in the course of their time in office,

where people are looking to them for leadership,

they're looking for them for direction, for meaning.

And you have to call upon yourself

to not only deliver words that capture your point

but that also inspire people to act.

Hello, my name is Valerie Jarret

and I am a former senior advisor

to President Barack Obama.

I served in his administration for all eight years.

[dramatic music]

- Members of Congress.

- This is "VEEP"

and the episode is directed by Chris Addison.

- I'd like to begin today.

- In this scene,

Selina Meyer finds herself in a very awkward spot

when her teleprompter goes down

at the beginning of the State of The Union.

Every person who speaks before a teleprompter,

that is your worst nightmare.

And usually and certainly in a State of The Union,

the way you protect for that happening

is you have a hard copy of the script in front of you.

There isn't a time President Obama went to the lecture room

where there wasn't also a book right there

because inevitably teleprompters go down

and I will say it went down

for President Obama at times,

but not at a State of The Union.

And what you'd see is him just open the book

and start to read.

And oftentimes what you'll do is keep the book open

and turn the pages as you're going

to try to keep up,

so that would, if it does go down

you're not scurrying to find your place

but I can just imagine what went through her mind

when she's looking at a black screen.

There's a teleprompter operator

and usually they work with the candidate.

You know them, you trust them, you have confidence in them.

You want the teleprompter to go at the speed

that the person who's reading it is comfortable

and he can go too fast

or you can go to slow, and it loses a rhythm.

It's really a team effort.

- So today I don't just want to talk about the present.

I wanna talk about the future.

Whatever we have in store

- And you can see what's on the teleprompter

from some of the remote locations.

You can look right at the teleprompter.

They now it's beginning to sink in

that it's not a current draft

but it becomes very clear in a minute.

- No, I think this version

still has President Hughe's old spending plan in it.

We will invest $60 billion

in the new N620 submarines fleet.

- It's beginning to sink in to everybody

that she's announcing a policy

that's actually not her policy.

There's no way President Obama would

have read something that wasn't what he meant.

He would have just changed it

at the last minute on the fly,

but that's hard to do.

And I think for somebody like Selena Meyer,

who doesn't necessarily know that much

about what her policies are to begin with,

but you can tell on the expression on her face

that she thought

"This isn't what I'm supposed to be saying,"

but she kept saying it anyway

- You were supposed to take the submarine cuts out,

not spend an extra 10 billion on them.

- Gary-

- After a mistake is made the senior staff come in together

with the President and then try to figure out how to fix it.

Now we would have also met on our own

without President Obama in the room.

First, to try to come out to him

with some options available

and give him the benefit of our best thinking.

President Obama was so disciplined

and he knew his policies in backwards and forwards

that he didn't tend to misspeak.

That's not to say that everything was flawless.

I mean, I can think of an example of

where he was in a press conference

on the Affordable Care Act

and at the very end of the press conference,

he gets asked a question about Skip Gates

and police arresting him in his own home.

- My understanding is,

is that Professor Gates then shows his ID

to show that this is his house.

And at that point he gets arrested for disorderly conduct

- That wasn't according to plan

so then you have to figure out what to do about that.

But he really stuck to his speeches.

So we spent a lot of time and effort making sure

that we crafted President Obama speeches

in his words, and reflecting his policies

we would send drafts up to him the night before at home

and if it was a serious speech,

like the State of The Union,

he would have received multiple drafts

over the course of several weeks,

and so by the time he actually delivered the speech,

he was absolutely sure about every word that was in it.

- Gary glasses.

- Well, as the nation's first female vice President

I don't think she did right by our gender.

I think that this show really

was a caricature of what a woman would be

and not necessarily the best role model.

And I'm happy to know that reality will be very different.

- I'll be with you in a second.

[door knob clanking]

- This is the "American President" directed by Rob Reiner.

This scene with Sydney played by Annete Bening.

Think she's in a little bit of trouble

when the President asked to see her privately

in the Oval Office.

[door creaking]

- Sorry to keep you waiting.

