100 Days Inside Obama's White House

-CHANTING:

-Yes, we can!

You and I, we're going to change this country!

And we will change the world!

For millions, the election of Barack Obama to the Oval Office

marked a new era of hope.

The young, energetic President was eager to take on the great

challenges of his time.

Our combat mission in Iraq will end.

Guantanamo will be closed one year from now.

Now is the time to finally keep the promise of affordable,

accessible health care for every single American.

CHEERING

The President turned around with this great smile on his face,

he said, "Well, then, of course I'm feeling lucky."

All right, let's go.

Let's go get them. It's game time.

But change would be harder than Obama had predicted.

Am I frustrated that we're not taking bolder steps?

Absolutely.

He said, "I am President of the United States,

"and I can't make anything happen."

He stood up in place and said, "That's it, I'm finished."

He said, "You know, I don't sleep at night very much."

He called me a name that I hadn't heard before or

since and stormed out of the room.

In these four programmes, Barack Obama

and his inner circle tell the story of what happened when he tried to

reshape America from inside a White House

unlike any other in history.

I am temperamentally optimistic... and...

tend to take the long view.

# Ama...

APPLAUSE

# ..zing grace

CHEERING

# How sweet

# The sound... #

In tonight's programme,

how Obama's promise to change America was knocked off course

by the financial crisis before he even took the oath of office.

There's a bunch of other things we need to do,

but the success of those things, they were going to require

getting the economy out of the hole we were in.

If we didn't, there wasn't going to be success, no matter what

else good the President did.

Election night, 2008.

Barack Obama's supporters were confident that the first

African-American president would reverse the legacy of eight years

under George W Bush.

-CHANTING:

-Yes, we can! Yes, we can!

CHEERING

But even as he basked in his victory,

Obama knew the country was on the brink of a financial collapse.

During the course of the campaign, I was having fairly constant

phone calls with financial advisors, so by the time

I was President-elect, I had a good

sense that we were in the midst of a major crisis.

What I wasn't aware of was how rapid the bottom would fall out

and the fact that...

what had started on Wall Street was now spreading through Main Street.

It was worse than Obama knew.

A month later, he was given news

that would affect his entire presidency.

The unemployment figures.

That day, they were just horrible, so we learned we'd not only

lost 533,000 jobs,

but the numbers for October

and September had been revised down,

so suddenly we're looking at these numbers and it's like, "We have

"750,000 fewer people employed than we thought we had yesterday."

I wanted to call you, just because...

Someone said, "The President would like to

"talk to you on the phone about the employment numbers."

And I was almost incoherent, it was almost...

"The President-elect, I'm so sorry, these are so horrible."

And that was when he kind of lightened the mood when he said,

"Christy, it's not your fault."

And then with that long pause,

"Yet."

Obama arrived home in Chicago and gathered his economic advisers.

The news was about to get even worse.

A number of us wanted to meet with him before the main meeting

because we wanted to get a preview of what the President-elect

was going to hear. And they painted

an extraordinarily grim picture.

David Axelrod looks at the numbers,

at the forecast of what's going to happen,

and he says, "You're telling us

"that even if we pass the biggest

"stimulus of all time, the unemployment rate is

"still going to go to 8.7%,"

or whatever was the forecast at that time.

And they said, "Yes."

He said, "Well, that's certainly going to be a massive challenge."

Here's the problem. We haven't had a "holy shit" moment,

where people recognised just how serious the problem was.

It was really the first time that the President's new

team of economic advisers met with those of us

who were in leadership roles.

Their opinion was...shocking.

I remember some of the language that was used,

that I was surprised to hear that day as well.

I said, you know, "David just told us that the

"American people hadn't had their 'holy shit' moment,"

so I said, "Mr President-elect, this is your 'holy shit' moment.

And just basically walked him through how terrible

the downturn that we were facing really was.

I talk about housing, and I say, "We've got

"a third of the people under water under mortgages.

"We've never had anything like this ever in US history.

"If all of these people decide to walk away, we're doomed,

"we have no idea what to do. Because we're going to have

"so many losses that are then going to take down the banks."

'I had the worst job, I had the dirtiest job, which was to try to

'lay out for the President

'what we had to do next for the financial system.'

It was a major factor why the economy was falling off the cliff

and accelerating, if that's possible in physics.

The fate of the presidency was going to ride on

whether we produced a successful recovery or not.

Larry Summers said, "Mr President, there is

"a one in three chance of a second Great Depression."

Now, that's not something you can ever imagine.

You read about the Depression in history books,

but you don't think about it happening in our time.

We realised we were going to have to take substantial, sustained

action, that the politics of it

were going to be extraordinarily difficult.

There are only so many hours in the day,

and with this as a first priority,

other priorities were going to have to wait a bit.

