David Gergen appeared on the AC360 Later show on Wednesday October 30th. Gergen is a Clintonian Liberal, and gave his assessment of how President Obama appears disengaged from governance.
However, his more accurate summary was when he described the White House as a command center for purely politically driven operations, and not actually governing or accomplishing anything.
…. at least he started out that way until the Kool-Aid drinkers, Andrew Sullivan and Charles Blow, were able to pick their aghast jaws off the floor and begin to push back. D’oh…. It was quite humorous to watch.
The Copyrighted Video of the segment is available HERE. It is well worth the watch. Also, below is the CNN transcription from the segment.
ANDERSON COOPER: I want to dig deeper into the notion that the health care debacle has revealed President Obama to be out of the loop, a bystander president, his critics are saying. What do you think about that? Veteran presidential adviser David Gergen has a lot to say about it. He joins us right after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
COOPER: Hey. Welcome back.
A do-nothing president, hands-off, passive, out of touch. I refer, of course, to Dwight Eisenhower. That was a knock on him at the time and Calvin Coolidge, even George H.W. Bush. When a president gets tagged by the pundits, they are either accused of micromanaging like Jimmy Carter or being out of the loop, bystanders to their own presidency.
President Obama is the latest bystander.
Back with the panel.
We’re joined now by David Gergen, who has worked with presidents both Republican and Democrat since the Nixon administration.
What do you make of this? Is he a bystander president?
DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I think he has a management style that does not lend itself to vigorous governing.
He’s a first-class individual. He’s a moral man. I worked for Nixon. We don’t always have that. Give him a lot of credit for that. I give him credit for passing a health care bill. It was the first — seven presidents tried and failed. He got it passed. I think also it’s become a triumph and a tragedy with what’s happening with it.
Where I think he — I think, Anderson, he is much, much better at campaigning. He ran a superb two campaigns, very well run, very well administered, the awe of the country in both cases. Yet he doesn’t run the government well.
COOPER: And so what is that? Why can somebody run — is it just a completely different exercise?
GERGEN: I think it’s a very different exercise with very different kind of talents. I think they came in thinking the White House was essentially a political instrument, as opposed to a governing instrument.
And the inner circle was mostly political. If you look back at Bill Clinton, his inner circle were mostly his policy people. His outer — his next circle outward is political people.
COOPER: You believe even on issues of national security or domestic policy, they’re running it through a political prism?
(CROSSTALK)
GERGEN: Absolutely, and economic policies.
SULLIVAN: This health care law surely belies that. If you wanted just to be popular, if you want to be purely political, you wouldn’t touch this with a barge pole.
I think he it touched it and grappled with it because he believes in it.
(CROSSTALK)
GERGEN: I don’t have an issue with that. But I still — I think the way he runs the White House is much more politically attuned than substantively attuned.
Most Democratic presidents who come in with bold ideas about using government often bring heavyweights with them to make sure that they not only pass it, but they put it into place. When LBJ was there, he had Joe Califano. When Franklin Roosevelt was there, he has heavyweights around him to run his domestic programs.
You do not see this with President Obama. Who is his domestic counselor? Can anybody name the person who runs domestic policy?
NAVARRO: Actually, I can.
GERGEN: Who?
NAVARRO: Her name is Cecilia Munoz. She used to be at the National Council of La Raza.
(CROSSTALK)
NAVARRO: Her forte is immigration. But I don’t see her anywhere.
GERGEN: I’m sure she’s a wonderful human being. She’s not a heavyweight in American political terms. Where is Tom Daschle when they need him to run this?
SULLIVAN: Give me a couple other examples other than the health care thing of where his own engagement in governing has been obviously a failure.
COOPER: A lot of people point to Syria.
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: “The Wall Street Journal” has a piece saying that basically he’s been disconnected during meetings, kind of literally with his body language checking his phone.
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: Well, that’s because he didn’t want to invade Syria, when we elected him not to invade Syria.
GERGEN: If you ask the American people, do you think the stimulus program was well-conceived and well-run, you would find by a heavy majority they’d say no.
SULLIVAN: And they’d be wrong.
GERGEN: No, they’d be right.
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: It was an incredibly effective.
GERGEN: It was not an effective program.
SULLIVAN: It was. It saved us from a second Great Depression.
(CROSSTALK)
GERGEN: We have had the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
SULLIVAN: Yes, because we have been imposed austerity by the sequester and in the states by Republicans. As a recovery, it’s — given the headwinds against it…
(CROSSTALK)
GERGEN: When real Democrats who understood how to run the government like Franklin Roosevelt put it into place, he put in a place a program like the CCC. He proposed it in April of 1933. He had 250,000 people in the woods by that summer.
And it was the most popular program in the country. You don’t see anything like that.
(CROSSTALK)
BLOW: You’re saying the president is not a real Democrat?
GERGEN: No, he’s a real Democrat. I misspoke on that. But a Democrat who understood how to use government, because Franklin Roosevelt was prepared for the office. He’d been governor, he’d worked in Washington.
And what we have now are a group of people, they’re really nice people around President Obama. I have an enormous amount of respect for them as individuals. But he doesn’t have a government…
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: Let me give a simple example, Cass Sunstein, who has gone every single thing they have done and figured out cost-benefit analysis for almost everything, in fact, for the first time, had a really serious cost-benefit analysis of everything that they are doing.
You get the impression, this president, he really does like the details of governing. He’s been very hands-on with foreign policy.
GERGEN: You tell me the president has been hands-on with health care and let this happen, had this botched rollout? And now we have two million people have lost their health care policies and he promised us that would no happen? Are telling me he’s done it well?
SULLIVAN: I didn’t say that.
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: I think he’s done it terribly. I asked you to name another instance, because…
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: I am in all day talking to techies about my own Web site.
