycle

who you just throw on and it is part of that cycle. And it all becomes blurred.

I mean my job becomes blurred, too. I did George Stephanopoulos’ show

yesterday, and David Brooks was on and George Will was on. And I said to them,

“I feel kind of like the idiot in the middle sometime because I have to remain

somewhat objective here. And, you know, David Brooks can say what he wants

and George Will can say what he wants, and I either sound really just dull or

stupid. But it is a very hard line to walk across because certainly I believe that I

am capable of analysis. I don’t like to analyze things I don't know anything about.

But if I want to talk about foreign policy or I want to talk about national security

or I want to talk about the Bush presidency, I feel that I can analyze that. Can I go

as far as giving my opinion, no. And, certainly—I mean I agree with him

completely about propaganda. I don’t want the spotlight on me today. Come on.

This is like my day off. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: I have a follow up question to that because it seems with the

transformative presidents that you identified, they needed a social movement and

they also needed a vigorous, independent press. And you identified that news has

completely changed now. The news cycle is very balkanized and specialized. And

also, one of the parties has really seemed to be running against the press. And

there is really an assault on journalism. And I wondered …

MARTHA RADDATZ: We’ve been through it before. Can I just answer this? I

mean you really do—I mean I think it is true. I think it is sort of a brilliant tactic

to go after the press because then you sort of reset yourself and, oh, are we being

too hard? I’ll admit that. You do. You sort of say, “Am I doing this? Am I doing

that?” But to me the best example was the Iraq War. I mean day after day after


PAGE 36

day they blamed us. Day after day they said, “You are not showing the good

news. You are not showing how great it’s going.” I mean you read this Woodward

book now and, I mean, a lot of us knew this anyway, what was really going on.

And the President actually admitted to me in an interview a few months ago that

during 2006 he knew it was failing and he would still come out every day and say,

“We’re going to”—I mean obviously he would say a few things are going badly

and there are challenges. But the overall impression is, “It’s going pretty well.”

When, in fact, he knew it wasn’t. And to me that’s the American people saying,

“You know what? I can see. I can see what’s going on. I don’t mistrust the press

on this one.” So I think the public resets itself as well. Anybody else? Go ahead.

CASS SUNSTEIN: Here is a little idea signaled by what you said that

Montesquieu describing the system of separation of power, said it produces a

natural state of repose or inaction. And, actually, in the 20th century that’s been

overcome really by certain pressing crises and also the capacity for transformative

presidency just because the executive branch can do so much.

The little, inchoate idea is that in an era in which the media is so diverse and

distinctions between the respectable and the bloggers is so thin, it’s—in the public

eye, at least -- it’s like the separation of powers in a way, squared, or on steroids.

[Laughter] In a way that makes transformative presidency face at least an obstacle

that Reagan and Johnson and Roosevelt never did. This is an inchoate idea. But I

wonder if it isn’t so, that McCain or Obama try to do something very large, they

will face a barrage of attacks, both substantive and personal, many of them false

and baseless but it will take a lot of work to show that.

And that may … Montesquieu’s 21st century victory, something like that


PAGE 37

JOSEPH NYE (?): I mean I don’t disagree with that but it’s worth going back

and reading a little bit about Washington, Adams and Jefferson in terms of

backbiting, bipartisan press. It makes today look almost tame and that is hard to

do. [Laughter] But I think the basic point is deeper. And it goes back to the

question we heard earlier about American Constitution. You know, the quip is

that the founding fathers deliberately set up a government which made it difficult

to change anything, difficult to be transformational.

And the quip was that they created a government so that King George couldn’t

rule over us again and neither could anybody else. [Laughter] And what we find is

that when you do get major changes in American policies, I mean really big

changes, it comes from the followers. It comes from a broad consensus in the

public.

And I guess the question that Cass raises is the presence of the Internet and

blogging and niche markets. Is it making it impossible to have that kind of a

broad movement? I don’t think so. I think, actually, if you take a question like this

issue of energy and the environment, I can see a situation where you actually

could get a broad based movement. One of the encouraging things I found in

listening to the Republican convention, which otherwise wasn’t for me

encouraging, was the emphasis that they had on renewable energy in their litany

of things that needed to be done on energy. If we could get a broad based

consensus on this and get a leader who knows how to work across party lines, it

might be possible to get something done.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Okay. Over here, please.