I remember looking right at him.

I had known him for a long time before that.

You could tell he was not pleased.

He had a kind of little tuck in the corners of his mouth,

but he remained even keel.

As President, you have to deal with the unexpected.

That's part of the job description.

Obama had spent the last two years telling the American people

that no change was too hard.

Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

The people have remarked on the fact that

I talk about hope a lot in my campaign.

They tease me a little bit.

Some have been scornful.

They say, "Oh, he's talking about hope again.

"He's so idealistic, he's so naive.

"He's a hopemonger."

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

That's OK, it's true, I talk about hope. I talk about it a lot.

Because the odds of me standing here today...

APPLAUSE

..are so small, so remote...

that I couldn't have gotten here without some hope.

APPLAUSE

-Everyone all right?

-Yeah!

-How are you, sir?

-Welcome aboard, sir.

-Good to see you.

-Great pleasure.

-Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Early in January, the President-elect moved to Washington.

He had offered a vision of a united America,

a more perfect union was within reach.

I believe that our future is our choice.

And that if we could just recognise ourselves in one another and

bring everyone together, Democrats, Republicans and Independents.

Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Latino, Asian,

and Native American.

Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American,

gay and straight...

And if enough of our voices join together, if we see each other

in each other's eyes, we can bring those walls tumbling down.

The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down.

That is our hope.

APPLAUSE

That not only would we restore hope and opportunity

in places that yearn for both,

but maybe, just maybe we might perfect our union in the process.

In that spirit, Obama went to Congress to ask the leaders

of the two parties to work together at this time of national crisis.

He wanted them to pass a bill to inject

nearly 800 billion

into the economy, a fiscal stimulus.

His chief of staff knew that with so much money to play with,

it would be hard to keep his own side under control.

There were Democrats waiting their entire career for this,

not for a recession,

but to advance good economic and social policy. Very good.

They had just been through eight years with a president who

was not just against those things, but starving those investments.

The Democrats had not been in power

with a President in the White House for a very long time.

This was an opportunity for us,

for all of our pent-up ideas

and aspirations to work with a new President.

I personally was looking for a package

that was over a trillion dollars.

Rosa DeLuro, a liberal congresswoman,

wanted to spend billions of stimulus dollars on child benefits.

Her plan was to lower the income level

at which the working poor would receive them.

Speaker Pelosi at that time, I regaled her day in and day out,

day in and day out.

I asked her to please, in the negotiations, reduce that threshold.

If we could get it down to 8,000,

it would be reasonable, we could live with that.

If they're refundable for low-income people, that's where we would go.

And I never will forget, she came into the leadership meeting

and she said to me, "Rosa," she says,

"I couldn't get it down to 8,000"

and I'm, "What do you mean you couldn't get it down to 8,000?"

She says, "We got it down to 3,000."

Unbelievable.

You know, when it's first going through the House,

the bill keeps getting bigger and bigger.

You know, I think at one point it was getting close to a trillion

and I'm doing my little happy dance in the office.

When the Speaker released the draft stimulus bill,

the Democrats had added billions of dollars in new projects.

Good afternoon, everyone.

This is the first time Republicans and the American people

have had a chance to see any of the specifics

that are being presented today

by Congressional Democrats.

I just took a moment to look over the draft.

Oh, my God!

I don't even...

My notes here say that I'm disappointed.

I just can't tell you...

how shocked I am at what we're seeing.

It's clear that they're moving on this path

along the flawed notion

that we can borrow and spend our way back to prosperity.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

For the first time in 15 years, Democrats would have majorities

in both Houses of Congress and hold the White House.

On the 20th of January, 2009, Obama was inaugurated

with all the glamour of concerts and balls.

-Go.

-OK.

# At last

# My love has come along... #

'The celebratory mood in Washington is indescribable.'

It was like the Academy Awards every single day

'and no matter where you looked,

'you recognised somebody because all of Hollywood was here.'

# And life is like a song

# Ohhhh, yeah, yeah... #

'It's like everybody was a Democrat

'and Happy Days Are Here Again

'and that was the mood that we Republicans

'had been through since Election Day.'

And now it's January 20th and the weather stinks

and the situation stinks

and the future looks pretty bleak.

# At last

# Oooooooh... #

'We Republicans were realising that we were now essentially irrelevant.

'We simply didn't matter.'

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

-Good morning.

-MANY VOICES:

-Good morning.

Before I begin today's announcement,

I want to say a few words about the deepening economic crisis

that we've inherited and the need for urgent action.

Over the last few days, we've learned that

Microsoft, Intel, United Airlines,

Home Depot, Sprint Nextel,

and Caterpillar are each cutting thousands of jobs.

We owe it to every single American

to act with a sense of urgency and common purpose.

