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Parker Spitzer

A Disappointing Jobs Report; Guests Discuss Innovative Company Strategies, the Middle East Peace Process

Aired January 07, 2011 - 20:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


ELIOT SPITZER, CO-HOST: Good evening. I'm Eliot Spitzer.

KATHLEEN PARKER, CO-HOST: And I'm Kathleen Parker. Welcome to the program.

Tonight's top story: a jobs report that can only be called disappointing. On first look, the numbers seem good. The economy added 103,000 jobs in December while unemployment fell to 9.4 percent, the lowest rate since May of 2009.

Here's what the president had to say about today's numbers.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The economy added more than 100,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate fell sharply. And we know these numbers can bounce around from month to month. But the trend is clear: we saw 12 straight months of private sector job growth. That's the first time that's been true since 2006.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SPITZER: So, why don't we call the job numbers disappointing or even bad news altogether? Bear with me while I go through some numbers with you because they tell a story.

First, we need to add at least 150,000 jobs each month just to keep pace with population growth. So, even with today's number of 103,000, new jobs were not there, we're not even close.

Second, the drop to 9.4 percent unemployment reflects a large number of people who just gave up, dropping out of the workforce altogether, about 260,000 people just this month.

And third, 6.4 million workers have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer -- a historically unprecedented and deeply unfortunate number.

All in all, we are about 20 million jobs short of full employment, a truly staggering number.

PARKER: Here to help us make sense of all this is Ben Stein, author of "The Little Book of Bulletproof Investing: Do's and Don'ts to Protect Your Financial Life" and the famed economic teacher of one Ferris Bueller.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bueller, Bueller, Bueller, Bueller.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PARKER: Welcome, Ben.

BEN STEIN, AUTHOR, "THE LITTLE BOOK OF BULLETPROOF INVESTING": It's a pleasure. Where is that Ferris Bueller?

PARKER: Yes, where is he?

SPITZER: Investing somewhere.

STEIN: You know, where is he? Yes, exactly.

PARKER: So, I'm pretending to be in your class and I'm the dumbest student you got. So, I want you to explain something to me. The unemployment rate is down -- so that means fewer people are employed and same time the labor force declined, meaning fewer people are working.

How does that -- how does that happen at the same time?

STEIN: Well, when we have a recession as severe as the current one, an awful lot of people just become discouraged, unhappy -- maybe they're not the main breadwinner, maybe they are the spouse or maybe a child that's partially supported by the parent and those people simply leave the labor force.

So, we have a very sad situation where people getting are extremely discourages. You know, what we have to remember is for each one of these people, there's heartache. There's not just a number there on a bulletin board on a computer screen, they're somebody who is not sleeping at night, they're somebody who can't pay his house payment and worried about being evicted from his house. They are people who are going through agonies and torments.

So, we have a very, very serious pain rippling through this country right now.

PARKER: Well, one of the -- some of the statistics that show that jobs in the private sector were mostly for leisure and recreation and health care. And while you're thinking about people who can't pay the mortgages, I'm thinking about people who are just getting out of college or going to study.

You know, what should people study in order to prepare themselves for a job market that's primarily focused on leisure and health care?

STEIN: Well, those are very poorly paying jobs -- I mean, modestly paying jobs. I mean, if a person is in college now, I would say he or she should study petroleum geology. I think there's extremely low rate of unemployment among petroleum geologist or anybody having to do with agriculture, having to do with extractive industries of any kind, whether it's energy extraction or any other kind of minerals extraction. And those people are working like crazy.

The farm states, the states rich in natural resources, have extremely low unemployment rates. People are not being hired as much as we'd like to for retail and for manufacturing, although in some parts of the country, manufacturing is strong.

But if I were a young person or in school and definitely wanted to be employed, I would look for something with numbers involved in it, not something like art history. Art is a great subject. I enjoy taking it myself.

But I would look for something that has numbers and hard math involved that allows you to make money for your employer.

SPITZER: You know, Ben, you are so right. I think the manufacturing sector picked up 10,000 jobs better than the alternative, of course. But the big job growth was in other sectors. And in health care, I think the average entry wage there where the jobs were actually added was $19,000. That is hardly the sort of pay scale people are looking for.

I want to throw up a chart on the screen if we can just to -- so we can talk this through, Ben. It's going to show people how long it is going to take to get back to full employment at the job rate we have right now. What this chart shows is that deep declining, you know, line that's going to drop from the top, shows we have lost 12 million jobs since the peak.

