Welcome. Thank you, charlie. Charlie so this is the easiest way to make a buck i know. Put your columns together and there it is. Its not that easy, is it . Some of them are my columns and new material, in a tom sawyer move, i forced my brothers and sisters to write original essays. I have a really long essay on my 30 years with the bush fall and i have all of my letters from papi bush, not all of them, i used snippets of them and how we were able to maintain what he calls a love hate relationship all through the six or seven years i was writing critical columns about his son. Charlie what do you call it, love, hate, or Something Else . I never feel love or hate for politicians, i try and save those emotions for my exboyfriends or boyfriends. Charlie or future boyfriends for goodness sake. Thats not how i think of politicians. You know, he represents the lost world of bipartisanship and civility charlie desensey. The letters are really fun. Charlie he loves to write letters, too, he is famous for writing notes and letters. He didnt write a memoir and so he reveals himself, he has a book of letters and then he reels himself. Thats a form he feels really comfortable with. Charlie describes what politics mean to you. What they mean to me. Charlie what they mean to you. Is this the great game of our time, for example . Is it the most interesting spectacle that anybody could observe and right about, is it what . I watched your shows on shakespeare recently and in fact i watched them all twice because they were so wonderful. And i majored in shakespeare in college and its the closest thing to me that you can get to being a royal court reporter. Its the drama. How people respond to power, you know, how either they become better people or it corrupts them or the pressure theyre under in a campaign is the closest thing you can get to that. Now im a game of thrones fan for the same reason, all of hose alliances and feuds and trying to get power, its fascinating. Charlie but not murder. Not yet. We got 55 days to go. Charlie trump keeps talking about it. In a sense, i could shoot someone on fifth avenue and they wouldnt convict me, and on her, she could shoot somebody and she wouldnt be convicted. The most incendiary political rhetoric we have ever heard, the craziest. I used to call political strategists to help me analyze the campaigns and now i call shrinks. Charlie the psychologists and shrinks. Right. Charlie do they give you helpful advice to understand why donald trump is the way he is and why Hillary Clinton is the way she is . Yes, because with hillary, its sort of a nixonan paranoia. With trump, he lacks empathy, so he doesnt understand why he can heckle people and insult them and they get mad at him and then when they do something to him, he doesnt understand. For instance, he didnt understand why the bushes wouldnt come to his convention. He was really hurt, but he doesnt understand he eviscerated them, both of them, because he said, w, right. Charlie he cant understand why they wouldnt want to come to his convention. He is mystified. Charlie you have known him for two decades, had the phone relationship with him. I have seen him a lot. Charlie has the person you have known over the years the same person that you see campaigning today . In one sense, the same and in one sense opposite because on the 199 foray, the plane, the fake french impressionist paintings, so i said to him, why do you think voters would vote for you and he said because i get good ratings on larry king or more precisely because i get the best ratings on larry king. So even then it was ratings. And then he said because a lot of men hit on melania. So he was saying he had that ego arithmetic that he uses, the numbers are sentinels of his success. That has not changed. He still, even on tv this week, he was giving the number, the high number of his testosterone count as an example. Charlie testosterone count . He was telling dr. Oz that he had a really high number. Charlie you think that will be in the medical report . It is, yeah. So everything with him is the numbers. But on the other hand, he has completely changed. He was this sort of white rapper, greed is good kind of new york liberal, so you have these two new york democrats running against each other, but now he is either pretending to or has morphed into antiabortion charlie you think thats genuine . Antigun control. No, i dont think any of it is genuine. I think he is a salesman trying to make the sale at any given moment so he will say what he needs to do to make that sale like any Good Real Estate salesman. Charlie you said once, i was worried if i wrote something that made him mad, he would send out one of his midnight tweets about me, she started as a three, now she is a one and then you said i would be upset. For a while, i didnt want to write something about him. I was kidding. I was kidding about that. Im expecting that tweet any minute though maybe as i walk out the door. Charlie you dont really care . God no. Charlie do you think he can win . Anything can happen you know. Charlie of course, it can. I think that this week because hillary made some mistakes last week, she called his voters including my family the basket of deplorables. Charlie one half of his were deplorables. The problem is she is doing what she says is so awful what he does, take a whole group of people and generalize. Charlie a big mistake that mitt romney made, too. Exactly, so that wasnt good. The health scare, i agree with David Axelrod that its more about self than health because the health scare was a microcosm of the problem she always has had for the last 25 years which is something relatively mundane happens that could be cleared up easily in a few days or a few minutes and instead of just being transparent and clearing it up, she hunkers down, has the war room, is really defensive and secretive and she is like this idealistic Public Servant who wants to make the world a better place, but then sometimes she also makes decisions from a dark place of fear and insecurity that trips up the idealistic servant. Charlie on, that how is she different if her husband . I dont think he in all of these cases for