'The President felt that when we did the stimulus that it could be

'a bipartisan vote, that's why so much of the stimulus

'was in tax cuts which was a priority for Republicans.'

The President felt so strongly about this

that, in his first week in office,

he went up to the Capitol

to meet with the entire House Republican caucus

to explain what was in the stimulus,

what his priorities were, to hear their views

and to see if there was common ground possible.

To make it easier for Republicans to vote yes,

Obama had included 300 billion

of tax cuts in the stimulus.

While we were on our way up to the Capitol to have that meeting,

the Republican leadership sent out an alert to all their members,

encouraging them, asking them

to vote no on the stimulus.

'It had, I think, a dampening effect on the conversation

'we were hoping to have. The answer was no

'before we could even ask for them to consider it.'

They would have loved our support, but at the end of the day,

when we looked at the bill,

we didn't believe that this was actually up to the task.

On the off chance it did work and we were wrong about that,

the President was, of course, to get all the credit.

and we would have just been sort of bystanders

and perhaps a backdrop to this bipartisan roadshow.

Not one Republican voted for the bill,

even though, just four months earlier,

it was the Democrats

who had passed President Bush's crisis bill.

We didn't agree with Bush. We fought him on the war in Iraq,

we fought him on privatising social security,

but we worked with him on many other issues

and I don't want it to sound idyllic,

but it was different from what they did with President Obama.

It just was so sad.

I said to my Democratic colleagues that it was important for us

to go ahead and take action even if the Republicans were unwilling.

The 820 billion package approved by the House

included the biggest investment in green energy in US history,

as well as huge sums for roads, schools,

local government and tax cuts.

Now the bill went to the Senate -

where the Democrats' majority was smaller.

They needed 60 votes.

They had 58.

'I went to see a very senior Republican

'who I had dated periodically.

'And I said to her, "How are we going to make this deal?"

And she looked at me and said, "Well, what do you mean?"

And I said, 'How do we negotiate this?"

And she said, "Oh, sweetie, you're so naive.

"We're not going to work with you on anything."

And I kind of looked at her and thought she was kidding

and it turns out she wasn't kidding.

Obama needed a couple of Republican senators

to rebel against their party.

He asked the leader of the Senate Democrats to find them.

I knew from the very beginning

that I had to have at least two Republicans

to support what we wanted,

but, as it turned out,

two wouldn't do it.

None of the Republicans who wanted to do something to help

wanted to be the 60th vote,

so I had to get 61 votes on everything and it was very hard.

The only ones I had any hope of getting,

Specter from Pennsylvania, and then I had the two Senators from Maine.

Senator Susan Collins, a Republican Reid was targeting,

was called to the Oval Office.

I was shocked when I walked in,

expecting to see the economic advisors, other staff taking notes

and, instead, it was just

the President and me.

I told him I thought the package was too big.

He told me that his economists were telling him that a smaller package

would not do the trick. It would not boost the economy sufficiently.

He kept pushing very hard for a much larger bill

in the neighbourhood of 1 trillion.

I knew that was a no-go.

Collins agreed to meet with a group of 17 other Senators

from both parties, who were negotiating informally.

In Senate jargon, these groups are known as gangs.

'This gang of 18 came together'

with the primary focus of wanting to reduce the cost

by at least 100 billion.

A 100 billion of government spending

probably shaves about a half a percentage point

off the unemployment rate, so that's a lot of people

that are going to lose their jobs

if you shave 100 billion off the fiscal stimulus

and so, yes, it was very painful and very sad to watch.

Obama decided to accept the cuts,

confident they would buy him the votes he needed.

He flew out to a Democratic party retreat.

It is great to be here

with so many friends.

Thank you for giving me

a reason to use Air Force One.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

It's pretty nice.

LAUGHTER

The President mocked his opponents' arguments against the stimulus.

You want to replace the federal fleet with hybrid cars.

Well, why wouldn't we want to do that?

That creates jobs for people who make those cars.

It saves the Federal Government energy.

It saves the taxpayers energy.

APPLAUSE

So then you get the argument, "Well, this is not a stimulus bill,

"this is a spending bill."

What do you think a stimulus is?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

That's the whole point.

No, seriously.

That's the point.

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

The fun was over. Back in Washington,

his victory was slipping away.

The Republican leaders were fighting back.

'Although we had a number of Republicans who joined

'those first few meetings, gradually the numbers diminished greatly.'

We never stopped trying to convince our colleagues

that this was not something that was worthy of their support.

It obviously was pretty lonely in the Republican Caucus.

It's as hard now my just thinking about it as it was at the time.

I didn't know if we could get this done

and I told the President that.

I had to wait till his helicopter had landed

to give him the bad news, saying, "I'm not sure I can get this done."