Now, in order to recover all of those jobs, if we started creating over 200,000 jobs a month, which is what we were doing in the best years of the -- you know, the first decade of the century, which was back in 2005, if we started doing 200,000 jobs a month, at that rate, it would still take us until 2022 just to recover the jobs we've already lost. I mean, this is dismal stuff.

So, Ben, if you were the -- you know, the president's adviser, what would you do now to sort of accelerate this rate of job creation?

STEIN: Well, there's an old story which I'm going to tell you now and I'm going to tell you very quickly. When Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack in 1955 and was in the hospital, Richard Nixon, who was then-vice president came to see him and he said, "Mr. President, is there anything to do for you? Anything at all, just anything?" And Ike said to him, "Well, first, you could get your foot off the oxygen tube."

(LAUGHTER)

STEIN: And that --

SPITZER: My guess is --

STEIN: That's sort of what I'm --

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: President Nixon probably put his foot on it.

STEIN: No, he didn't. He was a great guy. But that was -- that sort of one thing the government can do is not making threatening noises towards business, not make business scared, that there are going to be new permits required, new caps, new trading caps -- any kind of government poured on them whatsoever.

Second thing government can do is probably not tilt the scales in favor of union wages although -- because although I'm a union guy and I love union wages, union wages are very high and employers don't like hiring at union wages.

Other than that, I don't see what the government can do. They're already operating at full scale monetary stimulation. I don't see what good it's going to do, by the way, to cut government spending. Government spending is already not probably stimulative enough. I have to agree with my friend Mr. Krugman about that. And I don't see what good it's going to do to cut $100 billion out of government spending, it just going to mean a lot of government jobs lost and more people added to unemployment. And I don't think that government spending is as big a crisis right now as unemployment is.

SPITZER: You know, on the way --

STEIN: Unemployment is real pain. Unemployment is real pain.

SPITZER: It's horrendous right now. And, you know, we'll put another chart in a minute on that.

On the wage front, to the extent that jobs are coming back and a few of them are in the automotive sector, one of the amazing things is that jobs that used to be 28 bucks a hour, the new jobs are 14 bucks an hour.

STEIN: Yes.

SPITZER: So, that diminution of wages taking a punch to the stomach of those middle class or formerly middle class wage earners who said, look, I've got a good union job, you know, for UAW, with General Motors, they're coming in at 50 percent lower, half the wage that used to be created.

But what -- your point is so critical. It's hard to see anymore fiscal stimulus, this Congress isn't going to put another stimulus in place and there's no really -- there's no opportunity for monetary stimulus anymore beyond what the fed has done, it would seem.

STEIN: What's it going to take is an enormous increase in public confidence. If we have an enormous amount of public confidence, we could start adding 300,000, 400,000 jobs a month. But where that increase and public confidence is going to come from, I am not quite sure.

I have a lot of friends who say, are we in the new normal? Well, maybe we are. In the Great Depression, we had unemployment above 15 percent for 12 years. Unemployment was above 15 percent for 12 years. And, you know, it might have been unemployment above 15 percent for 12 years without the rearm for World War II.

There gets to be a stage in the economies where there's a self- sustaining way below excellent situation in the economy where there's a permanent state of high unemployment and that could happen. It's a very scary proposition.

PARKER: Ben, one other issue that really confuses me is health care reform. The Republicans, you know, are trying to repeal it and they say it's a -- they call it a job-killing bill and then you have this Harvard professor just come out with a big paper saying that killing health care reform will rob us of so many hundreds of thousands of jobs. So, which is it? And does anybody really know?

STEIN: Nobody really knows and I must say I'm not in favor of the government socializing medicine anymore than it was socialized before Obamacare. But as to Obamacare being a job killer, I'm not quite sure that's true. I guess the theory is that employers will not want to hire because they have a mandate to pay for --

(VIDEO GAP)

STEIN: -- on the part of the ordinary citizen and restraint and serious suffering. I mean, I hate to say this, but there's some serious suffering out there and people did not make adequate provision for difficult times in the economy are going to be really hurting. And I see it all around me and it breaks my heart.

SPITZER: You know, you referred to the potential for a new normal. I think I'm right in the statistic I'm about to use. The facility -- the manufacturing facility over in China that makes iPods and iPhones this past year added 300,000 jobs. That's one manufacturing plant in China compared that to the entire U.S. economy the past month adding 100,000 jobs.

So, the new normal in terms of trade, in terms of the global wealth creation that is so critically important, we are simply losing this battle and I think the answer to this long term has got to be education, things that take a 20 or 30-year time horizon.

And so, I don't see -- I'm with you, Ben. This is a long-term transformation of our economy.

