Good evening, everyone. Thanks a lot for coming. Steve Bloomfield,
associate director of the Watson Institute. And I like to tell a story
before each of these sessions, that many months ago, in the
warmer months of June and July, together with a few
people, I thought it would be a good idea to have
a series about the election season that was unfolding,
and forthcoming. I had a thought, along with the
person with whom I spoke most , closely Ted Widmer, who
has taught in the history department at Brown, that
we were coming into somewhat dangerous times. And we wanted to be
prepared with opportunities to speak and to listen to Brown
faculty about the elections, and the season that
we were witnessing. We didn't expect, to be
honest, that the result was going to be as it has been. But we did expect that there
would be things to talk about before, during, and after. And I'm particularly glad
that we had assessed the idea that there would be
opportunities to talk about what has happened. And then finally, I
thought that the last in this series of discussions,
which have numbered seven, it would be good to talk about
the legacy of President Obama, whether the Democrats won,
or the Republicans won. So this series began in
the middle of September. And it's ending now, just
with the right person, I feel, Glenn Loury, who's
going to be talking about the legacy
of the president. I thought I'd introduce
the idea first by quoting from an article that
I think many of you have read. It was by David Remnick
in The New Yorker. It was the Nov. 28th issue. And he just laid out things that
have been accomplished or not in the Obama administration,
some of which I'm sure Glenn will
be speaking about. So David Remnick wrote,
"as recently as early 2015, the Obama administration
had been in a funk. He had underestimated ISIS. Putin had annexed Crimea. Syria was a catastrophe. His relations with the
Republicans in Congress, especially since the
crushing 2014 midterms, were at an impasse." "Then, in a single
week in June 2015, the Supreme Court ended years
of legal assaults on Obamacare. The court ruled in favor
of marriage equality. And at a funeral following
the murder of nine congregants at a black church
in Charleston, Obama gave a speech that captivated
much of the country. Rather than focus
on the race war that the killer had
hoped to incite, he spoke of the
reservoir of goodness in the living and
the dead, and ended by singing as I'm sure you
all remember, Amazing Grace." Remnant continues, "a sense
of energy and accomplishment filtered back into
the administration. Long before Election
Day, books were being published about its legacy. An economy steered clear
of a beckoning depression, the rescue of the
automobile industry, Wall Street reform,
the banning of torture, the passage of Obamacare,
marriage equality, and the Lilly
Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the end of the war in
Iraq, heavy investment in renewable energy, the
appointment of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to
the Supreme Court, the killing of Osama bin
Laden, the Iran nuclear deal, the opening of Cuba, the Paris
agreement on climate change, two terms long on dignity
and short on scandal," Remnick writes. Obama's approval ratings
reached a new high. Clinton's election as the
first female president would complete the narrative. And Obama, his aide
suggested, would be free to sit in the
healing sun of Oahu and contemplate
nothing more rigorous than the unrushed composition
of a high-priced memoir. That has not come to pass. So here we sit, with a new
administration in transition. And by the way,
we're going to have a conversation about
this transition coming up on Friday afternoon at 12:00,
I believe, in this very room. But before we talk
about transitions, we'll talk about the legacy. And let me tell you
something about the man who is here to speak to us tonight. Glenn Loury is a faculty fellow
with the Watson Institute, professor of economics, and
Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown. He's published
principally in the areas of applied microeconomic
theory, game theory, industrial organization,
natural resource economics, and the economics
of race and inequality. He's a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Econometric Society,
and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He's won many awards,
including the John van Neumann Award of the Budapest
University of Science and Public Administration, for his
profound impact on students. A Guggenheim Fellowship
and a Carnegie Scholarship to
support his research. The American Book Award, and the
Christianity Today Book Award, for his book One by One
From the Inside Out, Essays and Reviews on Race
and Responsibility in America. He's also received
much-deserved recognition seeking that he offer his
wisdom in prestigious fora. The Dubois lectures in
African-American studies at Harvard in 2000. James A. Moffett 29 lectures
in ethics at Princeton in 2003. The Tanner Lectures on human
values at Stanford in 2007. As a prominent social critic
and public intellectual, Glenn has published
more than 200 essays and reviews and journals
of Public Affairs in the US and abroad. He's a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor
at the Boston Review, and was for many years
a contributing editor at The New Republic. At Brown, he's taught,
among other courses, a graduate course in
development studies, an undergraduate
international relations class, called Ethnicity
and Inequality in Global Perspectives. And with Watson Institute
professor and political science Ashu Varshney, greatly valued
Brown International Advance Research Institute, or
BIARI, as we call it here, which has been an annual
for the last few years, Early Summer
Exploration of Issues in Global Conflict,
Inequality, Ethnicity. So there's no one better suited,
from a domestic perspective, from a disciplinary perspective,
from a global perspective, to talk about the
Obama legacy today. Thanks for being here, Glenn. Thank you very much, Stephen. Thank you all for coming out. You probably want to hold that
applause until after you've heard what I have to say. Thank you all for coming out. It is a Tuesday
night, 7 o'clock. I get it. I mean, you should be
home with your kids, or eating dinner, or
some-- And I've been asked, and I'm going to read my remarks
for maybe 25 minutes or so. Because it is-- I want to be clear
in expressing myself. It is a difficult
question actually, for me to take up at
this point in time. I've been asked to make
a few remarks to provoke some discussion about the legacy
of our outgoing president. And that's what I intend
to do, to provoke you. I'm not a historian, nor
am I a political scientist. Others will be better
informed than I about the legislative
record, or the nuances of political
change, the backroom dealings, the infighting
and maneuvering that has taken place during
Obama's time in office. His landmark health care
legislation hangs by a thread. His effort to promote an
international coalition to fight climate
change is in jeopardy. His success at leading
us out of the quicksand of economic recession
and financial collapse is an important
achievement that'll likely soon to be
forgotten, especially if the currently anemic economic
growth rates in the economy improve in the near term. His presiding over the killing
of Osama bin Laden-- that's a plus, I suppose. And nobody can take it away
from him, though I must say his and others' constant bragging
about this achievement was a bit unnerving to me. His appointments of Sonia
Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the US Supreme
Court will, one hopes, cast a very long shadow. And although his effort to
champion equality for women, minorities, and
immigrants will no doubt be countered to some extent
by the new administration, much of that progress
will survive. His presidency has, of
course, been historic, merely in virtue of the
fact that he demonstrated the possibility of
a black man rising to the pinnacle of political
achievement in America, sustaining himself as the most
powerful person on the planet for nearly a decade. This remarkable
personal achievement, and those few legislative
enactments notwithstanding, we must ask what will be the
lasting impact of the Obama presidency? That is the question before us. As a black man, I have an
additional question to ask. What will his presidency
imply for black Americans? In breaking through the color
barrier in American politics eight years ago, did
Barack Hussein Obama bring with him a distinctive
African-American moral vision? Did he somehow embody
an alternative version of American history? Did his blackness matter much? Will there be a
lasting Obama effect on the African-American
consciousness? Did he change the game for
black and brown politicians in a way that will resonate to
the benefit of a Cory Booker, or a Deval Patrick? Some thought this would be so
at the time of his elevation to the office of the presidency. They anointed the ascendancy
of President Obama with world historic
significance, and linked this to his race. A black man, an
African-American, a son of Africa
had risen to occupy the highest office in the land. Our time had come, some said. Hallelujah, they shouted. Indeed, I can
still, to this day, recall the soaring close
of Reverend Joseph Lowery's benediction at Obama's first
inauguration in January of 2009. Listen for just a
moment, if you will, to the voice of the co-founder
of Martin Luther King Jr's Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, as he opened events on that
glorious day of nearly eight years ago. Listen for its hopeful,