I'd received this phone call from Harry Reid

to come over to his office and I really debated whether or not to go.

I went into the room

and the room was already filled with Democratic leadership.

Senator Collins, from the State of Maine,

objected to a 16 billion programme for school construction.

The Democrats' number two in the Senate tried to find a compromise.

She was picking and choosing things

that she wanted to bargain for.

I remember that, in particular, was troubling

because I thought it was a good investment.

I knew that that would create huge opposition on my side of the aisle

because we'd be redefining the Federal role in education.

And then the conversation kind of shifted over to health clinics

and there was a suggestion made

that we could take some of those resources

and put them into constructing community health clinics,

even in the State of Maine,

and she lit up and showed some real interest.

Obama phoned into the meeting to OK the deals

that Harry Reid was making with the Republican rebels.

Each of them got in the way of each other,

they all got in the way of me, but, finally, we got something done.

On this vote, the Yeas are 61,

the Nays are 36.

Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn

having voted in the affirmative, the motion is agreed to.

Even after the cuts, this was still the largest stimulus in US history.

Obama had pushed it through Congress in just six weeks.

But there was still a lot to do.

The economy was shrinking at a terrifying rate.

Ordinary folks were experiencing job loss,

but also seeing their home values suddenly diminish by 50%-100%.

This was going to be a long slog

and I think the biggest challenge at that point

was to try to set expectations properly,

try to explain to the American people what was happening.

'But also maintain a sense of hope.'

This young lady has been waiting very patiently.

And she's just been standing there...

At a town hall meeting in South Florida,

Obama came face-to-face with one of the millions living on the edge.

Go ahead. Here, you've got the microphone right behind you.

Thank you very much.

I first want to say I respect you and I am so grateful for you.

-Thank you.

-I've been praying for you.

I believe in prayers, so I appreciate that.

I have an urgent need.

Unemployment and homelessness -

a very small vehicle for my family and I to live in.

We need urgent...

And the housing authority has two-year waiting lists.

And we need something more than a vehicle and the parks to go to.

We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom.

Please, help.

Well, I... Listen, I... What's your name?

What's your name?

It's Henrietta Hughes.

OK, Ms Hughes. Well, we're going to do everything we can to help you,

but there are a lot of people like you

and we're going to do everything we can, all right?

But the... I'll have my staff talk to you after this...

after the town hall, all right?

All right. Erm, back here!

'Everyone understood what the deep issue was

and that is you've got 100 million people living in houses

where their mortgage is bigger than the value of their house.

So, either the banks

are going to have to take 750 billion of losses

or the government's going to have to come up with 750 billion

to pay off these people's mortgages,

which is, in addition to us

not having an extra 750 billion sitting around,

is going to lead to unbelievable howls of protest.

The banks, panicked that the housing crisis would bring them down,

had stopped lending.

If his stimulus were to work, Obama had to reassure the bankers.

But, in his first press conference,

he made matters even worse.

We are still going to have to get the credit markets flowing again,

because that's the lifeblood of the economy.

And so tomorrow my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner,

will be announcing some very clear and specific plans

for how we are going to start loosening up credit once again.

And beyond that, I'm going to make sure

that Tim gets his moment in the sun tomorrow.

He's going to be terrific. Major Garrett, where's Major?

'We had no playbook for these things. I was not sure

that we'd figured out something that had the chance of working yet.

I felt for Tim because he was under a lot of pressure to come out

and say SOMETHING, because people needed to know that we had a plan.

But the plan wasn't fully formulated yet,

which became apparent

when he came out and spoke in generalities.

Banks and the credit markets transform the earnings

and savings of American workers into the loans that finance

a first home, a new car or a college education.

And this system provides the capital and the credit necessary

to build a company around a new idea.

'I thought it was terrible,

'I could see in the eyes of the people watching,

'I'd had enough experience that you can get a feel'

for how people are reacting to it.

What was most alarming to me watching the speech

and watching the coverage of the speech was that the news channels

were putting the stock market ticker up as he's speaking

'so while you're supposed to be

'watching Tim give his major speech,

'you're watching something much more interesting -

'the market is ticking down rapidly.'

Geithner faced Obama the next morning.

I walked into his office and he said, "How could this have happened?

"How could you have let this happen?"

He said it to his assembled advisers, but it was really on me.

It looked like Geithner was the first one who was, you know,

as they used to say in Chicago, being fitted for concrete overshoes.

Earlier today, I proposed

that the Federal Treasury set aside 420 billion.

This 420 billion will be placed in a special fund

and will go to the first individual

who comes up with a workable plan to solve the banking crisis.

If you have such a plan, or know of someone who does,

you can call the number on the screen below to claim this reward.