STEIN: This is a -- look, if give stimulation to this economy, what happens is you give people money, they go into Wal-Mart. They pay money for something. That money is immediately shipped to China because everything in Wal-Mart except for pistachio nuts is made in China.

So, it all goes to China. It's very tricky to have stimulation when all the stimulus is going to China and all the innovation comes out of Silicone Valley. I mean, Mr. Jobs, Apple company is a genius company, but the real job creation as you say is coming from China. Where are we going to get traction in this country is not quite clear, but we've got have a better attitude between the president and business. That is one big starting point.

PARKER: All right. Ben Stein, thank you so much again for being with us.

STEIN: Always a pleasure.

SPITZER: Have a great weekend.

STEIN: You, too. Thank you.

SPITZER: Thank you.

Up next: Congress left out some key parts when it read the Constitution out loud yesterday and a publisher left out some key parts in a new edition of Huck Finn. When does revising history become erasing history? We'll right back.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAELA ANGELA DAVIS, FMR. CULTURE EDITOR, ESSENCE MAGAZINE: A bullet is not dangerous until you put it in the gun and point it at someone with the intention to hurt them. And so, if we can't talk about language in a way, or context or an environment changes the energy of that word, the student -- all students, not just black students --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Very true.

DAVIS: -- are missing the opportunity to know more about each other.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SPITZER: For the first time, both parties read the Constitution of the United States out loud on the floor of the House yesterday. But they didn't actually read the whole thing. They left out some highly sensitive clauses including the ones about slavery.

PARKER: At the same time, a new edition of Huckleberry Finn is coming out with the word "slave" replacing the N-word.

And joining us tonight to talk about all of this revisionist history are: our guests, culture critic and former editor at "Essence" magazine, Michaela Angela Davis and noted linguist John McWhorter.

Thank you both for being here.

DAVIS: Thanks for having us.

PARKER: All right. Michaela, what was the reaction to the reading of the Constitution in an abridged form?

DAVIS: The genius of America is our ability to grow. And when you take the horror out of history, when you recover from it, it doesn't feel as triumphant. And certainly slavery was a horror. Certainly, it was a horror that women couldn't vote. Certainly, it was a horror that people couldn't drink. You know, so, leaving out the 18th Amendment, leaving out Article I Section II that counts or categorized slaves as three-fifths of a person, when you leave that out, you can't say we've gone from being three-fifths of a person to the first lady.

SPITZER: I see it also through a different prism, which is that this goes to the heart of how they want us to interpret the Constitution. It goes to the whole notion of originalism and we have to understand the Constitution as it was written by the Founding Fathers. And, of course, they can't even acknowledge that because the moment they have to read it, they have to admit, wait a minute, that isn't so good. So, they want to -

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: So they like to deny the evolution you're talking about. Evolution isn't part of their constitutional world view.

PARKER: That's really the crux, the difference -- you know, do we believe that the Constitution can be -- can it grow, can it evolve or is it static and is it this one thing that can never be changed?

DAVIS: I don't think that's part of their agenda either to talk about things being living documents and that we can grow and evolve. I think that's -- and race gets on everyone's nerves. It really is a distraction. So let's remove the distraction so we can keep our agenda, keep our narrative pushed.

And, I mean, we often --and I think that's the same thing around the Twain controversy is that race is a distraction and people don't want to open up and have discourse and really get in it.

JOHN MCWHORTER, LINGUIST: I would say take another side and say that this possibly touches on things like Rand Paul and his rather dim view of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and saying that perhaps this sort of thing shouldn't have happened in a legalistic way. All the people are talking about libertarian principle or about originalism always stumble on the civil rights issue on Brown v. Board. And so, yes, that's something which if we put ourselves in their heads, they might have wanted to avoid.

SPITZER: This is so much of the heart of what the Tea Party was all about, their notion that we are the constitutionalists as they though they have some monopoly on understanding what this great document is all about. And then when, of course, you read it with them or to them or they read it to us, and say to them, OK, we've done it on the show a number of times with Tea Party folks, and then we say, well, what act of Congress really violates it? You get -- well, we don't really know.

So, they love the theater of it, but they don't really want to dig into what it means and how to understand it.

DAVIS: Do you think that's why they did it in the first place, to kind of a nod to the Tea Party, like, you know, thank you for doing this. PARKER: Definitely.

(CROSSTALK)

DAVIS: So if that's their audience, then why not flip the script to suit your audience?

PARKER: We are objective to a fault.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVIS: But I mean that clearly to me I thought, OK, this is a little show thanking the Tea Party for getting us in here and so, we're not going to offend you, we're not going to make you uncomfortable.

