'Economic Mess' That is the Bush Administration
SANCHEZ: Welcome back. When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were running for office they ran as the CEO team. Remember? It was all about fiscal responsibility, good, sound conservative policy that would benefit the economy and benefit average Americans. Now, seven years later, average Americans even the most ardent conservatives, are looking at our economic numbers and asking, what happened? CNN's senior political analyst and former president's adviser David Gergen is joining us now. David, I guess the big thing this week were the deficit numbers that were released that some are saying may be the worst ever. Is that overcome able with the little time that there is left for the Bush legacy?</s>DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: No. These deficits are going to be a major problem for the next president; they're going to handicap the next president in dealing with all sorts of other issues like health care reform or reform Social Security and the like. I must tell you this, Rick. I think most observers give this administration the high mark for the way it has dealt with the emergency we've had in the last few months. The treasurer and the Fed are both well mobilized to deal with Bear Stearns. A stimulus package through the Congress. A housing package through the Congress, and they've got -- working hard on the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae problem. In terms of dealing with the emergency side, they've done, I think, most people give them in the financial community, high marks for helping to stabilize things. But it's the long term in which people find enormous fault and the buildup of the deficit here is a president who inherited the largest surpluses in history, and we've moved from this gigantic surpluses to the biggest emphasis we've ever had, going into next year we're looking a deficit that is going to easily hit the $500 billion mark.</s>SANCHEZ: I guess some people could argue to that maybe they should have been more careful before we got into this situation.</s>GERGEN: Exactly.</s>SANCHEZ: Let me ask you this. You're as much a historian as anybody we know. Is there a precedent for this? Has there ever been a presidency that had to deal almost with a perfect storm scenario where all of these factors came together to create such a bad looking picture?</s>GERGEN: Well, nobody would want to make this comparison, because absolutely, but sure, if you want to use, introduce the word here. Herbert Hoover. You know, faced a perfect storm. I think it's unfair to say George W. Bush is a Herbert Hoover but I think it's fair to say that George W. Bush, this administration, did not look over the horizon. In the way it might have to anticipate what was coming. And how this storm would have built up and to deal with it in advance, and even now as they deal with the emergency, as I say, I think they're doing that well, they're not looking over the horizon to what's coming to the country in the next few years. We have bigger storms ahead than what we've been through.</s>SANCHEZ: So what specifically if you're John McCain or Barack Obama, do you want this job?</s>GERGEN: That's a darn good question, because I have to tell you, you got to be something of a massagist (ph) to want it. The next president will face the toughest challenges of any modern president. You have to go back to March of '33 when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated to find a time that was going to be more ominous and more dangerous for an incoming president and it's going to be, you've got huge problems to put our own house in order here at home. Plus, you have to deal with trying to get some international agreement on energy and climate. We've just seen the round, the trade talks has collapsed, how hard it is to come to achieve international agreement with many, many different countries now at the table.</s>SANCHEZ: I was watching you the other day on the Discovery Channel. By they way you had a lot more hair back then, and -- when you were serving President Reagan, it was about his shooting, by the way. You were seen all over that video. I was thinking to myself, this administration that tried to be Reaganesque has not come out seeming that way. Why have they ended up being almost -- so different from Ronald Reagan's presidency?</s>GERGEN: Well, Reagan was a very gifted leader, and he had these enormous capacities to -- he had a contagious optimism about the future and gave people confidence. This president does not give people confidence. You were just talking about the consumer confidence surveys being so low and beyond that, they did have one similarity. They operated to a significant, both Reagan and George W. Bush, by intuition. Almost by hunch. But it turns out that Reagan's intuition was much, much keener. His sense of what might work. Take his whole proposal for star wars. Most experts, would say as out landish, yet that proposal did a great deal to bring the Soviet Union to heal and helped end the cold war. Reagan's enormous courage in 1981-82 when he first came into office. He understood to support the Fed chairman in trying to take on inflation. You know Volker really helped ring inflation out of the system. He deserves an enormous number of medals for that. But Reagan as president saw that by doing that, we're also going to go into a recession and Reagan took a deep recession in the second year in office and unemployment went to 10 percent, he lost a lot of house and Senate seats, but he had the courage to get through it, and it broke the back of inflation. We have never had this as bad of problem until today; it's started to come back.</s>SANCHEZ: Interesting.</s>GERGEN: Very important. But it has got to be informative, Rick. You can't just have instinct, oh, yes, telling me this and I got on MBA from Harvard and therefore I am qualified. George W. Bush has taken the view that, I'm qualified to, I'm the decider on a lot of things he frankly has never had to think about before, and things are not surfacing well.</s>SANCHEZ: David Gergen, always great to have a conversation. We appreciate it, thanks so much. Coming up, what airlines are doing to try and survive and how it might affect you? And then the Reverend Jesse Jackson is back and he's good enough to give us his first interview since some comments that he had made, and there's something that he's angry about. It's all about YOUR MONEY. Why would you want to change the channel after hearing that?