They have language I don’t even understand. This is an incredibly complicated thing to do. I agree with you that there’s no excuse for the way it’s been run out. But I also don’t agree with you with the immense complexity of what they’re trying to do and the difficulty of it. And Medicare D had the same problems at the beginning.
NAVARRO: Andrew, you can’t on the one hand say that he is detail- oriented and hands on and then he not know so many things about Benghazi, he not know about what happened regarding the IRS, he not be knowledgeable about what’s going on with the NSA.
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: He did not know.
NAVARRO: Well, then you can’t be detail-oriented and…
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: If he’d known about the IRS, we should be impeaching the guy. He was not using the IRS…
(CROSSTALK)
GERGEN: Tell us how hands-on he is when this problem is mushrooming inside his own government.
He’s not hands-on. He does not know these things. It is a failure on the part of the staff. He doesn’t have a staff that’s keeping him informed as they should on the NSA.
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: What is he not being informed on?
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: How about his relationship with Capitol Hill? Would that be another example for you that he’s not — that he sort of leaves it to others?
GERGEN: If you talk to people on the Hill, they will say — Republicans I will say have a huge amount of hatred. It’s way beyond what it should be — But I think if you talk to Democrats you find that they find he’s disengaged. I have a theory, and it may be wrong, that in the domestic side, and I think to a considerable degree in foreign policy, he has centralized power in the White House.
He’s disempowered a lot of people in the Cabinet agencies. They’re treated much more like staff than they are like real Cabinet officers. He’s not the first president to do this. But when he brought power into the White House, he did not set up a team in the White House who could really run the government with all that power. That’s where I think he’s had some problems.
NAVARRO: I agree with you on how difficult it is to understand techie speak. But there’s also been some very clear memos that have come to light where the people working on the Web site gave very clear warnings that they weren’t testing enough, that they weren’t quite ready, that this wasn’t set to go.
And why didn’t they stop it? Because it would have been seen as a political concession at a moment when they were in a…
(CROSSTALK)
BLOW: That’s where you make the leap. That’s where you make the leap.
NAVARRO: How do you explain it?
(CROSSTALK)
BLOW: I’m sorry. The idea that memos were sent and whether or not they made it to the president’s desk is another question. We don’t know that, right? But the idea that you make the leap from information is flowing into the White House and then they make a political calculation to go forward with something simply — and knowing that it will fail simply for political reasons, I think that’s a leap that you just — you can’t back that up. What evidence do you have that that’s true?
NAVARRO: Logic. Rationale. Reason. Experts. Experience. What evidence do you have on the contrary?
(CROSSTALK)
BLOW: I’m just saying, I’m saying, we don’t know. You just said that as a declarative statement, and you don’t know that.
(CROSSTALK)
NAVARRO: OK. It is my opinion then.
(CROSSTALK)
GERGEN: Something you said just a moment ago you agree, you agree. You actually think the staff has not served him well.
BLOW: I think the questioning of the staff and whether or not they have done a good job and whether or not you have picked people who will make sure you are not embarrassed is a fair critique of this president and of this staff.
I think that is completely fair. And I said this the other night. Basic management is that you never allow the boss to be caught off guard.
(CROSSTALK)
NAVARRO: Do you think the memos should have gotten to his desk? Do you think the memos warning that they weren’t ready, that they weren’t tested enough, that they didn’t know if this was going to work, should they have gotten to his desk?
BLOW: I think in retrospect, we all say, yes, they should have gotten to his desk.
NAVARRO: OK. Then we go back to him living in a bubble of ignorant bliss.
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: … today saying that she said to him directly it’s good to go, it’s ready to go, when clearly it was not.
BLOW: Right. So, how do you blame him for that?
COOPER: Go ahead, Andrew.
(CROSSTALK)
SULLIVAN: Go ahead, David.
GERGEN: They work for him. He’s responsible for the quality of the people who work for him.
SULLIVAN: What I find interesting is that the sudden decision to call him not able to govern doesn’t normally happen after five years in office.
And I think we’re in danger of slightly taking this unbelievable cluster whatever and…
(CROSSTALK)
(LAUGHTER)
SULLIVAN: I just don’t want us to overanalyze this particular moment.
Everybody — now, I agree I think he should be criticized for not understanding on this thing, his biggest, biggest domestic issue that actually getting it to work was as important to focus on as getting the thing passed in the first place.
GERGEN: Right.
SULLIVAN: And I just don’t want us to extrapolate from this particular instance into a general characterization of his presidency which I don’t think is really fair.
GERGEN: I don’t think the bystander title is fair.
But I do think this has been a spotty administration in terms of the way they talk to him and how well they execute.
SULLIVAN: Here’s the other thing I would say, though. I do think that he self-corrects. I do think he understands…
GERGEN: We’re five years in, as you just told us.
SULLIVAN: Say what?
GERGEN: We’re five years in, as you just told us.
SULLIVAN: Well, he has often corrected. He’s shifted all along. He’s a very adaptable person.
What I have noticed about him over the years I have been trying to observe him is that there is a sense in which he hangs out on the ropes for awhile. He’s not a proactive president.
He is a reactive president, just as he’s a community organizer. He likes other people to do the stuff. Now, in some occasions, he has not picked the right people and they haven’t been candid enough with him.
But, look, this is also, you would agree, David, an enormously complicated and ambitious program, probably the biggest domestic program ambition since LBJ. So give him a little break in getting this through for a few months.
BLOW: And one person’s not proactive is another person’s thoughtful.
I think we have to see it through the lens that we want to see it through. The idea that we had a president who we felt like was just gung-ho and going ahead with things before he had thought them through, and people actually voted in 2008 because they thought the guy was more thoughtful, that he would take a second to take a breath.
COOPER: We got to take a break……
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