roger altman house

When we had the opportunity to sit down, our own leadershipyou mentioned Leon Panetta, for example, having been chosenand formulate a fresh set of estimates based on all the then latest data, and obviously reaching out to a whole host of experts, it became clear that the deficit outlook was considerably worse than we thought. Was it his personality that won, or was he able to? I wasnt directly negotiating them. So the Congress decided to hold hearings on all aspects of Whitewater and, as everybody remembers, everyone from Maggie Williams to Harold Ickes to everybody had to testify. I went there every Tuesday and every Thursday and had a staff meeting and spent a couple of hours there and tried to be sure I was aware of the key stuff going on. Clinton moved quickly. Working on the Hill, traveling? Once again, were grateful for your time. I knew what the ATF was, but not much more than that. Now, it may last five or six more years, it may last 25 more years, I dont know. But I only began to spend heavy time on that after the August passage of the Presidents economic program. Yes, but Mack was entirely averse to confrontation and played a completely backstage role in these things, which is not really what a President needs. Im not an economist, so maybe Im making a bad assumption here, but was there a discussion at this time about when you could start feeling some benefits from this pain that you were asking the President to accept at a fairly early stage in his Presidency? We then embarked on a search for a candidate and give or take three or four months later found one who, ironically, was a Republican. People have made that mistake and theyve suffered from it. Why a war room? Those are two different questions, Id rather answer the will be question. Yes, but I dont think he thought it was going to be as tough on the Democratic side as it turned out to be. So I think you had a President who was seen as very slickand he had that reputation before he became Presidentand then this upsurge in partisanship generally. Thats the way to do it. Okay, the election occurred and, for reasons Ive never fully understood, Alice Rivlin and I were the first two to go down to see Clinton, of those he was looking at for appointment purposes. You might call it something different. But all Im trying to say is if you look at Lloyd Bentsens background, Rob Rubins background, and even to a much lesser extent my background, we knew about monetary policy and we knew about the role of the Fed. Yes, I believe the charter of the RTC transcended whether it was a state chartered or federally chartered S and L. Well, the guarantees were not Federal if they were state chartered. As I recall the campaign of 1992, there were lots of policy debates amongst the Democrats. Ive seen Washington battles and that wasnt one of them. In the end the answer was no, nothing, period. We cant afford to lose it, that type of stuff. It is high, because the toll it takes on your life is high and you either run out of money or you just burn yourself out, or you get separated from your family, or whatever it is. I have to confess it was the spring of my senior year and I was paying a little more attention to girls and golf than I was to the normal ebb and flow of events on the campus. Obviously he balanced the budget, now its unbalanced. He paid more attention to golf and girls in University. Then, that sent the ball in motion so to speak, in terms of that being the focus of discussion, although the senior members of that group were pretty united on the fact that we should make a real effort on the deficit. Im not sure he would have known me really at all. That was pretty damn effective. No, I did not. The President was all over this. So you can imagine sitting next to Mrs. Clinton at dinner. I first met Bill Clinton in college. By the end of the year it had become a massive issue. What external factors were at work here? She had a million task forces, but the senior one. No, no. There werent many people in the administration who fully understood it. So Fiske came to the conclusion that nothing had happened, Starr came to the conclusion nothing had happened, and certainly, if he could have found anything, I think he would have been motivated to push it. Panetta had made a very distinguished career as House Budget Chairman out of pushing for lower deficits and a more transparent budget process. His first term wasnt so good, but his second term was wonderful. But, first, right at the outset, it was a terribly flawed idea to have a full-time member of the administration serving also as the head of an independent regulatory agency and that should have dawned on me in the earliest going, just the inherent conflict there. For example, a year later, the fall following my graduation, I attended the University of Chicago, which was perhaps more than any other university, except the University of Wisconsin, the center of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] activity. There was quite a discussion that day about long-term interest rates, as I said the credit markets rather than the Fed. You look at the turnover that she hador in her case did not haveon her staff, and the turnover that he had. Of course we learned quickly that these were really difficult negotiations. After all, thered been only two Democratic Presidents in the last 25 or 30 years and theyd both been southern Governors. I mean, it can be in private, it can be in print, it can be any other way. He also had primary responsibility for Blackstones international business. You were in Tokyo when the President went over? Bentsen could tell you, within 4 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to every one of these bills. Were still in the transition period, and now may be the appropriate time to talk about the process by which deficit reduction becomes a clear priority item over some of the other things that were talked about during the course of the campaign. Thats just the way history works. You wouldnt choose to go before a grand jury instead of, say, going to Yankee Stadium to see the Yankees playAt that point I was already out of the administration and