MCWHORTER: Certainly.

DAVIS: And we're going to let you have a drink afterwards. So, we're not going to talk about the 18th Amendment either. So, I feel like that we're clear about that. And it would be naive to really like clutch our pearls, oh my God, they didn't talk about slavery and women. They don't want to talk about race in America. They never do.

MCWHORTER: Enlightenment will never happen. So, I think that's another reason I'm inclined to just let it go.

PARKER: But you know that there is light at the end of this tunnel, and that is that we're having this conversation. Of course, conversation is taking place all over this country. I think it's a good thing.

SPITZER: I think they did themselves a huge disservice. Had their had the entire document read without great fanfare it would have passed in the dark. But, now, I think the act of cutting, focus, it forces to shine a big light of the laser beam on those words they excluded and now we're saying, this proves the very evolution in thinking that you want us to talk about.

DAVIS: One of America's great painters John Shubasky (ph) used to mark out words, cross them out, because he said when you cross them out it brings more attention to them. So, if you see a document with something marked out, you want to know what that is.

So, that artist's intention was to have you be uncomfortable and talk about that work, I'm admitting it. So, they did the same thing.

So, here we are having conversation about what they wanted to avoid.

MCWHORTER: I think one of the things to think about is the fact that the people who were in power about that decision didn't realize that that's how it was going to come out, didn't realize to lead to this kind of conversation, suggests they're not the genius strategists that they're often written about. And I'd be interested to see how much impact though people will have on history.

SPITZER: In politics, when you win, your genius. The moment you lose, you're an idiot.

(LAUGHTER)

SPITZER: Both sides, trust me. When -- is this different, the Constitution different from Huck Finn? Do you look at them and say one is more legitimate as an editing version than the other, or they both equally despicable as edited?

MCWHORTER: There's a difference here in that what we're thinking about in terms of this work of literature is whether or not people are capable of seeing something written very long time ago and something written with the literary point of view is using the slur in question, which I'm sure we're about to get to, to show the evil of the people who are using the word.

Whether or not we in the present can understand that the use of the word there is different from someone hurling the word as an interjection today, and it seems that to pull that word out of that text is to propose that students as well as black people in general, the black people who are supposedly going to be offended by "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain lack something as basically human as a sense of irony or abstraction.

It's deeply insulting to students. It is a really curious thing to say about teachers who supposedly aren't capable of imparting the notion of something having happened in the past and shedding light on the present to students and also implies that black people aren't capable of understanding they're different forms of the N-word, which would seem to be very apparent in, for example, the way it's used among young, black men or on rap recordings.

And, therefore, I take it as a grand insult to black people. I imagine the people sitting around the table in some editing room in a publishing house with their mouths pursed and nodding at each other and taking this word out and replacing it with slave and thinking that that's showing they're good people, when it actually shows that they are insulting black people just like Southern racist congressmen 100 years ago.

(CROSSTALK)

PARKER: Yes.

DAVIS: They're also robbing the white students of the opportunity to have discourse because, you know, black folks, we have had to deal with this word so much. We have had to deal with so much -- you know, we're not surprised. Many people, that's my Facebook was, we're not surprised, we're not surprised.

But it's all students and particularly nonblack -- the people who will never be called the N-word, the people who will never be called a slave are the ones that are also missing out on this opportunity to unpack history and get to know each other. You know, the N-word is like a bullet. A bullet is not dangerous until you put it in a gun and point it at someone with the intention to hurt them. And so, if we can't talk about language in a way, or context or an environment changes the energy of that word, the student -- all students, not just black students --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Very true.

DAVIS: -- are missing the opportunity to know more about each other.

SPITZER: Hold that thought. We got to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PARKER: We're back with Michaela Angela David and John McWhorter.

SPITZER: How would Twain respond?

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: He would be -- I presume, this is not my -- he would be mortified because he, obviously, thought so carefully about using the word for a very specific purpose.

DAVIS: Absolutely, absolutely. This is one of the things that, you know, Anderson read the other night is that he said that we have crushed and ground the humanity out of slaves. It's our fault and we should pay for it. He said that.

SPITZER: That was Mark Twain?

DAVIS: Mark Twain.

PARKER: Mark Twain, that's right.

DAVIS: That we have ground the humanity --

SPITZER: It is fascinating context when you wanted to pay a slave's law school tuition at Yale University.

DAVIS: That's right.

MCWHORTER: He was on the side of the angels.