Obama shrugged off the critics

and let the Treasury Secretary publish his plan

to get the banks lending.

He called it the stress test -

a massive new inspection programme that would force banks

to open their books to see if they could survive another crisis.

"OK, what's the probability we're going to have a Great Depression?

"If we had a Great Depression, what would the losses be?"

We made it clear that we would make sure there was enough capital

in the system to cover those losses

and if there was not enough private capital to come in

and cover those losses, we'd put public capital in.

As the country waited for the Treasury

to complete the stress tests,

critics argued that Geithner's plan

wouldn't be enough to solve the problem.

Some politicians started to think the unthinkable -

nationalise the banks.

I think if you put most of our major banks under a stress test,

they're going to fail.

-And this idea...

-And this stress test is starting this week?

Yes, this idea of nationalising banks is not comfortable,

but I'm very much afraid that any programme to salvage the banks

is going to require the government...

-So what would you do now?

-I would not take off the idea

of nationalising the banks.

Obama challenged his Treasury Secretary.

Was he being radical enough?

We had one of these really tough conversations, which is,

do you...

"Are you confident this is going to work? Can you reassure me?

"Why are you confident? What are our choices?"

And I told him that my judgment at that time was that, er...

we had no option but to play out the thing we'd set in motion.

'The President really flayed the financial team

'for having failed to come up with an answer,'

sometimes in very, very, blunt and pointed terms.

Obama summoned his economic team

to debate the case for nationalising the banks.

They wouldn't leave the White House for seven hours.

We sat in the Roosevelt room around that table, the table was full,

maybe, I don't know, 10-15 people

with the President right across from me and Larry

and we had a tough, rich debate.

Two of Obama's most trusted economic advisers -

Larry Summers and Christy Romer -

were arguing in favour of nationalisation.

I wanted as robust a response as possible.

You take them over, you peel off the bad assets,

you recapitalise them, you sell them back to the private sector.

Geithner brought his team from the Treasury to urge caution.

What we tried to do is to marinate the President

and his advisers in the perils of those alternate paths.

I said to the President, if Tim goes out and announces

that a Citi or a Wells Fargo or a Bank of America is insolvent

and the world watches their stock price

go from 40 to 0 in an hour,

what are you going to do if you hold stock in one of the other banks?

Are you going to hold, are you going to buy

or are you going to sell as fast as you possibly can?

And if everybody does that,

then you are literally having a bank run

that could lead to another great global depression.

How do you know that that's what's going to happen?

I mean, I think that was a possibility and the question is,

"Is it a 1% possibility

"or a 50% possibility?"

I think that was the debate.

We're not sitting there trying to figure out

what is the ideal in some perfect world if you had perfect knowledge.

We're living in the real world.

Obama, in a pre-planned gesture with Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff,

got up and said, "I'm going to get a haircut,

"going to have dinner with my family."

"You all stay here..." Clear we didn't get dinner,

"and you figure out, you have an answer for me when I come back."

Sometimes, you can just have a debating society

and somebody has to be able to pick up the bucket of cold water

and throw some down.

What Rahm did is say, if you like the idea of a strategy

that requires us to go get hundreds of billions more dollars

for this stuff, there is no chance.

He didn't use that phrase, he was less polite.

"We're not nationalising the banks. You can propose it, discuss it,

"debate it, is it good, go to the Brooke Institute,

"go to Aspen Institute and have a discussion.

"This Congress is not passing

"and we're not going to nationalise the banks."

-"There's no

-BLEEP

-way we're going to get another dime from Congress."

"So what is it we can do

"to get you what YOU need without THAT medicine?"

That was it.

Obama's team agreed to stick with Geithner's plan

and it worked.

When the stress tests were done,

the banks started lending again.

A few days after the debate on the banks,

Obama had to make a choice

where the political cost could be much higher -

a million American jobs and the pride of the nation were at stake.

-NEWSREEL:

-Detroit put the world on wheels.

In one generation, these and other names

created America's number one industry,

birthplace of the production line

and the unheard of idea that everybody can ride.

By the time Obama was elected,

the American auto industry was on its knees.

The three big car companies were on the verge of bankruptcy.

He gave Wall Street banker Steven Rattner

the job of finding a solution.

We knew early on that we would have to make a trip to Detroit.

Frankly, it was more symbolic than substantive.

We went to GM and we drove hydrogen fuelled cars and electric cars

and all these new gadgets.

And, from there, we went to Chrysler

where we met in a decrepit old plant.

There was no question Chrysler was in the worse shape.

It was laden with debt,

it had given up long ago almost all of its international operations.

It didn't have a single car that was on the recommended list

of Consumer Reports. It was a mess.

Rattner decided that General Motors needed a total overhaul

and a government takeover.

Ford could survive.

However, Chrysler would go under unless someone bought it.

