One-on-One With Obama

What a week! Last week, that is.

I have so much to tell you. I am sorry that it has taken me this long to put it in writing. Let me start by saying this: I will never forget last week. I started writing this on Friday afternoon. I had been awake for 36 hours straight. Living on fumes - actually Diet Coke. Thank God for caffeine.

As you may have seen on my last blog entry, I interviewed Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, in Pittsburgh on Thursday. Several months ago I interviewed Republican Presidential hopeful Senator John McCain and, at the launch of this network, Senator Hillary Clinton.

Getting through to the Obama camp and making it onto his schedule for an interview has been tough. His schedule is beyond hectic and, at least in my case, on economic issues, he has only done a handful of interviews. The great news is that persistence paid off. My producers and bookers have been working on it for months, calling week after week. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, I wrote a personal note to one of the members of the Obama camp. I simply laid out the reasons why the campaign should consider an interview with me to discuss the number one issue at the polls: the economy. Luckily, the note made it into the right hands, and I got the call on Tuesday.

Frankly, I was speechless. It was late in the afternoon and I had just picked up my oldest son Logan from school. We were stepping into a Benjamin Moore paint store when I got the call. Naturally, I assumed it was a stop-pestering-us phone call. Instead, it was an invitation to sit down with the Senator in Pittsburgh, as he was about to complete his three-week tour on American Global Competitiveness. I jumped at the opportunity! Called my Executive Producer right away and within hours our schedule and days turned upside down.

In the middle of this, with 36 hours to prepare, get to Pittsburgh, locate crews and live trucks, accommodations and flights, I was also substituting for my colleague Neil Cavuto on his 4pm Fox News show called Your World. Talk about multi-tasking .

So my Executive Producer Brian Donlon and I flew out Wednesday evening after Your World. Got about 6 hours of sleep and met up first thing the next morning. Two of the best members of our morning show crew, Pippa Bark, a senior producer, and Yvette Michael, our senior booker, had arrived that Wednesday and were already at Carnegie Mellon University that Thursday morning getting the trucks and multiple live shots set. When we arrived, the FBI was in full-inspection mode. It was everything you see and hear about in the movies. Security was tight and everyone around you was dressed head to toe in black or navy suits.

We checked in early, so that I could get dressed at the University and do two live hits on my shows Money for Breakfast and The Opening Bell. Then I prepared for what I knew would be a widely watched and highly scrutinized interview between the Senator and me. After we prepped, I went down to an auditorium where the Senator was hosting a private summit with some of the biggest and brightest names in the public and private sector. Eli Broad, founder of two Fortune 500 companies, SunAmerica and KB Home and now full-time philanthropist as founder of The Broad Foundations; Steve Case, former chair and CEO of America Online and eventual Chairman of AOL Time Warner and now chairman and CEO of Revolution; Federico Pena, former Secretary of Transportation and Energy under the Clinton Administration and now Managing Director of Vestar Capital Partners; John Surma, chairman and CEO of U.S. Steel; Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Richard Wagoner, chairman and CEO of GM, just to name a few. The list goes on. The members were situated on a podium with about a hundred people seated in front of them. They discussed everything from energy to climate change to education to health care to the economy to welfare...you name it. It was an open forum for each of the participants to share their thoughts and insights. It was excellent!

After the summit, several members of the summit came out to speak. I briefly had a chance to interview Rick Wagoner of GM about his stock, which at the time was down almost 11% on a negative call out of Goldman Sachs, which questioned GM's need for a cash infusion and a cut to the dividend. He answered, as I would have suspected of him, saying that the company is sticking to their strategy given the difficult times.

I also had the opportunity to sit down for a one-on-one interview with Federico Pena. If I'm honest with you, I didn't know much about him before I met him, and yet listening to him talk at the summit, I was most impressed by him. My one-on-one interview with him will run on this morning's Money for Breakfast.

About five minutes after I completed that interview, the Senator walked in. All of our cameras and our crew in New York were on alert for the live interview. The minute they saw him walk into the shot, the producer yelled, "We're going live." It caught me slightly off guard. I usually like to talk to or warm up a guest by making them feel comfortable with me, but I didn't have a chance. So the first 30 seconds felt rushed, but once we made it past the initial greeting and question, things were fine.