- Mr. President I-

- Is all right if I call you Sydney.

- Of course, Mr. President

- First of all, what happened before this scene

is the President walked in

and overheard Sydney being critical

of the President in a meeting.

Now Sydney's a lobbyist

and so her trade is that

she's gotta stay on good terms with everybody

while she's pushing for her agenda.

- Mr. President, what you saw in there

was nothing more than vanity run amok.

I was showing off for a colleague

who doesn't think very much of me.

It would be a real injustice

for you to hold the GDC accountable

for my behavior today on top of which I am monumentally

sorry for having insulted you like that.

- So, first of all,

I can't think of a single time President Obama was alone

in the Oval Office with a lobbyist.

You always wanna have

somebody else in the room with you,

particularly with a lobbyist

to double check and make sure

that nothing gets repeated that isn't actually true.

So it would have been very unusual.

- The GDC is asking for 20%, sir.

- It's not gonna pass at 20%

it's a long shot at 10.

- How do you know that

until you put the full weight

of the White House behind it?

- We had very strict restrictions on what lobbyists

could and could not do

because we'd seen far too often

where lobbyists use their influence

to try to sway policymakers,

to do what wasn't in the best interest

of the American people.

And so walling ourselves off from them

was really important to President Obama.

The President's private time

totally depends upon the President.

President Obama always asked us to put on his schedule

time during the day where he could just think.

Now I will say,

when we all saw that time on the schedule,

we violated that wish all the time,

'cause we thought, while he's in there on his own

we can go and ask him about X, Y, and Z.

But I do think it's really important

that a President has time to reflect

and to think because otherwise you can just be reacting.

There were many times when President Obama wanted to escape

and I remember one time he said

"Well, what would happen

"if I just started to walk

"towards the Gates of the White House?

"And do you think the secret service would stop me?"

And I said, "Yeah, I don't think you'd get very far."

But there were also times where he said

"look, I'm going for a walk."

And there had to be a lot of preparation

that went into that walk.

But I remember he just walked outside

of the gates and started walking up to everyday People

and they're like, "Oh my gosh, there's the President."

It was unusual though

to allow somebody into the Oval Office

particularly a lobbyist to an empty room.

And the fact that the President was still

in his private quarters in the back

while Sidney's wandering around the Oval Office,

that would never happen.

What I like about this scene

is that the camera's shooting from the ceiling.

And I think oftentimes when people see the Oval Office

they don't realize how high the ceiling is

and it is a magnificent ceiling.

- Mr. President pardon-

- Did you know the city planners, when they sat down

to design Washington DC,

their intention was to build a city that would intimidate

and humble foreign heads of state?

It's true.

- I didn't know that.

- The white House is the single greatest

home court advantage in the modern world.

- I don't know whether the White House was designed

to intimidate foreign heads of state, but it certainly does.

I have seen the most confident, powerful,

arrogant leaders walk into the Oval Office

and just crumble before your very eyes.

It is by design, very intimidating.

And he's trying to figure out,

well how can I make her comfortable?

So he's not trying to intimidate her

he's really just trying to hit on her.

- Are you hungry?

I skipped breakfast.

You wanna have a donut coffee or something?

- Sir, I'm a little intimidated by my surroundings.

And yes, I have gotten off to a rocky

and a somewhat stilted beginning

but don't let that diminish the way to my message.

- It's very hard to be a single President

for the reasons,

in this instance, in this movie, there are obvious

which is you have potentially

an inherent conflict of interest,

particularly if the person who you fall in love with

is a lobbyist.

- The GDC has been at every President

for the last decade and a half,

that global warming is a calamity.

The effects of which will be second, only to nuclear war.

The best scientists in the world

have given you every reason to take the GDC seriously

but I'm gonna give you one more.

If you don't live up to the deal you just made

come New Hampshire

we're gonna go shopping for a new candidate.

- So what you were seeing

is a negotiation between the President and a lobbyist,

again, unprecedented in my mind

in terms of what President Obama did