The Miller Center hosted Charlie Savage, author and New York Times Washington correspondent, on American Forum Wednesday.
Executive Producer of American Forum Doug Blackmon said the program is broadcasted in 85 percent of markets in the United States on PBS stations and aims to engage the public in national issues.
“We're very oriented to issues that are really important right now, issues of real national consequence,” Blackmon said. “We're trying to bring together scholars, politicians, policy makers [and] journalists to talk about those really important things in ways that an informed and engaged public will find valuable and entertaining."
American Forum is produced by the Miller Center and hosts a different guest each Wednesday. In keeping in line with the center's mission, American Forum often focuses on issues affecting the executive branch, Blackmon said.
"The Miller Center as an institution is very [interested] in the presidency and the executive branch and in research on the presidency, in the past and in the present, and in what the biggest issues [are] that will face any president,” he said.
Savage's book, “Power Wars,” and his articles for the New York Times deal extensively with the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Blackmon said he was chosen as a guest to discuss the important implications of these policies and the effects they will have on the next president.
"Savage’s book is very much so one of the very first efforts to put together a broad assessment of the Obama foreign policy over the entire administration,” Blackmon said.
The book begins with a chapter about what Savage considers to be one of the most defining moments of Obama's presidency.
"I open the book with… the Christmas 2009 attempted Underwear Bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner," Savage said. "All the systems put in place to protect against something like that had failed. The political backlash to that moment was ferocious."
The attempted bombing occurred when Umar Farouk attempted to detonate explosives hidden in his underwear while onboard a flight. Savage said the incident caused Obama to swiftly harden his counter-terror initiatives.
"If there was a successful attack, he would be a failed, one term president. Everything they were trying to do… beyond national security, in terms of health insurance and whatever the rest of their domestic policy was would [have been] destroyed," Savage said.
One of the running themes of Savage's book is how there are often many sides to every situation and knowing what is right is not always apparent, Blackmon said.
"What his book demonstrates, and what his reporting has demonstrated over a long time as a really prominent American journalist, is that things are complicated," Blackmon said.
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