prophetic tone. Lowery said, "we pray now,
oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack
Obama, the 44th President of these United States, his
family, and his administration. He has come to this high
office at a low moment in our national, and indeed,
the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got
the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our
nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not
shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills." He went on. "For we know that
Lord, you are able and you're willing to work
through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our
brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the
exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from
favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these. We thank you for empowering thy
servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe
that yes, we can work together to achieve a more
perfect union." "And while we have sown
the seeds of greed, the wind of greed
and corruption, and even as we
reap the whirlwind of social and
economic disruption, we seek forgiveness. And we come in a spirit
of unity and solidarity to commit our support
to our president by our willingness
to make sacrifices, to respect your creation,
to turn to each other and not on each other." "And now Lord, in the complex
arena of human relations, let us-- help us, I should
say, to make choices on the side of love, not hate,
on the side of inclusion, not exclusion, tolerance,
not intolerance. And as we leave
this mountaintop, help us to hold on to
the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power
back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches,
our temples, our mosque, and wherever we seek Your Will." And I'll close. I'm quoting him at
length because I want to capture the spirit of
the time, that wonderful day eight years ago. "Bless President Obama,
First Lady Michelle. Look over our little
angelic Sasha and Malia. We go now to walk
together as children, pledging that we won't get weary
in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave
us, with your hands of power and your heart of love. Help us then, now Lord,
to work for that day when nation shall not lift
up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten
into tractors, when every man and every
woman shall sit under his or her own
vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid." "When justice will roll down
like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream. Lord, in the memory
of all the saints, who from their labors rest, and
in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help
us work for that day when black will not be
asked to get in the back, when brown can stick around,
when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get
ahead, can get ahead, man. And when white will
embrace what is right. That all those who do
justice and love mercy, let them say Amen." Such was the hope,
widely embraced by a majority of the
American people at that time. This prayer, delivered in
the style of a black Baptist preacher, had the new president
nodding and tapping his foot. Some of us will recall
that in this prayer, this famed black preacher,
longtime ally and confederate of Martin Luther King
Jr, exalted the humble in the official story,
America's minorities, black, brown, yellow, and red. And he humbled the exalted. But did Obama do the same? The preacher dared
to hope that white will embrace what is right. The Reverend Joseph
Lowery confirmed for many the glow of
a heartfelt blessing on what was expected
to be a new era. But sadly, and with the
benefit of hindsight, I think it's fair to say
that events didn't develop in quite that way. So now I come to ask, how did
that work out for us folks? For us black folks? For us Americans? Did we, in fact,
enter a new era? More pointedly, did the election
and re-election of Barack Obama constitute a kind of fulfillment
of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous dream? This is precisely the kind of
question about American history and the place of
the Negro within it that our great
historians will be parsing, fighting over,
and striving to illuminate for decades to come. The fight for control
of this narrative about the lasting significance
of the Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama will, I'm
sure, be a fierce one. And will be raging still
long after I am gone. I'm afraid that my preliminary
answer to this question, for what it's worth,
must be a resounding no. Obama's two terms in the
nation's highest office neither fulfilled King's dream. Racial inequalities are
every bit as deeply rooted now as eight years ago. Race relations are
arguably much worse. Nor did President
Obama's time in power serve to usher in any sort of
new era, the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee to the
contrary notwithstanding. Quite the contrary, lasting
change from his presidency is hard to find. Speaking politically,
what future can we envision for the
Obama coalition, so-called. Now, where are the Obamacrats? What ultimately will
be the political legacy of that campaign of
hope and change of 2008? These are fair questions. For the fact is that
during the era of Obama, we have witnessed a virtually
unprecedented collapse of the electoral fortunes
of the Democratic Party, at the state and federal levels. Some, especially now,
after Trump's victory, will attribute this to racism. I for one, without
for a moment denying the reality of racism
in American life, think that's way too easy. I'm more inclined to see
it as a colossal failure of political leadership. No message that resonated,
no next generation bench of political talent
being developed, and no success at leveraging the
commanding advantages of 2009 on behalf of change
that we can believe in, and change that lasts
the test of time. Of course, obeisance to the
"white supremacy is holding us down" narrative will prevent
acknowledgement of this reality by many who will insist
that we depict ourselves, we African-Americans,
including President Obama, as the victims of birthers,
racists, climate deniers, and Republican obstruction. Meanwhile, back in the real
world, where I prefer to live, we're going to have to deal
for at least a generation with the bitter
fruit of what looks like an awful lot
like President Obama's abject political failure. Failure. Yes of course, there
were racial overtones to the opposition
that confronted Obama. But we always knew
that this would be a part of the terrain, one
of the difficult obstacles to be managed and overcome. I'm simply claiming here
that those obstacles were not insurmountable, and that
a shrewder, and wiser, and stronger political leader
might well have overcome them. Easy for me to say, I know. But President Obama did not
overcome these obstacles. Instead, he
exacerbated the problem of dealing with
America's residual racism from his office, by on
occasion, mishandling the responsibilities of
his office on race issues. Here's what I'm saying. President Obama faced a
critical choice from day one, either to stand above
racial identity politics, incurring the wrath of many
of the race card players by insisting on
being a president who merely happens to be black. Or to become the first
President in our history to utter such words
as, "if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." That was a mistake. He injected himself
thereby as a partisan and into the middle of a
racially explosive dispute, when he could not possibly
have known the facts. President Obama did
not choose wisely. He erred further by
splitting the difference on questions of law and
order when riots broke out. He ought to have
expressed with clarity and unambiguous firmness the
primacy of the rule of law in Ferguson, Missouri,
in Baltimore, Maryland, and elsewhere. Instead, he equivocated. Think what it would have
meant to our country, and perhaps even to the
outcome of this last election, if our nation's first
black president had chosen differently. If, for example, he had not
made a man like Al Sharpton into the prominent informal
ambassador of his government to people of color. This is just one example
of how he simply failed to get the country behind him. And this was not the inevitable
consequence of him being black. I dare say the opposition
to Bill Clinton during his eight
years in office was no less virulent and intense. But Clinton was infinitely
more deft as a political leader than was Obama. Clinton saved his party from
irrelevance and oblivion by entering into a
strategic compromise with his enemies, Newt
Gingrich in 1994, for example. Obama has, by contrast,
led his party over a cliff. He was dealt a far more
favorable political hand in 2008 and 2009, than
Clinton had been in 1992. And he nevertheless
managed to make less of it. Barack Obama will
enter the history books on less than flattering
terms, I predict, once the dust has
settled, and the events of his historic ascendancy
to the White House can be viewed with
some objectivity. Indeed, I'd bet a fair
sum that even today there are veteran Democrats
who are quietly lamenting what is, upon
reflection, a plausible thesis. That their party would
have been much better off had Hillary Rodham Clinton
been nominated and elected in 2008, with Barack
Hussein Obama waiting his turn in the Senate,
and running for president in the current election cycle. What is more, that additional
political experience might well have equipped our
nation's first black president to better handle the
predictable challenges, which as a black man in the Oval