AUDIENCE: Hi. I look around and I bet you there are a lot of Hillary Clinton

supporters in this room. So my question is sort of for them and for me also.

[Applause] When I had to make a choice it was very difficult for me because I


PAGE 38

sort of sensed that Barack Obama was not as progressive, quote-unquote, as

Hillary Clinton. But at the same time, I thought that Barack Obama could, in fact,

build or have a social movement behind him. And I think it is very important in

terms of making real changes. But I sense, though, that Hillary Clinton had more

core principles than either her husband or Barack Obama. So since there is a

possibility that in four years we might be having to look at Hillary Clinton again, I

was wondering whether or not anyone there could tell us what they think her

transformative sort of powers would be.

MARTHA RADDATZ: We will let you off the hook on this one.

CASS SUNSTEIN: I think Hillary Clinton is fabulous, I should say. As someone

who worked with Obama for many years, I think the world of Senator Clinton and

I’ve worked with her; I’ve been privileged to work with her. So I agree with the

thrust of the question. I guess I’d say, in terms of transformation, we want to look

at three features of her. One is what does she care most deeply about? And the

answer, off hand, would have to include healthcare and children. She’s worked on

both of those issues her whole career. So large scale changes with respect to each

of those. And on healthcare her plan had an interesting difference from Senator

Obama’s, though they both are transformative compared to what we now have.

That is the substance. The second is her intimate knowledge of the operation of

the White House and the relation with the legislative branches. So that she has in

a way that is promising of the potential for cross cutting action that would include

the necessary numbers. The third point on your question is that at least now it’s to

be hoped that this won’t be so four, eight, 12, with the way longevity is going,

many years from now, if she runs again. It won’t be the case that she is the kind of

polarizing figure that she, I think, still remains that would cause difficulties for

her.


PAGE 39

She is such a terrifically winning person and so knowledgeable that who is to say

she wouldn’t be able to overcome the polarizing facts associated with her last

name and the fact she’s been a rallying cry for people who, actually, privately

admire her. So these are the three points.

AUDIENCE: Similar question and Martha, you raised it earlier. And that is the

question of the vice presidency. We’ve had, I think, four vice presidents become

presidents in the 20th century. And I’m just wondering if any role about leadership

at all in the selection of the vice president or Harry Truman, was there any

thought of him as a leader when he was selected? [Laughter] I mean what

happened there?

MARTHA RADDATZ: I think of the feeling that his audience has kind of made

up its mind on that one.

AUDIENCE: I think so, too. But I’m just wondering if leadership in the vice

presidency is any factor in the [simultaneous conversation]

MARTHA RADDATZ: As you said, Dick Cheney certainly changed all of that.

JOSEPH NYE: Could I put in a word for Sarah Palin, which is probably not a

popular view? But if you look at Harry Truman, he was a Senator who was known

for his loyalty to the Boss Prendergast machine in Kansas City. He held some

hearings in the Senate on war issues. He was not a great, distinguished figure.

And Roosevelt kept him in the dark. Truman did not know what was going on.

And when Truman became president, it took him a while but he did rise to the

occasion. And the reason is because he was a man with a strong sense of self who

listened to others and surrounded himself with very good people.


PAGE 40

I don't know much about Sarah Palin. I don’t think many people do. But if you

noticed the way she handled herself in the convention speech, which was a skillful

performance, and you notice that this is a woman who is able to combine hard and

soft power. She uses her motherhood for appeal but she also is tough, it’s

conceivable that after some time, if she learned on the job, she might be able to do

a Truman.

I’m just saying. That is not how I’m going to vote. [Laughter] But I just think we

ought to keep our minds open. I mean it’s not inconceivable that she might be

able, right now, given her experience she has zero, particularly in foreign policy.

And I think if she were to suddenly become president now it would be a disaster.

But, you know, Truman had a little bit of time. He learned somewhat on the job

and I think the answer is, on many of these things we don’t have the answers. You

know, you try to guess as best you can about their emotional intelligence, their

combination of hard and soft power skills, and their ability to learn and their

ability to listen.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And one more question and let’s get that quickly.