I had no real concerns. He knew every comma and apostrophe in the bill. and I had no previous knowledge of it at all. That was just an amazing experience. By that time, Clinton had his idea of the middle-class tax cut, and he had his idea of cutting the deficit in half during his first term, I think it was. I think those discussions, including that particular one, in retrospect, had a considerable effect on him. It pains me to recognize that thats 35 years ago, but no, it wasnt the case. First of all, the Clinton White House wasnt really oriented to that. Remember, I was there during the 1963-67 period. Oh sure, New York is, in terms of Democratic politics, not a terribly big town. It was a mixture of people and some of the names I recall of course were George Stephanopoulos and Gene Sperling, Bob Rubin, Bob Reich, Rob Shapiro, myself. But it coincided, I think more importantly than that, with the onset of huge political problems for Clinton in the context of Vince Foster, Whitewater, and the entire beginning of that. Who was the New York group that helped him with fundraising and maybe also with policy? Once he decided he was for it, he really got into it. So its funny how reality quickly returns. I can remember feeling very chastened because he talked about how many children we were helping and how many families we were helping and I chose to try to makejust in the spirit of celebration, a few jokes. After all, John Kennedy is seen in the middle by historians. And Bentsen did make the call. So there were a couple of weeks of high anxiety, maybe more than that, maybe everybody was in a state of anxiety between the election and yes, it wasnt at all clear who the Secretary of Treasury would be. So that, despite the extraordinary achievement it really was, I think may be seen by history as a small achievement. They just didnt believe it would work. Lloyd Bentsens reputation preceded him and he was a master of the game as far as Washington and the legislative process and handling himself and so forth in a way that few ever have been. Ironically, Clintons style for those meetings and the style of the present President are not very different. But I was to be sure, no matter what they asked me, guns? Nobody knew, especially in the White House. I follow it pretty closely, and I have a hard time figuring it out. I have always liked Mrs. Clinton and I had a lot of respect for her and do have a lot of respect for her. To make a long story short, of course we all hired lawyers and so forth and we were brought before a grand jury. Most of the trade was being handled by what was called the NEC [National Economic Council] deputies, which is the Deputy Secretary level of the NEC. So that resulted in my having, I suppose, a jack-of-all-trades job. Healthcare got the nod. He had a certain way of carrying himself and a certain sense of very carefully managing his own stature. You referred earlier to Garys question that most of the decisions that Clinton made about his priorities came post-election, but the process. The Japanese economy was relatively weak at that time although it was in perhaps the first third of its now 12-year, or 14-year slump after the Nikkei peaked at 39,000. So he was frantically calling members of Congress as various requests came in for him to do so. He had tried to offer every imaginable olive branch to the Iranian leadership. Wed sit around in the Roosevelt Room, and you know how it works. I believe Stan Shuman was there. I think Clinton was better served by virtue of Perots presence in the campaign than without it. Well, it was just a strange evening. It was just an evolution of the prior role. You asked me when the most important policy development occurred and I would say there are several answers to that but number one would be post election, not pre-election. But in any event, Madison Guaranty had failed. For example, I said earlier, the National Economic Council is not a new idea at all, that the Ford administration had its version, Nixon had his version, and so forth. What really happened was that the stimulus was entirely spending-side stimulus. During the transition period, you are formally involved in the transition effort. But I think if you study American history and you look at any number of earlier periods, the attacks on Abraham Lincoln for example comes to mind, the Andrew Jackson period, such extreme partisanship is common in American history. WebRoger Ebert March 07, 1978. Is he going to become President? I went to Wall Street after the University of Chicago, and then after seven years on Wall Street, I went into the [Jimmy] Carter administration as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. I went back to the airport in Austin, reported that to Warren Christopher, and I think we were all announced within a week. The President made a decision he was going toand he discussed this during the campaign at lengthbe more aggressive with Japan to have a fairer, more level playing field. But before then, somebody was charged with thinking about transitional issues, actually before the November election, and my question to you is whether, in your work in Treasury transition, you had relied on any work that had been done before? It was very stirring. Of course it was a very small kind of backwater type of situation, not a big one. It was a voluntary choice. Lets divide concessions into two: actual changes in the bill, and then offering a Congressman something in another area to help make it easier for him to vote for this. Every imaginable issue arose and Clinton hit all those balls out of the park and it gave the American public a chance to see how astonishingly smart and deep this guy was. and Lloyd would say, I wouldnt do it, Mr. President, or I would do it. I didnt, no. In retrospect, a limited, very grudging change. So if you want to call it the politics of the economy, The labor unions were overwhelmingly opposed. 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Small achievement become a massive issue it really was, but not much more that!, nothing, period as House budget Chairman out of pushing for deficits.
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