Office, he was certain to face. OK? Are you feeling provoked yet? Remember, that was my job. So we are left to
ponder, how are we going to factor into
this historical narrative the reality of the political
failure of Barack Obama? Of course we could deny it. But I don't think we've
got the facts on our side, if that's the path
we choose to take. When the first black
president took office, his party was in control
of both houses of Congress, most of the governorships,
and quite a few of the state legislatures. As he departs, the party has
been completely decimated at all levels. There's to be a
Republican president who will be working with
Republicans in control of both federal branches and
2/3 of the state governorships. Reapportionment lurks
right around the corner in a few years, so the effects
of this Republican dominance may be long lasting. Trump will appoint at
least one and possibly three new justices to the
United States Supreme Court. Indeed, Obama's humiliation
is nearly total. Our departing president,
the first son of Africa to occupy that office,
went out on a limb during his recent campaign,
begging black voters to support his
designated candidate, based upon the imperative
to preserve his legacy. "I may not be on the
ballot," he said, "but my policies
are on the ballot. And my legacy is on the ballot." In speech after speech
on the campaign trail, he allowed as how he
would be disappointed with his black supporters
if they didn't turn out for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Well, they didn't. They didn't turn
out in Philadelphia. They didn't turn out in Detroit. They didn't turn
out in Milwaukee, where they needed to
turn out in order to make that election go the other way. What are we to make of this? A few tens of thousands
of votes here and there, this way or that, could
have changed this election. Obama has presided first over
the rise of the Tea Party, and now the Trump movement. Yes, it's a movement. And Trump is going to do what
President Obama didn't do, but perhaps ought to have done. He's going to go around
the country holding rallies after he's seated in
office, keeping alive the fervor of his movement. He's going to harness
the energy and intensity among his supporters from
the campaign, mark my words. I take no pleasure
in saying this. I just prefer to live
in the real world. And I certainly don't
hold Obama responsible for the shortcomings of the
Democratic Party candidate in this last election. But the fact of the matter
is that President Obama has left his party in a hole. He's failed. He ran for president
promising hope and change, and has left us with
not much of either. At the end of eight
years, it's bitter ashes. All that he did
hangs by a thread. So now our country's
first black president, such an elegant man,
so sophisticated, so intelligent and
articulate, with such swagger, departs from the
national political stage, looking to all the
world like someone who didn't know WTF he was
doing, as far as leading this country is concerned. The proof of this pudding has
got to be in the eating, folks. He's failed. A black man got to the
highest office in the land. He penetrated the
highest glass ceiling. And then he fell
flat on his face. OK, perhaps that's too harsh. But we are now about to
enter the era of Trump. I repeat, I don't blame
the president for the fact that Hillary Rodham
Clinton lost a race that was eminently winnable. But I must insist that
this loss is definitely a part of the
president's legacy. Not good. Thank you. You provoked. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. That was generous. All right. Glenn was very generous in
speaking pithily and shortly. So we have a good amount of
time to have a conversation. These seminars were set up, in
fact, for lots of interaction. So question, comment, react. Brad, please. Say who you are, please. Everyone will say who they are. I'm not picking on you. I'm Brad Brockmann
with the Center for Prisoner Health and Human
Rights, here in Providence. And my question goes to the
impact of his economic choices from the beginning. And how much do you see those
as having had an impact when he started out with Larry
Summers, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, when in fact
he had promised change? And I think that the
saddest part of the legacy is that that was one piece of
the longstanding democratic presentation, understanding
that started under Clinton, and policies of triangulation
that consistently move the party to the
right, and how important you think that is. You know, I confess to not being
an expert in these matters. But I did read the
newspaper for eight years. I remember, I think
Bernanke was already in office when the president
assumed the presidency. But he did appoint
Summers as his counselor in the White House. And he did appoint Geithner
as the Secretary of Treasury. And Geithner was a protege of
Summers at the New York Fed. And Summers was in
effect a protege of-- Robert Rubin. Yeah, Rubin. So we had the financial crisis. So a great transfer
of wealth takes place. So a political opportunity
presents itself. All the metaphors I think of are
profane, and I can't say them. But cut off some of
their essential organs, and put them in a place
where they needed to be put. I mean, it's time to
go for the killer. It's time to do the thing
that you needed to do. To cash in on that political
opportunity, in a way. Nobody went to jail. Not that many people, as far
as I know, went bankrupt. I mean, the people who
pulled that heist walked. Now I wasn't in those meetings. I don't know what
Larry Summers whispered in the ear of President Obama. I don't know what
Timothy Geithner might have said to him. But I do know that Bernie
Sanders was still complaining about this eight years later. I think an opportunity
was missed. That's just my opinion. Tony, did you have a-- I was going to ask more
specifically about what your opinion about the
nationalization of the banks was. Because that was kind of the
moment where they had them. And whether that was
the moment to squeeze. Or whether it was a question
of prosecution afterwards, prosecution for
stupidity-- plus, it was going to be difficult,
and it's remained difficult. But the fact was that
they were bankrupt and the government owned them. And could have done
what they wanted to do with them as owners. Could have zeroed out
some of those accounts. You know, this is a little
bit inside baseball. And I'm going to
pretend not to have-- I'm not going to pretend to have
expertise that I don't have. I'm not sure about all
the details, whatever, I'm just kind of giving a
broader political gloss on it. So I think a much tougher, a
much more actively belligerent facing off with Wall Street
was what was required. The original political sin,
or the original exemplar of not having the
political muscle to make the thing through. Because in some ways,
it looks like that's the boomerang that's come
back at him, from the Tea Party through Trump. The anger that nobody
paid for ripping us off. We ate it. Well, there's that. And I mean, there's also the
way that the Affordable Care Act was enacted into
law by a shoestring, with no Republican support. Again, it's going to be said,
and it well may be right, he would have loved to have
some Republican support, but he couldn't get it. There are people who are on
both sides of that question. But I think that-- I mean, if
you look back to those town halls that the representatives
were encountering in 2009, and into 2010,
when people were up in arms, and against the-- the Tea Party
movement was getting started. It seemed to be instigated by--
there's a good book out there, with Theda Skocpol and whatnot. But yeah, we're going to
have ample opportunity to review these years,
and to diagnose all of what might have gone wrong. Because this guy-- I'm talking
about Donald J. Trump-- is President-elect
of the United States. And he's appointing a government
right now, as we speak. And there's going to be a
government that we don't ever see. All these people appointed
to regulatory boards, and assistant
secretary positions, and whatnot like that. And we're definitely going to
go in a different direction. We have the opportunity
to reflect at our leisure on all that may have gone wrong. Is it fair to say-- Identify yourself, please. Oh, Stanley Bleeker. Would it be fair to say that he
didn't know how to wield power? Yeah. Let me just say about
this conversation that we're having-- so I'm the
guy that's up here in front, everybody else is
sitting out there. But I don't want it to be
asymmetric in that way. My mouth is not a prayer book. I don't have the Rosetta Stone. But yeah, that's what I
just said, in so many words. So I agree with that. I would like to know
what other people think. Yeah, I think
that's fair to say. Go ahead. So when it comes to power-- And identify
yourself, please too. Oh, my name's Jo. I have such a loud voice,
I don't think I need to. Please use it. So you were
mentioning that Trump is going to continue campaigning
and mobilizing people. Recently, yeah. And when Obama took office,
a very mobilized generation, because of the war,
really de-mobilized. Like that Facebook guy came in
and built that huge database, and then just shut it down. Was that a fork in the road? Could there have been
another wielding of power in a different way? Sort of feels that way. Again, I'm not best
informed person about the mechanics of
political mobilization, and exactly what
happened to the mailing list, and the contributors,
and so forth and all of that. Certainly feels that way. The air went out of
the balloon, didn't it? By the time you
