Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20150324 : vimarsana.com

KQED Charlie Rose March 24, 2015

Litsch, real argument, real critical discourse and if you put it on paper or online or if you use a piece of charcoal to put it on the side of a rock that is the less interesting. Rose the contribution is it is what it is, it is what it is and that is what the fight was about and thats what my heartbreak was about. It is about what it is. Rose we conclude this evening with Juliano Salgado. The travels, that gets to grow up, learning a lot about the world and really open, but it is also the ideation between fact and audience whoever is going to read the newspaper, see those photos is going to see the world through his eyes and somehow is shaping, you know, the vision or the understanding you have from a fact. That is really interesting and that is something that i took on when i started doing documentary and wanted to be at that point. Rose mike allen, Leon Wieseltier and Juliano Salgado when we continue. Rose funding for charlie rose has been provided by rose additional funding provided by and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose we begin this evening with pricks, texas senator ted cruz announced he would run for president in 2016 the first high profile candidate to officially enter the race. Other republicans expected to rupp include senator rand paul and senators jeb bush and scott walker, senator cruz spoke this morning at Liberty University in virginia, the largest Christian School in the world. Manage in 2017 a new president , signing legislation repealing every word of obamacare. Mac a federal government that works to defend the sanctity of human life and to uphold the sacrament of marriage. Imagine a president who stands unapologetically with the nation of israel. Imagine a president who says we will stand up and defeat radical islamic terrorism. Rose joining me now from washington, mike allen chief White House Correspondent for politico and editor of the play book, i am pleased to have us on this program as he also appears on the week. Let me start with this note. I if es the race is beginning. They have been talking about it and we know who the candidates are going to be and we know they have been out just trying to define how they would run, looking for the narratives and trying to raise the money and figure out how the journey will take them, but we now have an official candidate. Tell me anteed cruz and what it means for him to get out front, a lot of ink today and a lot of video today. Well, charlie you are right and charlie, ted cruz surprised people today, as i talked to the other campaigns over the weekend, i think that they thought this event was going to be kind of lame you know most campaigns when they are announcing set up a very elaborate optics, for instance rand paul when he announces the week after easter, it is going to be five days, five states, including south carolina, where you will have the uss yorktown as the backdrop and patriots point as the dateline for him, thats a more traditional beginning to a campaign. Ted cruz going to a place where he didnt have to build the crowd, going a regular convocation at lint university which is just down the road from where i went to school at Washington Lee University and the convocation is actually mandatory so this is what most politicians dream of is a mandatory audience for your announcement and people on other campaigns said that is kind of low rent. But it turned out this was very effective charlie. He got as you said tons of attention. Ted cruz was kind of out of the conversation. You know, months ago there had been buzz about him and i told you, you know what . Ted cruz can win iowa and that always surprises people but it is true, and iowa has very conservative christian voters and ted cruz as we saw today is very effective at talking to Christian Conservative voters, but he get in front of this largely friendly crowd although you will see everywhere the pictures of a couple of very enterprising supporters of rand paul who got down front and stand with rand tshirts that got in the shot some time, so that photo is around, but this is a little largely supportive audience and charlie, ted cruz speaking for 25 minutes as if he is speaking to a courtroom without any notes, very focused showing why he was such a skillful arguer at the Supreme Court, and taking on issues that are very important to the audience that he is going after. He is talking to his target audience, including protecting christian congregations against lawsuits that will force their ministers to perform gay marriages and charlie, thats a pretty under the radar issue, most republicans wont touch it with a tenfoot pole but i can tell you it is a huge issue with evangelicals and a very smart under the radar issue and just an example of how ted cruz knows exactly who he is talking to. Rose i assume what he has to do is emerge as a leading conservative and therefore hope as they go down the primary road it will be a faceoff between him and perhaps jeb bush in terms of moderate versus conservative, even though jeb bush has a claim to conservativism as well in terms of his performance as governor of florida. Thats the hope of this group of people who are essentially conservative is to stay in the game . Thats exactly right. And, charlie, i predict that ted cruz will be one of the last people standing. He is an excellent communicator he is going to be a ten in these debates that are coming up and he has a real base, he has a base that is not based on momentum or the flavor of the month as some of these other candidates his people are very dedicated to him and thats going to be very important. He is not going to have as much money as jeb bush and not have the fancy advertising that jeb bush has, not the come from nowhere surprise story that scott walker is, he may not get the big establishment bump that marco rubio does. I think senator marco rubio of florida will be the next candidate to get his day in the sun, to get a fresh look, things have been kind of quiet in his camp, but national security, which is his wheelhouse is rising as an issue as we see night after night on your program, charlie, and we are going to have marco rubio and rand paul and maybe even Hillary Clinton all announce in the same week right after easter that week of monday april 6th the text day, you are going to have a rand paul announce in louisville, later that week, you are going to have marco rubio announce and either that week or the week after you are going to have Hillary Clinton, so 2016 is starting fast. Rose okay. Let me talk about some other things. Frank hunts says he has the single best sound bite over the last three years saying the big problem in washington is we dont listen so some say about him too, that message transcends ideology and partisanship because so many people in the public think washington is out of touch. There is a certain resonance about that. People, people like jeb bush is saying i want to have a conversation with the American People something that hillary did when she first ran for senate in new york. There is a sense that americans epidont believe that washington is hearing them, whether it is tea party or whether it is elizabeth warren, correct . I think that is a great point. Charlie, the question here is can ted cruz freshman senator, rookie of the United States senator and former Supreme Court advocate, can he be an outsider and so far he tapped that very well, it is a very interesting point about luntz and there was a very luntzian construct in the speech, you saw where senator cruz again and again said imagine, imagine and on the twitters they were making fun of him for in the john len than contest but that. Imagine is very luntzian so though he was with no notes this was an extremely shrewd linguistic construct. The other fascinating phrase that he used, i think is going to come up again and again is, charlie, as you heard he talked about courageous conservatives. Rose right. And of course that is just to say, that his opponents are wimps, right and he talked in the past about the mushy middle and the, in the video he announced this morning he said if you just want more of the same and that is you can fill in there another senator, another governor or jeb bush, if you want more of the same, there will be plenty of that but he said i am the, i am going the lead a new generation of courageous conservatives. So that is going to be a powerful message. Rose so take us where the race is now. Where is jeb bush . Jeb busp7zc is absolutely the far and away leader. He is the person that someone has to take out in order to be the nominee. Charlie if you and i talked a month or two ago we would have said it is wide open anybody can get this, there are a bunch of credible candidates unlike in the past, very serious people, senator marco rubio governor walker, senator cruz, but jeb bush has had such an impressive even though quiet rollout, he built this enormous staff, he has an unbelievable fundraising machine charlie, when he announces his initial fundraising which will probably be 80 to 100 million, he will have more than every other republican combined, including the top candidates like scott walker, and marco rubio, so. Jeb bush has enormous financial advantage and this is what changed going back to at least reagan, there has never been a single time that a republican has amassed establishment endorsement, buzz, money, and has not gotten it. It was first both bushes, dole, mccain, romney, every time the person who corners that establishment market gets the nomination, and so for jeb to stumble and fail, he would have to break that. So bush is mostly raising money, we dont expect governor bush to actually formally announce his campaign until summer, he may be one of the last ones. We expect scott walker, will wait until after his wisconsin legislative session is over, we expect him to go in late may to early june, so we are going to have a steady drumbeat of these candidates coming with, of course, mixed in there now toward the earlier end, the candidate who blots out the sun, Hillary Clinton debate as you and i have talked about in her campaign, do we go sooner aprilish, do we go later, julyish . The argument for waiting is narrow the window that she is actually engaged in political combat. And allow her to a be a statesman as long as she can be. But within her campaign we are told that the early argument has won. They need to raise money, they need to build numerous staff, a huge Startup Corporation she needs to get started and so that is why in the next couple