Ben Smith:

The part of the book that kind of stuck with me most was something George W. Bush said to you about the financial crisis of 2007:

I listened to (Hank) Paulson and (Ben) Bernanke and spent your money to bail out the guys who created the instruments in the first place, which is an absolute political disaster,” Bush said. “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful. It really irritated a lot of Americans, and they haven’t gotten over it yet. That’s just part of it; there’s a lot of other reasons why. But we’ve had candidates say, “You’re mad, I’m going to make you madder.” As opposed to, “You’re mad, I have some solutions to make you less mad.” We’re kind of in the madder stage, where people are exploiting the anger as opposed to dealing with it like leaders should.

Do you agree with his diagnosis of this political moment?

David: George W. Bush, although he went to Harvard Business School, was not basically a Wall Street fan, needless to say. And when the financial crisis came, he couldn’t believe that his Secretary of Treasury and everybody were telling him, Ben Bernanke, that they have to do this kind of bailout, because he thought this is basically bailing out the banks for the mistakes they made. But eventually he became convinced that if he didn’t do that, the economy would collapse. So I think to a large extent, what was going on in that period of time was that Hank Paulson did not want to be Secretary of Treasury. He had to be importuned several times to take the job. And in the end, he took it because he was assured that he could run economic policy, wasn’t going to be run out of the White House, and therefore Bush tended to honor that commitment and basically delegated everything to Paulson. And so Bush went along with what Paulson wanted. Though I think George Bush’s Midland Texas instincts were the opposite of what his administration actually did.