AUDIENCE: And thank you. Mine was also a Sarah Palin question, which is

what does it say about John McCain’s leadership that he chose Sarah Palin?

MARTHA RADDATZ: Bob? I’m not going to … Go ahead.

ROBERT KUTTNER: You know, the stories one hears, and I think the

reporting on this is pretty solid, is that McCain did not want to choose Sarah

Palin, that he wanted to choose Joe Lieberman or maybe Tom Ridge. And this is

the McCain who really is somewhat independent. And there was a revolt by the

Republican base. And his campaign staff came up with the idea of Sarah Palin,

whom he barely knew.


PAGE 41

Now it may turn out to be a very shrewd stroke. The initial reaction of the press

was this was panic. This was crazy. It turned out that she is a pretty shrewd

politician, and she has energized the Republican base and we are going to have to

see over the course of the next few weeks whether it was a master stroke or

whether she is going to fall apart under pressure.

But it suggests that, to me anyway, that this is a guy who takes his political advice

often from the professionals. And that served George W. Bush well [laughter] at

least in getting re-elected. And I think it remains to be seen whether this pans out.

So I think the original thought that the Democrats were going to have a field day

with this because it showed that he was panicky and it showed that he chose

someone wildly unqualified, it’s going to be a more complicated story than that.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Cass?

CASS SUNSTEIN: I think it is really interesting and it is actually a subtle

question: what does it say about his leadership style. And it fits nicely, doesn’t it,

with the general theme of the day. I think it says two things. One is Governor

Palin was widely unknown within the United States. The Weekly Standard has

been promoting her as impressive, terrific, a good choice, an up and comer. Fred

Barnes did a piece about her. He was bowled over by her. Rush Limbaugh has

been promoting her, [laughter] and he’s been a big McCain skeptic. I don’t mean

to make fun of Rush Limbaugh at all, really, just to say that this is someone who

had a very strong constituency of people for whom she wasn’t a “Who’s she?”

person by any stretch of the imagination. She was a: “Thank goodness she did it.”

That was their reaction, not who.

So that says something about Senator McCain about his, what’s the right word?,

appreciation of interest in, cultivation of, sympathy with a certain part of his base,


PAGE 42

which had felt neglected by much of his campaign. That is important to know.

Yes, that would say something about his governing style.

I think the other thing to say is that everyone who knows him and has observed

him has said the word “maverick” captures part of it. But he’s a bit of a gambler

by nature. He is someone who takes risks. The downside of this for his critics is a

tendency towards impulsiveness, they say. But this has, for all the familiarity of

Governor Palin to some parts of the base, it does have a gambling quality. That’s

why I think the question is a subtle one. It signals to things about Senator McCain

we might not quite have known before, or not known so well, maybe.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Whether that gambling quality is something that a good

leader can have sometimes?

CASS SUNSTEIN (?): No question that sometimes—I mean Roosevelt, you

know, the lend lease program where he gave arms, illegally by the way, secretly

also by the way, to England—that was a gamble and it worked.

JOSEPH NYE (?): But a very cautious one. He knew where the public was

before he did it.

MARTHA RADDATZ: On that gambling note we will wrap up our session

here. Thank you all for coming.

[Applause]

MARTHA RADDATZ: And you will tell them about the books.

JOHN SHATTUCK: Well, we’ve learned what kind of leader we want. Now

we will see what kind of leader we will get. But thank you all. It’s been a


PAGE 43

wonderful evening. I want to make sure that everyone here knows we have three

new and frequent authors. Our three panelists have new books, which they will be

signing out front. And anyone who wants the sequel, which is how does the

Internet and blogging, YouTube and all the other communication phenomena

affect presidential campaigns, come here on Thursday. That is the next topic for

“Making of a President, 2008.”

Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you, Joe Nye. Thank you, Cass

Sunstein. Thank you, Bob Kuttner. And thank you, Martha Raddatz.

END OF FORUM

a: good, okay, good€¦ · web viewso good afternoon and welcome to the john f. kennedy library....

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