Were formerly reestablished. His latest article is called open 10 days in june. 10 days in june. Guest happy for the july. Charlie to you as well. 10 days, does that come back to your own russian knowledge . Guest started with shooting and ended with that amazing eulogy. Charlie resistance to forgiveness, furious debate morning and finally justice and grace. Guest i was recalling a time when the Health Care Plan had been unbelievably stumbling in the rollout and people were starting to say this is the beginning of the lameduck president cy. A few months later you had the Midterm Election which were abysmal for the democrats. Talk of the lame duckery only intensified and the thought was there was no way in the world obama would be able to get anything done. It was striking to me, not to overstate it, not to see a new deal has been passed in the last couple of weeks. Charlie the theme was in the air. Guest absolutely. The parameters were defined by a horrendous tragedy that seems so familiar and to see the president say i have made these statements too many times before, and some of those statements always struck me as not political enough not ferocious enough, not revealing enough of what one knows to be inside of him in terms of fury and frustration about what is going on racially and in terms of Relations Police and all the rest. This time that did not happen. Charlie this was a tipping point, at least in his rhetoric and what he allowed the that day himself that day. Then you had the eulogy in charleston. It was political, it was much of the black church. There was no holding back. Guest this is who i am in terms of my solidarity my allegiances and my passions, and to me it was extremely promising. Charlie i think it was about when he came to washington, he wanted to be aspirational, but he also realized there was a practical job. Guest early on in the presidency i was working on a book that became a biography about race. I got an interview at the end of this process and we talked about race a lot. His forthcoming as much as he could or wanted to be in the oval office. Then he started walking down the hall away and came home way back and said, i cannot tell you its very good for me i have got to tell you, its very difficult for me to talk about his issues the way i want to because i know just as i can move market inadvertently with a stray word about financial policy i can exacerbate the situation. I can make things worse or arouse passions on both sides that i do not want to do if i set a foot wrong on this discussion. The implication being the most important thing i can do in the history of race in this country which is the most narrative that we can talk about in American History on this holiday or any other. The most important thing, i have already done i have been elected and subsequently reelected. It seems to me because of these tragedies and the repetition of these tragedies, has allowed him so to become more full throated on these issues. Charlie he lamented that he could not talk about economic inequality in the way that he wanted to because he would be defined as class for. Warfare. Guest it was classified as warfare. He made one quote unqouote remark about bankers and you would inc. He was walking through america with a pitchfork. He lost a lot of support in the fatcat community. Charlie i think he said he only thing that stands between you and pitchforks is me. There is a lewis in an op ed. He left at the emotional pinnacle of his tenure. Guest he could perform and say things in a certain way that Hillary Clinton or any other politicians can. These africanamerican he is africanamerican. [indiscernible] charlie it was one of the great moments anyone who has seen believe in someone having total command of the moment. There was a sense of ideas i believe in. Guest samesex marriage he also i do not see this derisively he played derisively. When he was a state senator filled out a questionnaire. One of the questions was, leave in samesex marriage do you believe in samesex marriage. He said, yes, i do. Charlie he began to take, im evolving. You read David Axelrod spoke axelrods book. No one charged obama of leading the charge. I want to say one thing about those issues. We should be careful about thinking that race in america is a solved issue. Confederate lines are going down across the south and yet the majority of people still think of the Confederate Flag is a symbol of southern heritage, not a racist symbol. Not everyone comes to the same conclusion all it one. There are two different ways of looking at that. There is one thing about people personally accepting a given issue. The other is politicians during the base by saying stirring the base by saying there is a war on christianity. One i understand. One is not healthy or american for american politics. Charlie rarely in our nation has such a sweeping set of challenges to past assumptions. Guest people have been getting over the head and worse in the struggle for gay getting hit over the head and worse in the struggle for gay rights for decades. It is a moment, like brown versus board of education where there is a decisive break for a moment. Charlie what is the moment and what did it change . Did it change something did it change something so that we cross the river . Guest there is a difference between something a movement and law of the land. Local clerks in charge of marriage life marriage licenses saying, i will refuse to do this. On one hand, you are angry that person. On the other hand, there is a sense that that person could not change from one day to the next 180 degrees. It is not shocking. On the other hand, that person cannot make up his or her own law on gay marriage as they can about a speeding ticket. This will be absorbed at different rates. It is now the law, and it is a moment of fantastic triumph. Charlie i want you to deal with the question of whether there is something beyond the law, whether this has something to do with the psyche of the country. Guest it does. Think of where we were. Andrew sullivan