The only interested buyer, Fiat,

demanded a 6 billion government loan.

Larry Summers was in favour of the deal

and organised a briefing for the President.

The advisor who was against the deal wasn't invited.

Have a seat.

Larry started to explain the auto situation to the President

and the President interrupted

and said, "Larry, I've read the materials."

And the President looked around the room

and said, "Does everybody agree with this recommendation?"

And I said, "Well, Austan's the real expert here,"

and that was when the President said, "Gee, where is Austan?"

And I kind of said...

I didn't throw anyone under the bus,

but I said, you know, "He wasn't on the manifest,"

and the President kind of called out to his secretary,

"Get Austan on the phone and tell him to get over here!"

They call me on the phone

and they say, "Why aren't you in the Oval Office?" "Wait, what?

"I don't..." so I run over there,

"I'm supposed to be in the Oval Office!"

But Obama postponed his decision -

he had run out of time to hear the arguments.

He had a meeting on Afghanistan, he had a meeting on Iraq.

'He had a town hall meeting on the economy.'

-Yes?

-Mr President, what specific steps do you see

your administration taking about the health of the auto industry?

OK, it's a very topical question

because I'm going to be making some announcements

over the next several days about the auto industry.

Just a few hours later, Obama reconvened his advisors

to help him make the decision on Chrysler.

Public opinion was very negative.

Even in the State of Michigan,

I pointed out, people were opposed

to bailing out the auto industry despite the fact that Michigan

was the home of the auto industry

because there was tremendous anger

about how the auto executives had run the industry for decades.

I said that if the government doesn't act

within a matter of weeks, Chrysler would run out of money,

it would not be able to pay any of its bills.

The electric lights would go out,

the workers would stop being paid,

the cars would stop being made,

suppliers would no longer receive their payments,

the doors would close and all those workers would be out of jobs.

The people who buy Chryslers,

if there's no Chrysler, then what are they going to go buy?

And my view was that the evidence said they would probably go,

if you couldn't buy a Ram Truck, then you probably would buy a Ford.

The President was sitting very contemplatively

with his chin in his hand and clearly thinking about it

and clearly torn and trying to...

And also, in fairness, this was not his area of historic expertise

and so he's trying to digest all this stuff about sales rates

and unemployment and jobs and this and that and loans,

but, at the end of it, he processed everything

and he said, "I've made my decision.

"If we can save Chrysler in a commercially sensible way,

"then we should do it."

Most of the decisions I make

don't lend themselves

to a clean, crisp,

wonderful solution.

When they do, somebody else typically solves them

and they never arrive at my desk.

I went back to my office and slumped in my chair.

After that, I was exhausted and the phone rang, it was Rahm and he said,

"Get in here right away. Fargo, North Dakota is underwater."

There was a flood that had taken out an entire city

and I thought to myself

it was like we're in an episode of the West Wing here.

I mean, you couldn't make this stuff up.

Obama had been battling the recession for three months

when he bailed out the motor industry.

The early weeks of his presidency,

when he was at the peak of his popularity, were gone.

Now, he was determined to catch up.

One promise in particular had inspired the world

to believe that he would restore America's ideals.

"In order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo

"consistent with the national security

"and foreign policy interests of the United States,

"and the interest of justice,

"I hereby order..." and we then provide the process

whereby Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now.

The President charged me

with the responsibility

of coming up with a plan

to close Guantanamo.

The Attorney General had thought

that some prisoners could be released

and most of the rest sent to trial.

But, soon, he had to tell the President he was wrong.

The vast majority of Guantanamo prisoners could not be prosecuted.

We frankly did not have a desire to rely on testimony

or information gleaned from a prisoner

that was as a result of torture.

That seemed to us to be inconsistent with who we were as a nation

and certainly inconsistent with the way in which

we wanted this administration to be viewed around the world.

Since he couldn't prosecute them,

Obama needed to move detainees to the US -

either to prison or for release.

His team decided to begin with a group of independence fighters

from Eastern China who'd gone to Afghanistan for training -

the Uighurs.

The US courts had ordered their release

and the Guantanamo team suggested

some of them should be freed in America.

If that worked, others could follow.

There was a lot of conversation about this population,

what the issues would be around their transfer

if we brought them into the States,

how would you monitor them, where would they go.

Now, these were certainly people

who, if you were in China, you might have been concerned about, you know,

the Chinese regime, but we didn't have any basis

to believe that they posed a threat necessarily to the United States.

But the CIA Director,

who had been a Congressman for almost two decades, was worried.

We had a bunch of staff and lawyers around the table

all saying how this could be done.

I kept saying, "Are you kidding?"

"Do you know what you're dealing with up on the Hill?"