DAVIS: So, it's very clear what his position is and very clear that he wanted to be a provocateur, that he wanted as to continue to stay in conversation. And so, to remove that is so -- I think it also speaks to where we have gotten in our education system, that we are afraid to teach, teachers perhaps aren't equipped to have a really, you know, diverse conversation, a really layered conversation if your students aren't ready to have the conversation, don't bring the text to third graders. You know?

PARKER: Part of the motivation was, apparently, you know, this book has been dropped from reading lists and this professor was trying to find a way to get it back into schools. But maybe this is not an opportunity for schools to reexamine those policies.

MCWHORTER: They have to understand, it's a weird thing. There's an anthropologist, his name is Donald Brown, and he has written a list that I think all people should read. It should be in needle point and put on people's kitchen walls, of what the universal traits of humanity are. This is everybody from a free letter at --

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: I'm with you. I'm taking notes here.

(CROSSTALK)

MCWHORTER: They have two things on it that all people have from the rainforest to people analysis over there right now.

PARKER: All right. Let's just put that on our Web site.

MCWHORTER: The capacity for abstraction. All people can be abstract. All people understand that language does not correspond directly to reality. All humans get that.

And this notion that we're going to expunge the N-word from that book because students can't handle it is implying that students and some other people, especially brown ones, are not human. They don't have the capacity to abstract and they don't realize words mean several things. I wouldn't have it. I wouldn't have it.

SPITZER: It is amazing that both with Twain and the Constitution, this aversion to history. This desire to sort of you lied certain things, get rid of certain things we just don't want to deal with have kind of converged at this one moment. It's very sad.

DAVIS: And I think it brings back this bigger point again that when we take a purist view, we actually lose how great we are. That we -- that we can change from imperfect to a more perfect union. So if we start off thinking that we're perfect and having this idealized version of America, we can't have the journey of becoming more perfect and that's --

MCWHORTER: We're so proud of ourselves. Yes.

DAVIS: Yes, yes. You can't have -- you know, cultural self-esteem if you don't know that you have grown.

SPITZER: All right. John McWhorter, Michael Angela Davis, thanks for being with us.

MCWHORTER: Thank you.

DAVIS: Thank you.

PARKER: Coming up, what do girl scouts, cops and Southwest Airlines have in common? We'll find out from our next guest. Stay with us.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WILLIAM C. TAYLOR, FOUNDING EDITOR, FAST COMPANY: It's not about getting a little more efficient or getting a little bit cheaper. It's about become more memorable in the eyes of your customers, and, by the way, also, the people who work for you every day. You can't be exciting, creative, distinctive in the marketplace unless you're always exciting, creative, distinctive in the workplace.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PARKER: In an era when reinvention and innovation are the touchstones of every business organizational discussion, our next guest has done it and written about it with organizations as diverse as major corporations, the Girl Scouts and even a city police department.

ELIOT SPITZER, CO-HOST, "PARKER SPITZER": Bill Taylor's the co- founder of Fast Company of Business magazine with a cult-like following that has won just about every publishing award imaginable. His new book "Practically Radical" is both a manifesto for change and a manual making it happen. And full disclosure, he also happened to be my college roommate, but those stories we'll hold for another day, I hope, at least, Bill.

PARKER: Not so.

(LAUGHTER)

TAYLOR: I put something on the web.

SPITZER: All right, Bill, you have studied all sorts of organizations as you just heard, Girl Scouts, major corporations, police departments. What are the rules from those that successfully reinvent themselves?

TAYLOR: First of all, it's funny, because we when are talking about politics today, we want people operating in the middle of the road, get away from extremes. In business that's a terrible idea.

What I have come to learn is that it's not good enough anymore to be pretty good at everything. The most successful organizations are the most of something. They don't just sell competitive products and services. They stand for important ideas, ideas meant to really reshape the sense of what's possible in the marketplace.

PARKER: Some of the companies you use as examples do very risky things when it seems counterintuitive.

TAYLOR: Yes.

PARKER: And there are times when they're in dire economic stress and do something this seems --

TAYLOR: It doesn't seem risky to them and obvious to them. One of my favorite companies in the world is Southwest Airlines. You know, you look at the airline business in general and Warren Buffett said with the clock cleaned with investment and said he was alive in 1903 when the Wright Brothers flew, he would have shot it out of the sky because of the heartache it's caused.

Southwest for years never had a money-losing year. It has never laid off a single employee. And that's because it does business in every way completely different from every other airline. They don't wake up saying we want to do things differently. It is just the way they have chosen to be in that business.

SPITZER: How do you gate mindset, a DNA within the leadership and throughout the company that challenges the premise every day that says we got to do it differently and one step ahead of the imitators?

