Bowles carried around a card with the president’s top priorities written on it—and rebelled when Clinton tried to go off script. “One day the president came out of his office and he had another one of his great ideas,” he recalls. “And believe me, they were unbelievably great ideas. And I turned to him and said, ‘Mr. President, you have got to go back into that Oval Office, right now! You’ve got to look at this list of things that you and I agreed you wanted to get done. Not that I wanted to get done, but you wanted to get done. If you will stay focused on those three or four things, I can set
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