the last quarter century, he is not the one who wants to hunker down and demonize opponents and fight the press. He goes along with that if she insists, but George Stephanopoulos said if he could get a genie out of a bottle and change one thing, it would be to give Washington Post the white water papers and it would be over in a week. It led to seven independent counsels and the taxpayers paid 80 million that led to impeachment. She has a pattern to say she had pneumonia, we all understand that. Charlie some people on her staff in brooklyn had pneumonia. I have been on a book tour for two days, im exhausted. Everyone knows you get sick and tired, so no one would have held that against her. I guess the outright was to trying to make it a squender issue that women arent as strong as men and she responded to that. Charlie look at trump on the birther issue, for example. Everybody says he no longer believes that. He doesnt say that. He can go out front giuliani Charlie Conway has said it, too. I asked him about it . Charlie what does he is a . He says no comment. Charlie he said the first thing he first started experiment with that group of people within the right wing of the republican party, but its the same thing. Its the same thing. Youre right, but in his head, he thinks he is doing what he needs to do now and then later hell be really flexible. He said to me, the New York Times will be very happy with me when im president because i will be the kind of president they like. So i think in his own head, he thinks he is doing what he needs to do now and then i said to him, i dont recognize you on the public stage. You are this bigoted person who is spreading hate. Thats not the person i knew in new york for three decades. I wasnt a friend of his, but i would interview him on occasion. He said i can be that person again. I can be very president ial, but i think he just feels that he is riding this train and he doesnt realize that train is taking him to very dark places that he cant return from. Charlie i think you said the following, no one is more surprised than he is that this thing, this adulation from tens of thousands of people in an arena would be for him. Exactly. Charlie and its intoxicating. Yes, exactly. Charlie he doesnt want to do anything that will break that bond. Right, thats exactly right. Charlie people who come here and talk about this all the time and talk about, which election will be decided whether its a referendum on him or her. And the caveat is if its a referendum on her, that in fact he is not the perfect vessel, but because its a referendum on her, theyll take him believing that he cant be any worse than what has happened before which is a gross revisionism of history. But that is his idea. If its a referendum on her, theyll accept him and they dont think he is perfect. They know that he changes his mind. They know he is a raging ego maniac, they know all of that. He is in 2016 the change agent. Thats why voters are fearful and anxious and depressed because they have to vote against someone, not for someone. They have got these candidates who have historically high unpopularity ratings. They seem to be getting higher by the minute. Charlie if he loses, having convinced himself or at least convinced himself to the point of being able to merchandise himself that he is the worldest reatest winner and on a day in november, he could become the worlds biggest loser, will he simply rationalize that and say it wasnt me, it was fixed. Thats why he started doing the thing about the system is rigged. I do think it would be sort of devastating if he has to shrink back to new york as a looser. His whole brand is about winning. I dont know how you continue the brand unless you change the name to a vanka. Charlie or the business with roger. Are you fascinating what roger is doing with him . Yes, its so weird and all of these kind of motley crue that i have covered my whole in er sort of combining this strange toxic brew. Charlie your brother and your sister are voting for him. When you say why, what do they say . Well, you know, if you read charlie these are conservative irish catholics. Right, its funny because the other columnists are going on some Margaret Mead anthropoe logical road trip, theyre driving to kentucky looking for that strange exotic screen tour called a trump voter. One of the columnists wrote an open letter and he said, i would like to find a trump voter and reason with them so if i could just find one to come forward and all i have to do is go home, you know. I dont even actually have to get in my car. I think their essays are really interesting because theyre agonizing the way a lot of traditional conservatives are agonizing. Paul ryan is not allowed to talk about this right now. If you read their essays, you can see the kind of agonizing mental process that paul ryan is going through where they want to be republicans, they do not want to vote for Hillary Clinton. They want the supreme court, but they cant abide some of the things trump is doing. Charlie since you know him so well, you can answer the question. Is he fit to be president . You know, having covered all these presidencies, the qualifications issue is interesting when i think about it because if you take dick chaney and donald rumsfeld, you would have thought they were the two most qualified people on earth. Charlie certainly the most experienced along with bush 41 and along with hillary now. They led us into the worst Foreign Policy mistake in american history. So its hard to tell and convince, there is a great quote from harry truthan where he says you cant tell in advance how someone will take the responsibility of being president. Also you dont know what historical event is going to hit. If 911 hadnt hit, w probably would have been a very popular president. Charlie vietnam hadnt hit before he was president , Lyndon Johnson would have been one of our great president s, on civil rights, great concern for those social measures that changed peoples lives. Right, exactly. Charlie hillary, tell us what her gift is. What makes people, she walked into this nomination, everybody thought it was herself and Bernie Sanders showed up