Don't kid yourself that Congress

is suddenly going to put their arms around this

and say, "Oh, great, let's bring them here to America."

The Guantanamo team hoped they knew better.

The thought was that Congressman Frank Wolf of Northern Virginia,

who was very critical of Chinese human rights policy

might actually be supportive.

So in that burst of optimism and, in retrospect, naivety

the administration proceeded with a plan

to bring at least two of them into the United States.

Republican Frank Wolf represented Falls Church, Virginia,

where the two Uighurs were going to be released.

A member of my staff got a call

from a fairly high level person

in one of the agencies,

saying that the administration at the White House

had made a decision to move the Uighurs,

that they had actually leased an apartment

out in the Falls Church area

and an aircraft was ready and they were going to move them.

The chair recognises the gentleman from Virginia, Mr Wolf,

for five minutes.

Obama's promise to close Guantanamo

hung on the words Wolf was about to speak.

Do members realise who these people are?

There've been published reports that the Uighurs

were members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement,

a designated terrorist organisation affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Fear of Al-Qaeda trumped everything.

Congress quickly voted to cut off funding

for relocating Guantanamo prisoners to the US.

I remember hearing one senator who said, you know,

"When I go to a Town Hall meeting

"and I say that we shouldn't give terrorists the same rights

"that we give to American citizens,"

that's the biggest applause line I have

when I go to a Town Hall meeting.

I remember thinking at that point,

"Well, there it is." I mean, THAT'S the nature of the problem.

Listening to the recent debate, I've heard words that, frankly,

are calculated to scare people rather than educate them,

words that have more to do with politics

than protecting our country.

I think we were both disappointed,

and frankly angry at the political nature

in which...

our plans were thwarted.

Obama missed the one-year deadline for closing Guantanamo.

Seven years later, he still hadn't closed it.

He feels really passionately about it, really wanted to close

on his watch - it's just a very thorny one. It's really difficult.

Yeah, so it's... Clearly, he felt frustrated by the whole thing.

Six months into his Presidency,

Obama hosted the annual White House picnic for Congress.

The US had come out of recession.

The glamour of hope and change was back.

CHEERING

'The President was very excited about it,

'he was throwing a luau in tradition of his Hawaiian heritage'

and I remember, at the beginning, him saying,

"Am I going to take pictures of these people?"

And we said, "You are, but we're also going to use this

"as an opportunity to talk about the energy vote the next day."

During his campaign,

Obama had pledged to pass an energy bill to fight climate change.

It was about to be voted on in Congress.

Democrats from the coal-producing states

thought that if they voted for it they could lose their seats.

And so these members walk in and take their family photo

and then we'd escort the family out

and say, "Excuse me, member of Congress,

"the President would like to have one second alone with you."

And they're like, "Oh, of course!"

And we'd slam the door and there'd be Rahm and Phil Schiliro.

We'd be looking out that window and the picnic is going on outside

and the President is making the case to members on the fence.

And then I say, "Well, here's the science

"and we've got so much more to do, we've got so far to go."

These are people who had to make fundamental decisions

about political self-interest

versus the good of the country and the good of the planet.

By the time they walked out of that room,

they would look at me on the other side

and say, "That wasn't very much fun.

"That wasn't as much fun as it's supposed to be."

The next day, Obama's secretary whispered into his ear

that the House had passed the climate bill.

But, six months later, it was dying in the Senate.

He couldn't get the votes.

When this bill failed in the Senate

and everybody thought, "It's hopeless,"

we in fact were able to bounce back

out of what looked like a disaster in Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit

gave Obama a chance to fight climate change on a global scale.

He would need the other great polluting nation, China,

to agree to cut its greenhouse gasses.

But the Chinese were afraid of the impact on their economy.

I met him at the airport and I said,

"We've been here for several days now

"and I'm sorry to say we don't have a final agreement for you to bless,"

and his attitude was,

"Well, you know, I'm here.

"Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work."

No hotel, no stop,

to...get prepared,

drove right into this convention centre

and you slowly came to appreciate

that this was some sort of fake shopping mall.

There were mannequins, but there were no clothes for sale.

Obama met the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, and argued his case.

The President said that this conference

could either reach some positive conclusions or not.

And if it did not reach positive conclusions,

the people who would be blamed

would be China and the US.

Back in the US, one of the complaints or one of the arguments

against the US ever doing anything in the global context is,

"Why should we do something until China does something?"

Wen Jiabao basically said, you know,

"Let's have our people get together

"and work on language on the communique."

Our people got together

and then there were three hours of head-butting.

The next meeting was even worse.

It was planned as a session with Obama, European leaders

and Premier Wen, but Wen sent a diplomat in his place.

Their words were recorded.

Extracts were leaked.

They never re-convened.