wrote a cover piece of the the new yorker the new republic about gay marriage from a conservative point of view. Charlie hes a game in any strong conservative a gay man and a strong conservative. Guest now we are discussing whether trans people should be able to serve in the military. That is an amazing thing, struggling with these gender issues of equality and respect on things that were unimaginable 5 10, 20 years ago to me it makes a happy july 4. Charlie are you surprised, or did you always know this is a man as a journalistic observer, that you never believed he always wanted to give expression to his self deeper self. Guest i have always thought obama hides in plain sight. I think he is the opposite of nixon. Always paid off when thinking about him to think to take him at his word. It never occurred to me that he was a left of center democrat. His model how to deal with social movements was frank when roosevelt dealing with the nations civil rights movement. This is a story that obama tells all the time. Fdrs pensees, response is, make me. Fdr cannot be the head of a movement. The movement has to force a sympathetic president forward. We are congratulating each other july 4, a lot of the names of gay rights whether they are more or less establishment liberals or radicals like larry kramer need to be regulated and acknowledged congratulated and acknowledged. Charlie this is what he said to you in a 2014 interview, i have strength and weaknesses like every person. Guest this kind of talk was maddening to some people when it was published in the new yorker. It seemed so philosophical. I would beg of people compare that to the rhetoric were hearing in the growing president ial race. Is that the temperament that is desirable, that kind of thoughtfulness, or some of the other stuff were hearing right now . Running number two in the race is donald trump. Charlie so . It is a product of personality. Guest his name is all over the side of casinos and golf courses. He is a man willing to say any to be notice. When he recently said what he recently said finally crossed the line. A Major Television network said no more. Nbc throwing him off the air. Apparently he has a mens line. Charlie it is a pretty nice line. Guest it is, charlie. What a country. Charlie what a country that donald trump is out there. Guest a grotesque buffoon. We should be able to call things what they are. There have been a lot of buffoon in American Life but this is somebody who uses hate. Charlie he knows hes a buffo on. It is a connivance to get more attention. Soemehow he may get momentum and nomination to be president. Guest i very much doubt that. Charlie so it is a product of the moment . Guest he likes. Charlie so hes not serious about wanting to be president . Guest this is the most Serious Office dimensional he does not know office imaginable. I dont agree with ted cruz on almost anything. He is an intelligent person. Charlie he is a rhodes scholar. Guest thats another asked aspect. Charlie there is also Bernie Sanders. He is growing bringing record crowds. Guest madison is the whitehot center charlie paul ryan, where he comes from. Guest it is like austin, texas. It is an expression of people on the left who want Hillary Clinton to be more like them. It is an expression of economic populism. The black vote for Bernie Sanders aint hpapenappening. Charlie there are not any black votes in vermont. Guest wisconsin. Or wisconsin. Charlie he is trying to make a case he is a serious person. It is healthy for the Democratic Party to have a debate rather than a coronation. Do you feel good about the country on its birthday . You feel that you look at samesex marriage guest i feel good about these things. The air comes out of me a little bit. Tuesday, the same court made the ruling it made on the Death Penalty of the penalty. Supreme court will not go undefeated on the liberal side. Charlie i meant this in a larger lense. Sense. Here we are. We think about washington and jefferson and madison and adams, and we think about the creation of this country. It was not a perfect union, as we all know. Guest in america there are a lot of people without resources and look at the widening gap of incomes. It is great to celebrate july 4, but complacency is not an option. Charlie i want to leave you with president obama talking about his week. President obama my best week was marrying michelle. That was a really good week. Malia ndand sasha being born excellent weeks. There was a game where he scored i scored 27 points. I have had some good weeks. I am blessed to have had those. I think last week was gratifying because number one, we were able to get a package of trade legislation that i believe will serve the american people, american workers, and american businesses. The Affordable Care act, the results the for themselves. We have the lowest uninsured rate that we have had we started keeping records. My remarks in charleston heartfelt. It was a reflection on a consistent challenge of race in this country and how we can find a towards a better way. Last week was a culmination of a lot of work. How am i going to spend whatever Political Capital i built a . Up . The list is long and my instructions to my team and myself have always been that every last ounce of progress that we can make as long as i have the privilege of holding office. Charlie in his own words. Guest that is the obama you want to see. A year ago there was this sense that the presidency might play out. When you want to see in him or any president you have high hopes for, is that they leave it on the floor. Even at the end of the term, things he pushes towards the good may not reach their combination culmination, but the next one might. That certainly was the case for health care. Charlie thank you for coming. Leaving it on the floor, you indicate where your sports interests are. Thank you. Guest good to see you. We live in a pick and choose world. Choose choose choose. But at bedtime . Why settle for this . Enter sleep number. Dont miss the lowest prices of the