TAYLOR: The challenge is, and I mean, I spent a lot of time researching companies and struck by how similar in any industry most companies are to one another. The question is, how do you let what you know not limit what you can imagine? George Carlin had a term --

SPITZER: I was going to try to find it.

TAYLOR: Deja vu -- I've never been here and feel I have been here. It's the opposition. Can you look at an industry of 20 years, can you look at a set of customers working with for a decade and look at them as if you've never seen them before? And with that fresh set of eyes get a whole new point of view about how you create the future of your industry.

PARKER: One example that I love is the Girl Scouts, because I was a girl scout growing up.

TAYLOR: You and 50 million others.

PARKER: How did they do that?

TAYLOR: You think the way you build a future is break from the past. The Girl Scouts, one of my favorite transmission stories, they didn't break if the past, they rediscovered the past. They went back and studied the early writings of Juliet Gordon Lowe started before women had the right to vote. She had girls in the woods and doing these crazy things.

And she was a really radical social activist and the girl scouts becoming very polite, what would our founder think? So they used WWJD, not What Would Jesus Do, but What Would Juliet Do? And they tried to remind themselves of the really provocative ideas around which the organization started and said why can't we get back to that?

So the past became a license to be much more confident and risky --

(CROSSTALK)

SPITZER: Swatch.

TAYLOR: Absolutely.

SPITZER: Before swatch, buying a watch, you buy a watch. Swatch was exciting, different. There were 15 different types of watches.

TAYLOR: Exactly.

SPITZER: How does that happen? Who was behind that? TAYLOR: Nick Hayek, who unfortunately passed away about six months ago, is one of the great strategists. What he understood that I think too few organizations understand this and so many companies in the book do understand is it's not about getting a little more efficient or getting a little bit cheaper. It is about becoming more memorable in the eyes of your customers, and, by the way, also, the people who work for you every day. You can't be exciting, creative, distinctive in the marketplace unless you're also exciting, creative, distinctive in the workplace. I mean --

PARKER: How did this apply to a police department? You went to study a police department.

TAYLOR: Again, another great guy, colonel Dean Essa (ph) of Rhode island, celebrating the eighth anniversary of chief of police. They were incompetent, corrupt, a laughingstock. And in eight years he's re-imagined the role of a police department today and talks about beyond, the 911 is kind of screwed things up. You have to have it, of course, but the theory is you're a citizen. You call. We come. You don't know who we are. We have to wear name tags.

SPITZER: There's nothing interactive.

TAYLOR: Hopefully we have a family doctor. Still you have the family priest or rabbi. Why don't we have a family cop? Why doesn't everybody know by name?

His officers carry business cards with their cell phone numbers. They put the cards on the shops and newsstands or whatever. His definition of a victory is every year do 911 calls go down? Because when people have a problem, they're calling their personal cop on the cell phone to help.

SPITZER: Like primary care doctors.

(CROSSTALK)

TAYLOR: It is very high-tech and all of that stuff.

SPITZER: Let me push you on one thing -- Girl Scouts, Swatch, you know, the police department in Providence, Rhode Island, you have leaders at the top of every one of the groups, exceptional, extraordinary people to infuse the organization. Can you teach that? Is this a transferable skill to read the book and say now I know how to do it? It's brilliant. But can you learn this stuff?

TAYLOR: I think there is a natural inclination among too many people in business to get into a position of authority you get very conservative, very cautious, particularly in this day and age.

SPITZER: Yes. Tell me about it.

TAYLOR: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste" is a bumper sticker, right? I think a lot of us are learning the wrong lessons of the economic crisis which is don't take risks, be cautious. And I think if leaders can get comfortable, first of all, the big flip is, just because you're in charge, you personally don't have to solve every problem.

PARKER: Millions of Americans are watching us right now.

TAYLOR: Oh boy.

PARKER: Right?

SPITZER: Absolutely.

PARKER: They're thinking we want to do something innovative with the company, we want to do the next great thing. What's the first question to ask themselves? How do they get started?

TAYLOR: As an individual or as part of an organization, what ideas do you stand for? When someone comes to work and works for you or you wake up Monday morning and go to work, you have to ask yourself, what impact am I trying to have in the world? And how is what I'm doing different and distinctive from what other companies in this same field are doing?

SPITZER: All right. Bill --

PARKER: Wait. Nope, no, no, sorry. The most important question of all, for 40 years, off and on you were the college roommate of one Eliot Spitzer. Tell us something we don't know.

TAYLOR: Eliot, can I really -- wanting the reveal this?

SPITZER: No, no. This is --

TAYLOR: This is a way to get trafficked at website. I'll reveal secrets on the web.