get to 2010 there's a tsunami going in
the wrong direction. I don't know. The president had
a difficult job. I'd be the first
person to admit that. It was a difficult job. Did he risk the ire of provoking
his political enemies by, as it were, taking victory
laps around the country, and bringing out huge crowds
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, or whatever of his constituents? Was he trying to do
what I just actually was saying that he
ought to have done? Choose not the blue pill but
the red pill, or whatever. Not take the road of I'm a
black man in the Oval Office, but I'm a man in the Oval
Office who happens to be black. I hope I'll get
pushback about that. I understand that's
controversial. I know that what I've
said is very arguable. I had my judgment about it. Maybe he was trying to
do the kind of thing that I had in mind
when I said that, which is not to too much inject
the kind of demographic trump card-- I'm sorry for
the pun-- that he had into the management
of his office. Maybe he was trying to be above. We don't do theater, that's
what I've heard one of his aides as having been quoted. He didn't want to
play to the crowd. He wanted to be serious about
managing the affairs of state, and not playing political
games, and so forth. I don't know. These are things we
can speculate about. Thank you for the talk. My name's Richard Wimberly. And my opinion is that
the biggest social problem in the United States is the
continuing interrelationship along what's known as
ethnic/racial lines, both the feeling that there's still
inopportunity for certain large groups of people because
of the color of their skin, and also the fact
that there is still a discrimination by the
establishment against people who have different-colored skin. And I think one
of the problems is that-- in Barack
Obama's instances, is that he was willing to use
that called race card in order to achieve purposes, but
yet not to solve problems. But rather to gain local
ability to overcome in particular instances. Whether it was in
defense of himself, or whether it was
some other instance. And wasn't able to really
step in to deal with it. And I think there's
a continuation here. I'm a person. I'm a member of
the general public. But a member of
the general public who's been around the world,
and been in Africa, and Asia, and Europe, and other places. And my opinion is
that the continuation of the idea that you're
black and I'm white is the stumbling block. Because I'm not white. And I prefer to not
think of you as black, or think of him as black. I would tend to think
of you as someone that I had come to listen to,
as I have a number of times, because of what you
say, and read you, because of what you write. And it doesn't-- the black
and white is the printed page. It's not the color of our skins. And I think the
need in America is to break away from black and
white, and to be Americans, or to be other hyphenated--
recognizing other legacy. But not that we are
black and white. And I hold the dream
of Martin Luther King to be the highest dream
that we should have. And yet it happened, sort of. And yet it didn't. OK, so Mr. Wimblerly, let
me give you what I think would be the pushback. This is a man, who
in 2004, stood up at the Democratic
National Convention and gave a famous
speech, in which he said precisely what you said. He said it's not a red
America or a blue America. It's the United
States of America. It's not a white America
or a black America. He said, I embody
it in my very DNA, a man whose father was an
African, whose mother was a white American. He, in a profound way,
instantiated the very idea that you have affirmed. And the pushback would be
he was the same man in 2008, when he got elected to the
presidency, as he was in 2004. His views about that
hadn't changed one whit. But what happened was that
he encountered a buzz saw. He encountered a determined
opposition, partly mobilized around the idea that a black
man was in the White House. An idea that wasn't much
spoken on Capitol Hill, but that was widely embraced
by many of the constituents of people on Capitol Hill. You'll recall during the
State of the Union Address, early in his first
administration, somebody stood up on the
floor of the Congress, and broke the decorum of that
august body by yelling out during the president's
speech, "you lie.' Unprecedented, it at least in
my knowledge about the history of American government. That would not have happened,
the pushback would go, to a white man. That didn't happen to
George W. Bush, who couldn't carry Barack Obama's
book bag, they would say. He got more deference
and more respect, in keeping with the office,
than this man who happened to be of African descent was granted. They will say-- and I'll stop. Mitch McConnell
announced on day one-- I'm not necessarily
buying all this argument, I'm just giving you,
as forcefully as I can, what I think the
argument would be. Mitch McConnell
decided on day one that they wanted to make
sure that he failed. Not that the country succeeded,
but that Barack Obama failed. Probably wouldn't have
decided that if he hadn't been a black man, they will say. There were people who could
not accept the idea that it was African-Americans in the
White House, African-Americans hosting state dinners,
African-Americans representing the country at critical
moments, African-Americans greeting foreign leaders
coming to this country. And that that simmering
undertow of racial antagonism made it impossible for him to
do what we have every reason to believe he believed in,
but wasn't even given a chance to do it, they'd say. What do you say to that? So my first thought
is when we go back to the dream of the
Reverend Martin Luther King, he says that we should look at
the quality of their character, rather than the
color of their skin. And I may be in the
great minority here, but I don't view Barack Obama,
in terms of his policies, as being necessarily a person
who's created great policies. In the introduction,
there was a talk about how the Supreme Court
has ruled that it's legal, the Affordable Care Act. OK, but is it the right
thing to do for medicine? Is it the right thing
to do for people? Is it the right way to
deliver the goods that was needed at the time? And therefore, when
we talk about policy, he didn't deliver policy. And you want to go back
and talk about well, maybe some people say it was
about the color of his skin. And maybe it was. I'm not denying it. Because I know it's deeply
rooted in American culture. But it's also the
fact that he didn't deliver on a lot of things that
he made promises that he would. He would say change in the
campaign without defining it. And then he comes
into office, and we find that change is
a new medical system, a new medical insurance
system, which takes away from people their
ability to make choices that they've made all
their life, the ability to choose a doctor. A health relationship as
much a relationship of love between the client
and the healer. And in this new system,
there's no love. It's all squeezed out by
the Affordable Care Act. OK, thanks. And I think they're going
to be others in the room who will have a different opinion. I'm anxious to hear from
them in the fullness of time. Over there, too. However you want to go. Ed Steinfeld, Watson Institute. Thanks, Glenn. As always, you are
incredibly eloquent. But I have to
admit, I didn't find what you were saying
to be particularly provocative in any way. Maybe because I share
some of your anger. But maybe also
because I didn't quite understand what exactly
the target of your attack, for lack of a better word, is. So if I, personally speaking--
if I look at the Trump victory, I'm angry about it. And yeah, I could--
by definition, it's a failure of the
previous administration. Again, speaking
just for myself, I look at the Hillary
Clinton candidacy, the fact that she was the candidate,
the anointed successor, makes me angry. And I think she was the
wrong candidate for the time, a time that called for change. She wasn't a change candidate. You could blame the
administration for that. You could look at the
failure, or the challenges that advanced industrial
democracies are facing across the world right now. The US is just one. But it's the Trump insurgency,
the Brexit insurgency, that Italy stuff,
it's across the board. And you could say
all right, it's the Obama administration's
not causing all that, but it's part and parcel
of some kind of phenomenon. And I just say as
background, I still don't get exactly what it is
that the Obama administration did that's making you angry,
and that's making me angry. So let me list a
couple of categories. One is the guy somehow-- he
created a self-identity that was just wrong for the time. He campaigned on
change, and maybe he presented himself as the first
African-American president. Maybe he should have
done something different. I sense there's a piece of
that in what you're saying. So something about identity. And then maybe, there's
something about strategy. The guy campaigned for change. And he, at least, never was
willing to do class politics. He did a lot of kind of
politics, but never class. And maybe that was--
that's maybe strategy. Then there's maybe-- and
this came up a little bit-- kind of association. Who did he surround himself by? Of course, that's going to
relate to class and strategy. But maybe that's
where he went wrong. And then there's
just another one. Maybe the whole damn
system is a mess. And it's a mess in
the United States. It's a mess in the UK. It's a mess in Italy. And because it's
a mess, a vacuum has been created
for insurgencies. I don't think Donald