and he found a constituency that was not hers, millennials to the left of where she was, but she has impressed people like David Petraeus and people like bob arack nd people like b obama. Maureen when you think about what hillary has been through, i mean, i feel really sorry for her when i think about this trajectory because she thought it was hers in 2008 and then its like game of thrones, the young handsome africanamerican prince comes along and usurps the queen. Charlie equally great claim on history, the first. Yes, she and obviously bill were dumbfounded by that, so acted out and was really upset and so then Charlie Jesse jackson. She loyally waits her turn and works for barack obama and then, you know, this time comes and she is again almost usurped but this time by this cranky 74yearold socialist, i mean, what are the odds . Who got the best of all of the young women who were supposed to be excited by her. So then she kind of finally sends him off and then she gets like, you know, this kind of short fingered bulgarian who is like a toon. Like who killed jessica rabbits. Its this toon and now has come and drawing close charlie closing the race and behaving. From her point of view it must be like what the heck is happening here. Charlie bill wants to be set loose. I did an interview with him. Right, it was a great interview. Charlie thank you. He is anxious to get out there because he thinks, he said to me, i can go find, give me two weeks, i can go find out what it is with the working men and women in america, what it is with the people under similar lines who tend to want to support trurp, what its about and can reason with them and explain my wife to them. I believe he believes that. He had to do that for barack obama at the convention in 2012. Amazingly, right, barack obama as it turned out doesnt like politics. Charlie Richard Nixon and jimmy carter. Right, he likes to be above the fray, but politics is the fray. But bill is not as much as a pure boon to her as he was in 2008 because charlie less popular. Africanamericans are reluctant to vote for her partly because of bills record on criminal justice. Charlie incarceration which he has apologized for. And nafta which is no longer charlie all part of the center when she has moved away from the center. Right. Charlie what would be more fun just from the perspective, you have defined yourself. Tell me, and do it again for me, what is it that interests you in terms of your column . How do you think maureen dowd sees the world in a way that other columnists dont . What is it that attracts her powers of observation . Yeah, i am really not so interested in the horse race. Charlie policy . Im interested in policy as it pertains to the person. For instance, you know, i have this essay in this book where i rereported the whole relationship of papi bush and w, the fatherson relationship. Their breeding and competition ended up in the worst Foreign Policy mistake in history. The family dynamic charlie you believe the iraq war was about the son trying to do something his father didnt do and trying to at the same time revenge his father because Saddam Hussein tried to kill his father. Yes, and i went back and rereported the whole thing and i hope like with john meacham, i have done a definitive essay on this. So voters go along and they think theyre voting for someone and they dont realize and the clintons have been the same, you know, that theyre also dealing with this family dynamic that helped determine the results of these huge policy decisions that affect a lot of lives. Charlie so therefore, you also have been, you really are interested in the interplay of all those shakespearean qualities, greed like hillary, you know, health care, she did not listen to bills advice and he didnt insist on helping her with it, the my way or highway the advice, it was very secretive. Bill could have helped her, but that was when the arkansas trooper paula came out and one of her Top Health Care aides said to me, she had a 100 pound fishing wire around his balls are we allowed to say balls . Charlie yes, we are. Its nighttime. Charlie feels like it in the studio. It feels like a casino, if you never know if its anyways night or day, you never know it. Charlie and no clocks on the wall. Understanding what i just talked to you about it is that interests you, the shakespearean issues and how they affect policy thats what i meant to tell you about shakespeare, the peal of trump, there is this longing for the strong outsider, washington has been so dysfunctional and ted cruz tried to burn down the capitol and the republicans had all of these promises about obama care and immigration that they didnt keep. There is a longing for an outsider and there was a general, but that strong person we saw with perot, i think there is a longing for that. Then they turned out to be kind of nuts. Charlie what would be more interesting, donald trump in the white house with all that might happen or Hillary Clinton and bill clinton in the white house . Well, this is interesting because in hollywood, the only storyline they care about is bill clinton as first lad or as first vlade which he says laddie which he says he wants to be called in the same way was mesmerized by sarah palin, a young woman could play the dick chaney role. So now there was an old movie with Fred Mcmurray and polly bergen where he played the first lad. But hollywood is just completely enthralled by that storyline. And so hillary has said, oh, she would continue to pick out the china and chelsea could do the hosting and bill could be in charge of the economy. I think it would be a Real Public Service if he had to pick out the china and do that because then it would underscore how that role is. You have women like hillary and michelle in the role who have the exact same educational and qualifications doing it. If we saw bill clinton do it, we might modernize the role. Charlie i said to hill, i want you to give me more than anybody else. Always the same, ill do whatever he she wants me to do, that tells me nothing. What about the envoy to the middle east. You came closer than anybody else had and you could see that that idea in his eyes w