PARKER: OK, great.

SPITZER: The book is "Practically Radical." Bill Taylor, thank you so much for being here.

TAYLOR: That was fun. Thank you very much.

SPITZER: Buy the book. It's transformative.

TAYLOR: Thank you.

SPITZER: When we come back, Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness. Our next guest spent 40 years trying to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We'll ask him if there's a way out of the desert. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SPITZER: The Middle East peace process has failed at least partially because America doesn't have quote "the balls to do what's needed." That's what our guest said, and he ought to know. He spent the last 40 years trying to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians. PARKER: Aaron David Miller was a Mideast adviser and negotiator through five White House administrations and now says the peace process is a lost cause. We asked him about it earlier. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

AARON DAVID MILLER, FORMER STATE DEPARTMENT MIDDLE EAST ADVISOR: Nobody ever lost money betting against peace even in the best circumstances. It's like a giant root canal operation. It's going to bring extraordinary pain. It is important, and the reality is without allusions. Not giving up on the possibilities of peace. It's certainly possible if everybody, in this case the sun, the moon, and the stars, the Israelis, the Palestinians and of course the Obama administration is willing to pay the price. And that's the real key here, I'm not sure they are.

SPITZER: Let me ask you this. The last seven, eight months, there seemed to be an intense effort on the part of the Obama administration, a lot of press. Hillary got directly involved. Hopes were raised and then it all came to a crashing halt, which begs the question, even if you had a president absolutely dedicated to getting across the finish line, can the United States anymore, do we have the power, the influence in that region to force a peace on parties who may not want it?

MILLER: In answer to the second question, there is no question we do not and say no to America these days comes out cost and consequence. Everybody says no to us. The Afghans, the Palestinians, the Iranian, the Saudis, everybody. And it's bad for the street cred.

When we succeed, Kissinger, Carter, and Baker, we had street credibility. We knew what we were doing. But more important than that, and this speak to your point, it's about ownership. Unless the Israelis and Palestinians are ready and willing to own this process as their own, I don't care how badly Barack Obama wants this, it's not going to happen.

It was Larry Summers and/or Tom Friedman, both reminded me in the history of the world nobody ever washed a rental car. You don't because you care only about what you own. And the reality is --

PARKER: Correct.

MILLER: -- to make the decisions, Jerusalem borders, refugees and you have to want this.

PARKER: Yes.

MILLER: And it's just too hard right now.

PARKER: You've written that we need adult supervision when it comes to the Israeli/Palestinian negotiations and you've said specifically that we need more power into the secretary of state position, specifically Hillary Clinton. How would things look different if that was the case? MILLER: The truth is we may not be able to resolve this. But I don't think we would have drifted off the highway as badly as we have if somebody was in charge. Beavers build dams. Teenagers talk on the phone, and secretaries of state take on very difficult issues and manage them.

And the reality is whether or not the White House wouldn't allow it, whether or not the secretary is, quite understandably, concerned about failure, she is not in the driver's seat. Somebody must be whether we make a push for the end game or alternatively whether we're going to manage the management strategy.

SPITZER: Before when you talked about the halcyon days when the U.S. could go into the Middle East with a Kissinger, Carter, Baker, and get a peace treaty of some sort, we were the dominant power. Is it possible for us to generate that credibility, that sense that when the United States says you must come to the table they've got to respond which we're lacking? How would you rebuild that?

MILLER: It's really, really hard because we are now set up for failure. We are set up for failure in Iraq under the best of circumstances. Clearly set up for failure in Afghanistan. Iran, the Iranians play us like a finely-tuned violin.

We have been powerful at moments throughout our history and right now in this dysfunctional, angry, broken region we lack the capacity to make small tribes do the bidding of arguably the greatest power on earth.

SPITZER: Neither Hezbollah in Lebanon nor Hamas in Gaza seems to have any interest in forging a real peace right now. With them, how can you possibly get a meaningful treaty?

MILLER: I think you could do this with an Israeli prime minister and a Palestinian president prepared to make the kinds of decisions on these core issues. People want this. There's no question about it. But they need to be led, not against their own interest -- we have leaders prisons of their own politics rather than masters of their political houses.

SPITZER: Whom do you mean? Netanyahu?

MILLER: Benjamin Netanyahu at war with himself. You have Bibi, the tough talking Likud politician who is hostage to his own ideology, his father, the image and reality of his martyred brother, his own party, and at war with Netanyahu a man who wants to lead Israel out of the shadow of the bomb and make peace with his neighbors. This struggle has created a certain amount of paralysis.