season going on now. Sleepiq technology tells you how well you slept and what adjustments you can make. You like the bed soft. Hes more hardcore. So your sleep goes from good to great to wow only at a sleep number store. Right now, save 300 to 700 on select mattress sets, plus 36month special financing. Ends monday know better sleep with sleep number. Charlie and now a look back at some of the most memorable moments on this program. The new they were present at the creation of something special. In 1776 john says to abigail save every letter i write you. By the end of the lives of adams and jefferson when they write letters to each other, they are writing letters to us. They know we will be reading these things. If we were wrong and the american republican experiment failed, we would not be here. But they turned out to be right and this is now the oldest enduring public. They discovered the two holes that over the course of the last two centuries approved have proved to be successful. Democracy, and Economic System rooted in the energies of individual citizens are the source of real productivity. Charlie who saw the future . Guest hamilton. Most unbelievably fast thinker. The federalist papers were the great classics. This is a kid who is the bastard brat of a scotch peddler. [laughter] it was an epithet but absolutely correct. He was born in the caribbean of a woman who was bubbly probab ly a prostitute. We were reading the correspondence between adams and jefferson. She said, jefferson is this. Lyrical, floating. Adams is this. So they bring those franklin is the grandfather amongst the fathers. Charlie here is when you say. No event in American History which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the american revolution. Guest we look back now and it seems like it was a done deal. The oldest enduring republican in world history. In 1775 1776, the chances of this colony defeating a Major Military power in the world and the country that will go on to become the hegemonic power of europe is about one in 10,000. Charlie was it the perfect storm that it happens . Guest in the Continental Congress a revolutionary guy. Great friend of the adamses. Is closer to jefferson. He reports a conversation where jerry is stepping forward and the virginia delegate is stepping forward. Harrison says, when they catch us you are lucky, or i am lucky, because i am fat and heavy. When they hang me, i will die quickly. You are light and you will waste in the wind twist in the wind. The chances of them succeeding were so remote and if they failed, they would be hung. Charlie where most revolutionary go reovlu tionaries go to the gallows. We all know that president s are rated in history. Guest one day i had a revelation, and hamilton had a girl with washington if hamilton had a quarrel with washington he painted washington as a moody and temperamental man. He wrote, the general and i have come to an open rupture. He shall repent of his ill humor. I remember sitting there, actually stunned. George washington, ill humor . This is not conform to the saintly image i had of George Washington. It got me thinking that perhaps this most familiar figure in American History was in many ways the most unfamiliar. Charlie what do we know that makes the unfamiliar familiar . Guest i discover that washington under the service was a passionate, sensitive, complex man. He was a man of many moods and fiery opinions. He was a fierce, harddriving perfectionist. It was cloaked under this command is reserved and stoic aura that we know. There was a fierce, harddriving personality under that facade. Charlie could you make that case with these, without George Washington, the revolution would have failed . Guest the earlier biography is the phrase, the indispensable man. What you find during the revolutionary war, eight and a half years he is the commander in chief of the continental army. There were probably generals who were superior from a strategic standpoint. While others are getting sidetracked and petty disputes George Washington always has that whatever he has, he has a clarity of vision, tenacity of purpose and there is a force of character, nobody in the world whom you would rather give a Monumental Task to the George Washington. Charlie how did he come to those skills . Guest he had tremendous experience and we tend to associate him with the revolutionary war. He spent five and a half years in the french and indian war. George washington turns out to have been a prodigy. When he was 23, he was already in charge of all the armed forces in virginia and virginia was then the most populous and powerful state. Charlie guest 23. Guest 23. He is running an immense plantation at mount vernon when not only with 300 slaves, but it is also a small industrial village. In his last years he is running one of the largest distilleries in the country. Charlie he was the logical choice . Guest he was. In 1775 he was elected unanimously by the Continental Congress as commanderinchief and one of the few people who had significant military experience, even though he was then in his 40s. The revolution has started up in massachusetts, lexington, and concorde. There are thousands of militiamen who gathered in cambridge but they are new england militia men. To give this cause a continental perspective, everyone looks to the south because then it would give it a national character. There is something about washington throughout his life that people are confident and entrusting power to him. He inspires confidence by his levelheaded he is not someone who becomes drunk with power. He is somebody who understands that military power has to be subordinated. He does this brilliantly through the revolutionary war. He has 14 masters. He has to deal with 13 state governors and is internally swaddling Continental Congress. Washingtons genius during the war is in many ways political genius. He was not a great genius. Charlie what made him not want to be president for more than two terms . Guest its an interesting story. He starts out as a young