The Senator was on point, matter of fact and frankly pretty charming. Whether you plan to vote for him or not, my mailbox was flooded with questions after I met and interviewed him. He was not intimidating in the slightest. That surprised me. He walked into the room and shook everyone's hand. He looked everyone in the eye, and was as calm as a cucumber. He was very comfortable in his shoes. At the end of my interview, I joked about getting on the court the next time. Part of my personal note to the Obama staff member was a request to do an interview on the court. When he called to say that I got the interview, I joked about still wanting to play ball. He said bring your sneaks. So when the interview ended I reiterated to the Senator that I still wanted to play ball. He was very kind and generous and said we'd make it happen. It probably won't, but just the thought of it is pretty cool. Immediately after the interview ended, he sent in his personal aide Reggie Love to see me. If you don't know Reggie's story, you have to read the New York Times article from Ashley Parker on him. It's a great story. Long story short, he is at Obama's side all day and all night and regularly, daily, plays ball with him. Reggie played football and basketball at Duke and is a meager 6-foot-5. Reggie and I joked about a game and had a laugh or two about what position I played. Obama had asked if I was a point guard. I said no, a shooting guard. Still hoping for a best out of ten at the foul line.

Honest impressions of the interview? What were your's? Did you get a chance to watch the video? If you didn't, take a look. A ton of people emailed me their likes and dislikes. Most people really liked the word association game. It was any opportunity to see him think and pause. Some said that they wanted more specifics and that I should have pushed harder. They hear the Senator's call for change and his Kennedy-like appeal, but they want more. I tried to get as much accomplished as I could in a finite period of time.

Two areas where I should have followed up more aggressively:

One, on Energy. Where does he truly stand on oil and gas? Not alternatives. Alternative energy plans and strategies will over time (a long time) reduce our independence on foreign oil ,but what do we do about oil and gas prices until we get there? Do we build or permit nuclear facilities? Short-term, how do we solve the Energy crisis?

The second point is when I asked him about the risk of history repeating itself when President Clinton in 1993 promised tax cuts and then had to pass the biggest tax hikes in history to balance the budget. His answer didn't match up to comments made by Leon Panetta, former chairman of the House Budget Committee during the Clinton Administration, about the health of the Economy back then and in today's terms.

The Washington Post's Lori Montgomery wrote a brilliant article entitled "Big Promises Bump Into Budget Realities New President Won't Have any Easy Time Paying for New Initiatives, Fiscal Experts Say" where Panetta said the following about balancing the budget: "As President Bill Clinton 's first budget director said the financial situation is "much worse" than it was in 1993, when Clinton was forced to abandon promises of a middle-class tax cut before he took office. Instead, Clinton wound up devoting his first State of the Union address to a plan that aimed to tame rising deficits with one of the largest tax hikes in history."

"It's worse because there are a huge number of crises out there that are going to confront the new president," Panetta said, citing costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside the rising cost of Social Security and Medicare. "We're looking at a $400 billion deficit this year with the economy in recession or near recession. The likelihood is that it's going to get worse. And the fundamental problem has been that there's very little willpower by Republicans or Democrats to confront the issue."

Panetta makes a great point. This is an issue he will have to deal with. The risk of a record high budget deficit could force him to do things he may not have otherwise wanted to do. Plans on paper and in speeches sound good, but oftentimes those plans have to be scrapped when you see what you are left with, both good and bad. Whether it's Obama or McCain, they will have to address the legacy of the last Presidential term and adjust their plans and policies accordingly - not an easy task given where the economy currently is.

In any event, I was thrilled to get the chance to interview the Senator and I learned a lot in the process. The hardest part of this job is cramming in all the questions you want to ask in 6 or 7 minutes. Fortunately, I pushed this one out to about 11 minutes.

After the interview I did a bunch of interviews, live shots with Fox News and Fox Business until the O'Reilly show. When we drove back to the airport, we were wiped out. In a toast to my perfect tradition of nightmare travel and airport experiences, every flight to New York was cancelled. What a beauty! We had no choice but to drive ALL NIGHT LONG. We had to get back in time for me to appear on Fox and Friends and Good Morning America the next morning. We arrived in New York at 4am, I showered and went right to work. The joy of journalism!