Mahmoud Abbas, on the other hand, the Palestinians are like Noah's ark. There are literally two of everything. There are two Palestinian leaders, two Palestinian sets of security services and no monopoly over the forces of violence or a monopoly over one negotiating position. Those circumstances are not auspicious to make the kinds of excruciatingly painful difficult decisions. I was in a room with former president Bill Clinton where Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak sat, the same room that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat sat. In order to make peace in the Middle East since politics is an existential reality on a daily basis, you really need to be a master of your house to believe in this and be willing to take the constituency with you.

SPITZER: But you know why the accords didn't happen. That's why I'm wondering if even an American president as talented as Bill Clinton could make it happen in today's environment?

MILLER: I doubt it. You could invite the gods from Olympus down and the prophets, and without ownership on the part of the Israelis and the Palestinians, which you do not have right now --

PARKER: Let me ask you about that. When you talk about ownership, and then you say we have lost all street credibility and can't get it back, so what does shifting ownership to them actually mean? Does that mean we pull away from the talks altogether?

MILLER: The sad reality for us is we can't walk away. The issue's too important. The credibility is too important.

But if we try to impose this and act tough when we're really not and play the big boy on the block, talk big without imposing consequences, we'll fail. Right now, President Obama has very bad options. And he's going to have to figure out how to dance and how to maneuver over the course of the next six to eight months to keep this thing alive.

PARKER: You have been at this for decades and seem demoralized. If you could wave a magic wand and stabilize the Middle East, what would you do?

MILLER: I'm not demoralized.

PARKER: Good.

MILLER: To quote Jack Kennedy, it's not about me, but to quote Jack Kennedy, I'm an idealist without illusion. I haven't given up on Arab-Israeli peace and a more stable region, but I'll be damned if I'll recommend policies for my government that will result in failure, policies that aren't carefully thought through, policies based on the world the way they want it to be rather than on the way the world really is.

This guy Barack Obama needs to keep working this problem. The secretary of state needs to get her arms around it. She needs to take charge. She needs to quietly work with Abbas and Netanyahu on these issues to find out where they really are. Can the gaps be bridged?

If the president and secretary make a judgment that, in fact, they can be bridged, then with enough reassurance and toughness with enough honey and vinegar maybe, just maybe they could figure out a way forward. But think before you act.

PARKER: All right, Aaron David Miller, thank you so much for being with us.

MILLER: It's a pleasure.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PARKER: And next, see if you can watch the story coming up with without wanting to stand up and cheer. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PARKER: What a week, a new Congress and major shakeups in the White House staff. With all of that change we could use little inspiration.

Well, look no further than Miami University in Ohio. Lance Guidry coached his first and only game last night in what's called the Go Daddy bowl. He is the interim coach and the team says they'll introduce a new head coach next week. But they may want to reconsider their plans.

The game he coached will go down in college football history, and if you haven't heard it yet, we'll tell you the score at the end of this, but first you have to hear what he had to say in the pre-game prep talk.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LANCE GUIDRY, INTERIM COACH, MIAMI UNIVERSITY REDHAWKS: The number, the number represents when Coach Shembechler (ph) was here in the 1960s. The "m," the "m" was in the early '70s. They were 32-1-1. They had three consecutive conference champions. The stripes came in the '80s. So we got three different right here, tradition.

Nobody has ever worn all three of them. Y'all are the first ones and you y'all will be the last ones tonight. And the reason why is because you got a chance to make history, Not only Miami history, but college football history. Nobody has gone from double-digit losses to double-digit wins. Tonight you got an opportunity to do that.

Now, we're glad to be in the fight, fellows. We are the underdog again. Once again you're disrespected and you have to prove yourself.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, sir.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So we got to put the chip back on your shoulder and you play with that all night long! And we talked about the triple-crown. That's going to take four quarters. Not just the fourth quarter, all four quarters, fellows! We got to come out the gates. We got to come out the gates and run our race. Let's go get our damn trophy!

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP) SPITZER: That is amazing. You got to love it. You are ready to rumble when you hear a speech like. They won that game 35-21 over Middle Tennessee State. Congratulation Coach Guidry and the Red Hawks. We are all proud of you guys.

You know what I wish? I wish he'd go to the White House, speak that way to the president's staff, and get them energized to create some jobs. That is what we need.

PARKER: Hear the president talk like that. Huh? Get a chip on his shoulder.

SPITZER: You had to make it political, Kathleen.

All right, thanks so much for being with us. Have a great night.

PARKER: Good night from New York. A special edition of "Anderson Cooper 360" starts right now.