Trump was the chosen candidate of the
Republican establishment. I'm sure he wasn't. And Hillary Clinton,
she was the candidate of the Democratic establishment. So no establishment candidate
won in this election, and no establishment
choice was taken in Brexit. So you could say the
system is failing. But if it's the
system, and Obama's to blame for that,
or at least he was a participant in
maintaining the system, then what are we really saying? That he should have run his
presidency as an insurgent? I partly believe that. But is that what we would
have expected of this guy? That he would have
gone out and either done some kind of
populist campaign, or some-- in the face
of a lot of opposition, we acknowledge that--
but to be successful, would Obama have to
run an insurgency against the democratic
system, as it's evolved in the United States? So, sorry I went on for so long. But help me understand
why you're so angry, And, maybe you'll help me
understand why I'm so angry. Yeah. I thought that was
pretty good, Ed. You ticked off-- Only the anger's heartfelt. You ticked off a number
of possibilities there. I'm not sure I have a
whole lot to add to it. Why am I angry? OK, so in addition to the
things that you talked about, I will confess. I supported Hillary Clinton
in 2008, during the campaign. I know I wasn't supposed to. I thought, I'm from Chicago. I know a little bit of something
about Chicago politics. I haven't lived
there in a while. But I've got children
who live in the city. And I know a little bit about
what's going on in the city. And I thought this guy--
I mean, he's attractive. He's brilliant. He's got this persona. He's so exciting. But I thought, he's
a carpetbagger. I'm just confessing, OK? You've got to give me a break. It's 2007, 2008, I'm
a Chicago homeboy. I'm looking at this guy
who flies in from Hawaii, takes over my city, compares
himself to Abraham Lincoln, and waltzes into
the White House. I thought he was green. I didn't think he had
enough experience. I thought he had
not done anything except be Barack Obama. Got himself elected
to the Senate running against Alan Keyes. Anyway, got himself
elected to the Senate. OK? That's not nothing. It's just not exactly
a presidential resume. I thought, I'm going
to go-- this is 2008, this is just Glenn Loury,
resentful Chicagoan-- carpetbagger comes in
and takes over my city. Let me just stir the
pot here a little bit. Yeah, he's black. Chicago boy, OK? Southside. Yeah, he's black, sort of. Now I know that's a very
unkind thing to say. He elected to be black. He cultivated his blackness. I'm told, by one
of your colleagues who went to high school
with Barack Obama, that when he was a younger
man he only dated white women. And when it was heard
by some of the people back in Honolulu that he
had married Michelle Obama, they said no, not Barry. Not Barry. They thought he was Samoan. I'm gossiping now. And it's 35 years into
the president's-- 40 years into the president's history. So it's not fair. But let me just say, in
that speech in Philadelphia during the campaign, after
the Jeremiah Wright thing went down-- I knew Jeremiah Wright. I mean, I know him. He's still alive. I know Jeremiah Wright. He's a fiery preacher--
goddamn America. You remember that. Everybody remembers that. Jeremiah Wright is a good man. Jeremiah Wright built that
church, Trinity United Church of Christ from a 50 or
60 member congregation into a 5,000 member force
of nature in that community. My dear cousin,
who died tragically in a boating accident
at the age of 50, was buried in Jeremiah
Wright's church. I know Jeremiah Wright. Jeremiah Wright is there on
the South Side of Chicago. He's there cheek by jowl
with Louis Farrakhan. Yes, Louis Farrakhan. Louis Farrakhan. Louis Farrakhan has
thousands of followers on the south side of Chicago. Nobody ministers on the
South Side of Chicago, in the African-American
community, who doesn't respect Louis Farrakhan. They don't have
to agree with him. They don't have to have to
affirm everything he says. But he's a part of the
fabric of that community. I watched that campaign unfold. I watched the firestorm around
Louis Farrakhan-- I mean, around Jeremiah Wright's
remarks, when it was-- I watched national reporters
go to a church-- I went to high school a half
mile from that church-- go to that church
with microphones, and then report out to
the public the story line that they went here,
because they were all in the tank for Barack Obama. And suddenly, my black
Chicago disappeared, it became a caricature. It became something
to be ashamed of. It became something that the
president, soon-to-be president had to apologize for. I resented that. When he said about
Jeremiah Wright, who had taken the side
of the Palestinians in some public discussion over
and against the Israeli Zionist whatever. This is Jeremiah Wright. And when Barack Obama said, in
effect-- I can't quote him-- in that Philadelphia
speech, the man is confused, that infuriated me. Jeremiah Wright
was not confused. I thought the weight
of the African-American spiritual and prophetic witness
in this country over 200 years, coming now to a head with
respect to world affairs. Because one of our number
was about to perhaps assume the highest office in the land. I thought it had been
traded on an auction block. I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. So that's just me. That's Glenn Loury. I'm just fessing up. You asked me why am I angry? Well, one of the reasons that
I'm angry is for those things that I've been describing here. But I would hope
that that would not color my judgment about
where we stand now, after eight years of
Barack Obama's presidency. And I don't think we-- if I
could use the first person plural in speaking here--
are in a very good place. And that's what I
was trying to say. So maybe I'm mad for
the wrong reasons. Maybe your analysis is correct. There really isn't anything
to blame Obama for here. And you heard me try to
give voice to this idea that he did face this
kind of implacable force of racial antagonism. But my own feelings
are complicated. Let me just-- before the
next question-- say, ask you something, Glenn, about
something you paused at, with some moral gravity,
I thought, with regard to the killing of
Osama bin Laden. There was something there
that you wanted to say, I think, that maybe you
didn't explicate fully, that might have had to do with
the moral and political moment there. But what resonates in
my memory is much more Hillary Clinton giving
claim to that constantly during the campaign. But I guess Barack
Obama did too. There's something about
that that gives you unease, and it does me too. But what is it? Can you identify that? I'm not sure that I should
have any privileged thing here. This is just one man's opinion. Yeah, it did really disturb me. And yeah, you're right. Hillary Clinton kept
bragging about the fact she was in the room, she
was in the situation room. And it wasn't so
much the president himself waving the
flag, I killed him. But it was other people saying
amongst the accomplishments-- And I think David
Remnick said so. That they had extirpated the
life of this master terrorist. This is not President
Obama's fault that our political culture
has gotten to a point where-- and Trump-- I mean,
Trump is like this thing taken to an extreme power, where
we pat ourselves on the back, and brag about killing people. About taking people out. About good guys and bad guys. Now, I'm not a Pollyanna. I understand that war is hell,
and that it has to be fought. That defending yourself against
people who intend to harm you sometimes requires that
you do harm to them first. I understand that. But you don't have
to brag about it. You don't have to thump
your chest about it. So this idea that this is an
iconic moment in the Obama presidency, this
photograph that we've all seen of them in the Situation
Room, watching the screen like in a movie somewhere, where
they're getting real time video about when it happened-- it
just rubs me the wrong way. Now I'm going to
stop short of-- I don't know if everybody
knows who Cornel West is. Cornel West is a prominent
African-American intellectual and social critic. And he had been a supporter
of the president early on. But he turned against
the president. And one of the reasons
he turned against him was because nobody on
Wall Street went to jail. And another reason that
he turned against him is because of a
drone strike war, which is the way that
the War on Terror is being fought under Obama. And a lot of people
are being killed. Some of them need,
perhaps, to be dealt with. Others of them happened
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I'm not going all
the way to the point of kind of lecturing
the president about how to be commander-in-chief. I've got no idea
what intelligence he might be getting, and
what the options are. He needs to do, presumably, what
he and his military advisers determine to be necessary in
order to defend the country. But you don't have
to crow about it. Thank you. Hi my name's Ken. I'm a PhD student in
political science. So I want to sort of
confront something that's sort of a
more current reality, but that also is something
that you touched on. Which is that beyond sort of
the murky questions of race, and things that Obama was
always sort of destined to confront, no matter how the
rest of his presidency went. This is something that we're
facing right now, which is Obama may have done a poor
job in the driver's seat, especially in those
early few years. But just what about the question
that just Democrats just suck at playing hardball. And that pains me to