President Obama said to me,

"Should we speak to the Chinese once more?

"Should I speak to Wen Jiabao once more?" And I said, "Yes."

China's Premier agreed to another meeting,

but Obama's team had trouble nailing down the time.

We get a message that the Chinese have left,

they're in their cars on their way to the airport

and the President's sort of stunned.

I think, for many of us, there was a sense of,

"Oh, my God, this isn't going to work. This is going to fail."

45,000 people had come to Copenhagen.

But the one person Obama needed to make a deal had gone missing.

And the President's advance staff come into the room

and they're ashen faced

and they report that the Chinese are sitting upstairs,

that the Chinese are actually in a meeting

with Brazil, India and South Africa.

South Africa's President Zuma, Brazil's President Lula

and Premier Singh of India joined Wen Jiabao

to stop the climate deal.

And the President's response is, "Let's go.

"We had a meeting scheduled, they're here, let's go."

All of us involved thought that was kind of a cool idea,

unusual and not, how should I say,

normal protocol.

And so we all immediately jump up, the President,

Secretary Clinton.

We just continued down the hall, saying,

"President's coming through, President's coming through,"

and people kind of looked at us aghast

and parted like Moses going through the Red Sea

as we went down the corridor.

The protocol security guy tried to stop us

and I basically elbowed him out of the way, blocked him.

We got to the door of the room

and there was a bunch of people blocking it.

Are you ready for me or do you guys need to talk some more?

It's up to you.

What do you think?

Premier, are you ready for me or do you want to wait?

President Obama looked at Wen Jiabao

and said, "Premier Wen, delighted to see you,"

and Wen Jiabao forced a big smile.

Premier Wen signalled to President Obama,

"Oh, please have a seat next to President Lula here."

Obama had the Chinese Premier at a disadvantage and he did not relent.

The President said, "Well look, I have other things to do.

"I don't have to be here. If you all are not interested

"in having an agreement, fine, but I would think that it would be worth

"a little bit of your time,"

and Wen Jiabao pretty clearly

signalled that he wanted to get the thing to a positive outcome.

At the end of the day, there was one final issue that had to be resolved.

And the President said,

"Will you confirm to me that China will list in the annexe

"the actions it intends to take?"

So we waited for the translation to go through

and Premier Wen said, "Yes,"

and, at that point,

there was a sort of an explosion in the room on the Chinese side

of yelling in Chinese, of course, in Mandarin

and lots of back and forth among the Chinese officials

and we all looked at the interpreter with anticipation

and the interpreter said, "Internal discussion only."

And, at that point,

we knew we'd actually achieved something quite meaningful.

But Obama had had to agree to China's price -

there would be no binding agreements to cut emissions.

Although that was perceived as a failure given high expectations,

that actually planted the seed for subsequent success.

We have been able to forge for the first time

an international agreement about climate change.

One of the things that I've felt very strongly about

during the course of this year is that hard stuff

requires not paralysis,

but it requires going ahead

and making the best of the situation that you're in at this point

and continually trying to improve and make progress from there.

In America, by tradition, Presidents are judged

against what they achieve in their first 100 days.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

When Obama hit that mark, he had made the hard decisions

to rescue the global economy,

but not one of his big promises of change -

not health care, not education,

not Guantanamo had yet been delivered.

-Jeff Zeleny.

-Thank you, Mr President.

During these first 100 days, what has surprised you

the most about this office, enchanted you the most

about serving in this in office,

humbled you the most and troubled you the most?

All right, let me write this down.

LAUGHTER

-What was the first one?

-Surprised.

-Surprised.

-Troubled.

-Troubled.

-Enchanted.

-Enchanted? Nice.

-And humbled.

And what was the last one, humbled?

-Humbled. Thank you, sir.

-All right.

OK. Erm...

LAUGHTER

Surprised...

I am surprised compared to where I started.

Obviously, I didn't anticipate the worst economic crisis

since the Great Depression.

'You know the typical President, I think,

'has two or three big problems.

'We've got seven or eight big problems.

'Enchanted?

'Enchanted.

'I will tell you that when I meet our servicemen and women,

"enchanted" is probably not the word I would use.

LAUGHTER

But I am so profoundly impressed and grateful.

Troubled?

I'd say less troubled,

but sobered by the fact that change in Washington comes slow.

Humbled by the fact that

the Presidency is extraordinarily powerful,

but I can't just press a button

and suddenly have the bankers

do exactly what I want

or, you know, turn on a switch

and suddenly Congress falls in line.

In the next programme,

how Obama battled to bring universal health care to his country.

My job was to advise him on the politics

and I knew that seven presidents had tried, seven presidents had failed.

This health care bill will ruin our country.

-THEY CHANT:

-Kill the bill, kill the bill, kill the bill!