say, as one of them. But it's something I
think that we're seeing come into the foray again. Which is that Mitch McConnell,
day one-- our number one priority is to make this man
a one-term president, right? Democratic leadership will
work with Donald Trump where we can find commonality. No. I mean, here's the problem. I was appalled when the
Republicans did that eight years ago. But now they've done something
that's hard to come back from, which is they've
broken the system. One of my favorite thoughts I
saw in the wake of the election was basically, that the
Republicans broke Washington. And then they had
Democrats write the check to cover the damage. And I think that's
an apt description. But so here's my question now. It's easy enough
to say Obama didn't do a great job in leadership. It's easy enough to
say that top-down, the Democratic Party was
just toppled, basically, over the last eight years,
losing so many governorships and state houses. It's easy enough to say that. Now the question
is, what in the hell do you do to try to
reverse that course? Especially, because,
to me, the response that the Republicans had, which
was we're going to do nothing, we're going to sort of forcibly
break the system in order to get power back, really kind
of isn't an option anymore, for the sake of the country. So what do you do? How do you play hardball
now that the shoe is on the other foot? Good question. I'd be interested to hear what
people have to say about that. I don't know, exactly. I mean, I did read in the
newspaper-- if it was today, or yesterday-- that there
are some Republicans talking about slow-walking Trump
appointments, cabinet and other, and not rushing
to get a lot of approval. I think attorney generals
and such generally get approved right away. But you can slow-walk
it, because any senator has a prerogative. And you can get 30 hours of
debate, or something like that. And you can sort of clog the
system a little bit that way. I heard some people
talking like that. But then I also
heard people saying there's going to be 18
Republican senators up for election in 2018,
10 of them in states that Trump carried in
this last election. And some of those people-- I can
name some of them, Joe Manchin? I wouldn't be surprised if
you find an R next to his name before we get to the
Election Day 2018. I'm talking about
the West Virginia Senator, the one who
shot a bullet through a-- what did he do? He demonstrated
that he liked guns by having himself in
a campaign ad filmed firing a weapon into a--
I hope it wasn't a Bible. But it might of--
anyway, I'm being funny. I shouldn't be funny about
something serious like this. I think people, Democratic
Congressional leaders, have got to be careful. You can say they
did it to Obama, we're going to do it to Trump. But if that means that nothing
gets done for another two years, or whatever,
you're setting yourself up for a situation where
people can say look, these are obstructionist,
they're kind of whatever. But you give us the clout that
we need in these chambers, and we'll get them
straightened out. So I don't think maneuvering,
parliamentary maneuvering, while it may be necessary
in some circumstances, is a substitute for
political mobilization, for having a message,
for reaching people. Again, I feel a
little funny being the person doing this talking,
because I'm not really an expert. But it seems to me that Trump
was right about some stuff, in terms of reading
the electorate, and identifying what
people really cared about, and moving them. I mean, I couldn't help it. I'd watch these rallies. I'd log on to the
Trump thing at YouTube and watch these
rallies in fascination. Tens of thousands of people
crowding into these arenas. Thousands and thousands more
lined up to get outside. The fervor. Right? And I watch Hillary
Rodham Clinton have to bring Beyonce and
Jay-Z and whatnot in order to get people to turn out. Where was the
passion, I thought. So you know, I'm just
rambling up here right now. What do the Democrats--
what do we Democrats-- yes. What do we Democrats
do right now? I think we need a sober
period of reflection. And I hope that we will
dwell in the real world. I mean, I've got one of my
friends-- I love this guy. He's a brilliant guy. I want to name him. But you know he's hoping
for unfaithful electors, faithless electors. If we could just get 40 people
to change their vote-- no, actually, I think you
need more than 40. No, 40 would do it. I think 38 would do it. If you could just get
38 electors who are pledged to Trump, out of
a matter of conscience, to change their vote. And then I saw one
of these electors from Texas actually writing in
The New York Times this morning or yesterday very
much to that effect. But these people-- I think--
are living in a dream world. You really think you've got
to overturn this election? You know? So, stages of grief. We'll get past
that, and then we'll get serious about how
to connect with people, and how to get back in the game. I didn't read the
end of my speech because I wanted to
leave enough time. But at the end of it, I
said, about Obama's legacy-- I called to your attention the
fact that President Obama has said in effect,
give Trump a chance. That's what he said. He said we want him to succeed
for the sake of the country. He's more magnanimous than
those a-hole Republicans who didn't give him the
same benefit of the doubt. And I said, in part of the
speech that I didn't read, his legacy's a young man. He is a relatively young man. He's in his mid-50s. He's going to be around
for a while, God willing. He has a lot of good to do,
and maybe some of that good could be helping to bring
the country together in the face of this political
catastrophe for his party. That too could be a part
of his legacy, I said, in the spirit of
being provocative. My name is Bob O'Brien. To what extent should Obama's
relatively high approval ratings impact his legacy? Is it a function largely of
his foreign policy stance? Or is it more
emotional in nature? I don't know if those
are the only choices. I want to answer the question. I think his high approval rating
definitely figures positively in his legacy. And I tried to
give voice to that. Although there was
so much negativity, maybe no one heard me. The man is elegant. The man is decent. The man is brilliant. The man is articulate. He's got oratorical gifts. He has conducted
himself with grace. He has presided over an
administration that has been relatively scandal free. I don't know if absolutely
scandal free, but not too bad. He has conducted himself in
office, without exception, I think, with class. He's a class act. He's not a hard man to like. People like him. So I think the high
approval ratings are partly a reflection of the fact that
his personal qualities are very attractive to people. OK? His party's still
in a deep hole. But his personal
qualities, I think, are going to hold him
in relatively good stead in the public imagination. He's a decent guy. That can't be said for the man
who's about to take his place. [LAUGHTER] Would you speak to us
as an economist, now? OK. He inherited a
deep, deep crisis. Perhaps heads should have
rolled that didn't roll. And yet he, from a lay
perspective I have, restored the economy to
relatively good health. The growth rate is low. The unemployment rate is
relatively healthy now. You wouldn't ever
compare him as, an economist, I don't
think, to his predecessor, not for a moment. So wouldn't you
give his scorecard relatively high marks,
compared to where we were eight years ago? We were on the precipice of a
disaster, as I understand it. It's not my field of
expertise within economics. I don't know all of the details. But I talk to these
people all the time. These people being
macroeconomists, financial economists,
monetary specialists, and people who know
about securities markets, and know
about financial panics, and know about the link
between the financial and the real sector. Things could have
gone much, much worse. The worst recession since
the Great Depression happens to be descriptively
accurate, but not even really capturing
the emotional thing. They looked over down
into the precipice. There was panic. People didn't know whether
or not X, Y or Z were going to go belly up, and
the chain of dominoes, and where that would end,
and what that would imply. It was a global situation,
not just something affecting United States. A true house of
cards, teetering. So I think this idea that if
you were in office as president, when stuff happens
in the economy, then you did it is silly. So I think this kind of
straight line connection is questionable. But I think, not
withstanding the fact that Geithner and Summers are
Wall Street types, and Ben Bernanke, and others whose names
I can't mention or don't know-- I think they nevertheless
handled the economic management problems that they
were confronting deftly and effectively. And if you want to
say save the economy, I don't think that that
would be an exaggeration. I think that you
could well say that. Yes, growth is slow. Unemployment is low, but the
labor force participation is also down. And so people are not
feeling the same sense of economic
security, and whatnot that they might feel with an
unemployment rate under 5%. Inflation is nowhere in sight. We got a kind of stimulus bill. But it wasn't nearly as
big as it should have been. Paul Krugman was
ranting on the pages of The New York Times for
months and months about this. Pretty much everybody
in my profession agrees that we needed was
practically zero interest rates, and so much work
that needed to be done. Again, I'm not an expert. But my understanding
is that some of the funds that were
appropriated under that fairly large piece of legislation
didn't actually end up promoting jobs
as they might have done. But that's probably true
with any such endeavor of that magnitude. Dodd-Frank is another matter. And again, this is
something that people who know about know a lot
more than I know about it. But it's hanging by a thread. And it's probably going to
be substantially revised. And we'll see. But on the whole
I think you would have to give the president good
marks for the first few years of the administration,
in grappling with a serious economic
problem, and on the whole, managing it very effectively. And as you suggest, mismanaging
the political message of it. Because it might have been
interpreted as a much stronger political achievement. And it hasn't been. In fact, it's been overturned,
as a political achievement. Indeed, this is again--
I keep saying this. So no more qualifiers. I'm not an expert
on this either. But I said at the
end of my remarks, which I didn't read here. And I talked about Trump. And I said you have to
actually acknowledge that he did something. He came against all
of his opposition. He won his party's nomination. And he won the presidency. That was a pretty amazing
thing that he did. And I said he was
effectively communicating with the part of the
electorate that he was focused on trying to get behind him. And I said by
comparison, I thought that the president, who's
a brilliant orator-- stand him up in
front of a microphone and ask him to speak,
whether he's reading it or it's impromptu, and
he is going to wow you. That speech in that church after
that funeral was unbelievable. It was absolutely stunning that
the President of the United States was [INAUDIBLE]
He ends with breaking out into a hymn, Amazing Grace,
at the end of that thing. Much of it was
improvised on the fly. It was amazing. But effective political
communication of the sort that allows you to
cash in on your stuff? Maybe he wasn't
so great at that. If you make reference to
your last page one more time, you're going to have to read it. [LAUGHTER] Brad, go ahead. Yeah. I think the analysis
of what the Wall Street gang, Summers and Geitner
brought in is accurate. I think that the
piece that was missing was not so much the
saving of the banks. But the fact that they saved the
bankers, and the shareholders, et cetera. In other words, saving the bank
as institutions is one thing. Saving the individuals,
and not pushing-- I get it. There are other
phenomenon that I think, on the economic side,
that highlight the challenge. One of which-- we
know that the only demographic in the country
whose life expectancy is falling is older white folk. If you map-- there's a recent
study that just came out, looking at the opioid
crisis in the country, and the challenges. If you look where those
death rates are the highest, they focus on,
they map over a lot of these rural
white communities, where the opiate overdose
epidemic is unbelievable. A recent study has mapped on
top of-- part of that declining death rate is also a
function of suicide rates. They mapped suicide
rates over time and against trade developments
and declining jobs in different cities. And those, not
surprisingly, also overlap. So in other words free trade,
or the trade that is generally enacted in these kinds of--
the Pacific free trade group, or NAFTA, or any
of them-- results in trickle up economics. But it leaves these
communities devastated. And ones that have
not been addressed by any economic policies that
came about under Barack Obama. And I think that one of
the reasons that we don't see higher suicide
rates, for instance, among the black
communities is that they're used to this decimated economy. Or in any event, the point
is that the economic collapse of segments of the
population that ended up supporting the
President-elect are-- I mean, that's a huge
piece of the puzzle that needs to be addressed,
if the Democrats, if we are ever going to regroup. Anyway, it's just
startling statistics. To see life expectancy
falling in this day and age. And when you can directly
tie that to policies, jobs, and economics is eye opening. Yeah. Surely one of the
reasons why Trump was able to prevail
with these voters. And then maybe
that is-- the hope is that in stuffing his
cabinet with billionaires, essentially, that if he's not
able to accomplish what Obama did not accomplish, that the
change, the promise of jobs-- I fail to see how that's
going to materialize. And we'll see. And maybe he'll be able to pull
off some of those miracles. But it's reconnecting with
that constituency, who was originally separated
from their black and colored brothers under different
policies with Nixon, and politically setting up, I'm
better than-- that separation. Anyway, I don't want to
get into all of that. Michelle Alexander's
arguments about how Nixon and Haldeman and
the Republican Party began separating
constituencies that have natural, coinciding,
totally overlapping interests-- anyway. Well, I keep hearing Kellyanne
Conway, who is the campaign manager of Trump's
campaign, say, in these post-election
interviews, that they won-- and I can't remember
the number-- but scores of counties around the country. Maybe even hundreds of counties
around the country, that had twice voted for Barack
Obama in 2008 and 2012, but in this election cycle voted
for the Republican candidate. Counties throughout the country
for which this is the case. I'm sure many of them will
have the profile that you just described, it being
relatively exurban or rural. Of being largely white,
and of relatively modest economic standing. So it does make it
a little bit harder to say about those
voters that they just were somehow Neanderthals. I mean, they weren't
Neanderthals in 2008, and 2012. They could vote for a
black man for president. And that does invite us to
think about what else might be going on besides
their purportedly deplorable mores,
that might have led them to vote as they did. There was a wonderful
qualitative-- well, not quite wonderful-- there
was an informative qualitative study that recently
came out as well. Hillary hired a polling
firm to track undecideds. You may have read
about this recently. Again, this just came out. And the distinguishing moment
where undecideds shifted-- they were required
to keep diaries so that their understanding
of their thought patterns that shifted [? the thing. ?]
And it wasn't, as most of us thought, the email scandal. Nobody cared about
the email scandal. As it turned out-- You don't have the
microphone, it's OK. [LAUGHTER] No, the key, the point
that shifted this was-- and this is
mostly a white, lower middle class
constituency-- was the deplorables remark. When these individuals,
potentially former Obama supporters,
are lumped into this area. And they'd talk about
going to these rallies, in their diaries. You know, it was fun. We were having fun. We knew he was full of it. But to go there, it was
like a high school rally, he would say. To go in and cheer, and
know he wasn't going to do any of these things. But it was fun. And it was uplifting. And maybe it would be different
from the same old, same old. And then being lumped-- it's
fascinating, how much of this is true. Which is that having these
qualitative interviews with-- obviously, I'm
not obsessed with this. [LAUGHTER] OK, I got to tell you this. Many people here will know
my colleague Mark Blyth the political scientist,
political economist. So I'm-- I don't know,
vox.com or something-- and I'm reading one of these
pieces about the politics of smugness. And it's all about where that
attitude, deplorables, comes from, OK? The elites-- we
elites, you know? Looking down our noses
at fly-over country. And I'm writing to Mark,
and Mark writes back with this phrase,
I'll never forget. He says, I'm trying to tell
these people the Hamptons is not a defensive position. And I just think that's
a brilliant encapsulation of a certain idea. You can't defend your political
position from the Hamptons. You had better get
out of the Hamptons. Defending it from Brown is
also-- raises similar issues about elites I mean,
that's what we are. But we've got good
ideas, don't we? And I want to tie
some of the things that you were saying directly
to your point, Professor Loury, on political messaging,
and actually getting some bang for your buck
on some of the things that you're saying. Let me go through a couple
of other things you just ticked off. Opioid addiction. Why is that a problem? In part, deregulation of
pharmaceutical companies, allowing for many
years, basically, pharmaceutical
companies to run wild. Doctors to prescribe
things they shouldn't have been prescribing. My mother's been a
nurse for 30 years. She talks to me about
this all the time. Oh, we used to just give
people whatever, and tell them to go home with it. It's a different world now. Changing some of those
things creates a problem. That's just one of them,
I just want to say. The economic side of things. You see huge poverty increases
in some of these neighborhoods. Why? Because jobs are leaving. Jobs that aren't coming
back, by the way. Which is another part of
Mark Blyth's talk, right? And so what are the
messages on this, right? On one hand, you have
Democrats who-- and I agree, somebody basically needs
to say these things. And say, this is why these
things are happening. This is what we need
to do about them. One of my favorite
parts that I actually thought was productive
on the Democratic side during the campaign was
at one of the debates, Hillary Clinton-- it was the
first question of the debate. They asked why are you more
qualified than your opponent to handle the economic
challenges of the country? And Hillary Clinton
went point by point through an economic plan
which included basically, retraining programs,
investing in clean energy, taking areas where people
know how to make energy, insofar as digging
coal, and keep those energy-producing areas,
just in a different way. Thought it was great. But here's the problem. What do Republicans do? They say we'll get
you your jobs back. It's Democrat's fault that
your jobs aren't there. Ignoring the fact that
it's Republican governments have dominated some
of these states. These are in Republican
areas that dominated. Which story wins out? The one that's simpler. And so again, brings me
right back to my point of what do you do to
actually come up with a story that people are going to buy? Because, to your point,
both of your points, Hamptons is not a
defensible position. College Hill, little
more defensible. But still not a
defensible position. But so what does the
messaging actually need to be in order to
do something about that? I think-- one image I had
recently in all of this was I think Hillary needed
to lose, frankly. Because the Democratic Party
needed to hit rock bottom. And I think Donald Trump's
election is rock bottom. And there needs to be some
serious effort at true recovery and looking at the mess that
we created and contributed to on any number of
different levels. So I think-- anyway, that's-- So let me ask a question here. Anybody can feel
free to respond. So the carrier deal. Talking about messaging, OK? So as an economist, I'm
thinking oh, man, you've got to be kidding me? You're going to jawbone us
back to full employment? You haven't changed
anybody's cost. You haven't changed
anybody's bottom line. You might be able
to win this one. You might be able
to win that one. But that's not a solution
to the problem of the fact that an industry
is not competitive in a global economy. It's just simply not a
solution to that problem. OK, so one reaction-- Good messaging, though One reaction-- that's
what I'm trying to get to. I'm juxtaposing the kind of
green eyeshade analysis, which I'd ordinarily attribute to
a libertarian, Republican, Club of Growth type. You know, that let markets
do with their thing. I'm juxtaposing
that to Mike Pence, on every Sunday show
day before yesterday, running around talking about
1,000 of my constituents have gone to see their
Christmas hopes not dashed, because of-- whatever. And it's complete nonsense. Anybody-- I mean, you
could teach a computer to write the column that Paul
Krugman is going to write about why that's nonsense. As economics, it's nonsense. But as politics, it might
be-- he's on the ground. You see, he's not even president
yet, he's saving people's jobs. And I'm just not sure how
you conduct that argument in a politically effective way. Certainly not putting
on a green eye shade and saying, this is a
post-truth candidate who is too stupid to know
about the economy, is not an effective
rebuttal to 1,000 people getting a job, say, on live TV. I just wanted to say
one more thing on that. And who are you? Could you identify yourself? Oh, Dorothy. Anyway, I read that he forgot. That he didn't remember that he
even said that about the jobs. When somebody said that
they went to these rallies because they were fun, and
they didn't believe everything he was saying--
I don't buy that. I don't buy that at all. They might have had a
lot of fun, and all that. But underneath it
all, they think that he's gonna save them. He's going to save the world. And what's going to happen
when he doesn't come through? What's going to happen? He can't do all this stuff. Then he won't be in power
for very long, if he doesn't come through, and people
will see that for what it is. I'm not so sure. I mean, let me just tell you. So Trump went around, at
pretty much every stump speech, saying we're going to
fix our inner cities, our African-Americans,
we're going to invest, we're going to keep
them safe, we're going to make the
schools better, and we're going to bring
jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. He went around saying that. So I thought, hokum. Come on, really? I mean, that's it? You're going to fix 'em? You just think
declaring it-- I mean, these are difficult problems.
"Fixing the schools," quote, unquote. Those are difficult--
we're gonna find out. Where these jobs going
to come from, OK? But he says he's going
to fix inner cities. Now what I was hoping for
from Hillary Rodham Clinton and surrogates,
was, he says he's going to fix the inner cities,
but he's not going to do it. However, they do need fixing. He doesn't have a program. I do. OK? Instead, what they said to
the African-American voters who did not show up at the
polls in sufficient numbers in Philadelphia, in Pittsburgh,
in Detroit, in Milwaukee, and so forth-- what was said
to them was he's a racist. Did you see that he called
your neighborhood a hellhole? OK? So one candidate says
I'm going to fix it. And you're going to be better. And you're going to be happy. And the other people retreat
to this characterological dismissiveness,
and tell the voters who want their neighborhoods
fixed, oh, he's a racist. Rather than taking them
seriously enough as people in need to address
effectively their needs. OK? When I saw Michelle Obama--
god bless her, god love her. She grew up in South
Shore, in Chicago, a stone's throw, a couple of
miles from where I grew up. At a different time. I'm older than her-- say,
in one of the speeches when she was out there stumping
for Clinton, in response to Trump says he's gonna
fix the inner cities. He called my neighborhood
where I grew up a hellhole. I thought, reading
the Chicago Tribune, and counting the bodies on the
streets of her neighborhood, where she doesn't live anymore
and will never live again, it is a hellhole, I thought. OK, I can say that. Maybe you don't want to. Because it feels a little bit
racially offensive to say it. I don't mean that literally. Of course, it's not
literally a hellhole. It's a deeply troubled place. That street that
she grew up on has people with pistols shooting
other people in the head on it. Your answer to that
is that he's a racist? I think we've got time for
just one more question. Well, he's sort of answered
the general comment I'd make. And that's that in part, one
of the issues about Trump is, you've got to ask well,
what was the alternative? And I didn't vote for Trump. And I didn't vote for Hillary. I voted for Gary
Johnson, who I felt was the only candidate up
there who really was going to be able to do anything. So that if could
get all these people who are just being told in
a rally all these things, and are excited-- so what's
the alternative for them? To go in and have
the other person? Vote for the other person? They felt it might have
been a binary choice. I didn't feel it
was a binary choice. But other people might have
felt it was a binary choice. And so what's the alternative? And the alternative really
wasn't all that attractive. I don't think. Alex, did you see someone else? One quick comment
or question, thanks. I have a question. It's not-- And who are you? Oh, I'm Uko. And I'm a sophomore
undergraduate. And my question is just for
more the domestic issues. But I'm an
international student. And as an international
student from Japan, one of the most iconic
moments of Obama's legacy was when he visited
Hiroshima for the first time as a President in action. So would you-- how do you judge
Obama's international policies, and how he portrayed
America in the world? Oh my. Again, I have to claim I'm
not an expert on that, either. So during the
campaign, Trump went around saying nobody respects
him, he's a weak leader. Putin is a stronger leader. A lot of people complain
about apology tours. I thought that that
was-- that kind of talk was unfair to the president. It was not nuanced. Though I thought there was
going to be a red line in Syria, and then there wasn't. Probably wasn't the
most adept thing. I thought haven't the
Russians really eaten our lunch in Crimea? In Ukraine? In Syria? Aren't we really losing the
kind of military, diplomatic, political, international
tug-of-war with them? Again, I'm not an expert. There are people here
perhaps know better than I do about these things. I thought getting
agreement in Paris around a framework for coming
to grips-- it's a global commons problem-- of climate change. There needs to be
effective means of cooperation and collaboration
across national boundaries. And I think the president
exerted exemplary leadership in that regard. I thought-- and this
is again, just me, non-foreign policy expert--
Libya was a total disaster. I thought, more
generally, the management of the upheaval
of the Arab Spring looked to me, in
retrospect, to have been a little bit naive and hopeful. Morsi? The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt? Mubarak's a bad guy,
because he's not a Democrat? Well, he's our-- what
did Lyndon Johnson say? He may be an SOB,
but he's our SOB. It seemed to me to be
a pretty mixed bag. Maybe that's the
right note to end on. I've got two thank yous. One to all of you
for coming out. I've seen many of you over
the last 14 weeks or so. So you've been part of
a good, strong dynamic that I think that we might well
continue into the next season, because there's still
a lot to assess. So thank you all for coming. And of course to Glenn
for lending his wisdom, his patience his intelligence,
and despite the fact that he may not be an
expert on everything, he's an expert on an awful lot. So, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Steve. [APPLAUSE]