of weeks we will see her also as an official candidate. Rose i assume all candidates on the republican or democratic side this year have learn the lessons of how to use the social media from obama in 2008 and obama in 2012, that are hiring people who understand as you do the digital revolution and how you can use it so well, in politics both identifying voters, getting to the polls, understanding what issues attract their vote and all of that. It is a great point. We saw ted cruz do his formal announcement on twitter shortly after midnight and posted a couple of videos, a couple of videos in spanish long before his event today, Scott Walkers Campaign knowing that there was to be more Online Activity today, granted their own digital activities to try to reach people who were out looking for information, they will wind up with walker you have a lot of candidates including rand paul who are buying google ad words so when you type in ted cruz you may also see an ad for rand paul or for another cane because they know you are curious about the republican field, so they are going to show you their message, but what really matters at this stage of the game, charlie is fundraising, and how effectively can you build an Online Fundraising machine, ted cruz has a Good Opportunity with the lower dollar givers, stalwart conservatives throughout the country, but partly because of his role in the Government Shutdown as you know, and his clashes with Senate Republican leadership he has fewer friends within the capital than maybe any other candidates. Some of the donors pulled away over the weekend, the Houston Chronicle reported he had been doing very deliberate outreach to some of those big deep pockets in houston that he may be alienate add little bit recently. He is coming back to them and saying, a second look. So at the moment, jeb bush almost all of the activity is with the fund raisers, will go to iowa, New Hampshire for a tv picture right now but right now they are trying to stockpile this money so that when all of the candidates are out there together, they will already have their lard to put away and be able to spend more time on the trail. Rose mike, thank you. Mike allen from washington. Stay with us. We continue now with part 2 of my conversation with Leon Wieseltier he the, on bring night and we talked about israel and the recent election and the future of the netanyahu government and the possibilities of a twostate solution, we now turn to where he spent his professional life at the new republic, that magazine was his life, he was a literary editor of that magazine, he was the man who gave it its cultural heart. He left the magazine in dispute with new owners and now at the Brookings Institute and also the atlantic magazine, but i begin and asked him a point i asked chris hughes the new owner of the new public magazine when he was here about a month ago, what happened . Oh oh. What happened was that the owners of the new republic, the owner of the they re new republic decided to take the magazine in a direction he believed was necessary for its survival and i believe destroyed it. That is what happened. Rose all right. That is what happened. Rose so explain to me, and then i will have a clip from him. Explain to me what the difference in where he wanted to take it and where you wanted it to be. As far as i understand what he wanted to do, he was overwhelmingly concerned for commercial reasons with the transposition of what we did on to certain technologies especially mobile, everybody has an obsession with mobile. Rose some say you need to have an obsession to survive. My position is the transition to the new technology did not affect the content of the magazines this was simply historical inevitably and would have lived with it. I am not a fool. I understand that there are technologies that reach many more people than paper did. My own view was always that just that, just because there are new bottles doesnt mean that the old wine is bad. And if we similar, it was simply a matter of pouring the old wine into new bottles that would have been fine. The idea that the invention of new bottles required the invention of new wine so that pieces on certain subjects would no longer be featured or even published, so that longer pieces of a certain kind would be ground upon, so that the kinds of essays that we used to that we ran for the entirety of our history would now but surround by all kinds of bells and whistles and more snackable things seemed wrong to me, and it was certainly not something that i could preside over or or cooperate in. You know, i think that the primary task of the serious magazines in this country is not to get clicks. It is to offer this country intellectual leadership. Rose but cant you offer intellectual leadership online . You can but thats not what was being done certainly you can. My editing days are not over. I have thoughts about starting something and if i start something obviously i am going to use the technologies, because it is nice to reach lots of people, it is nice to in fact, since this is about the formation of American Opinion the more people you reach the more influence you will have, the question is, what are you reaching them with . What are you reaching them with . And the idea that the kind of serious critical essays that didnt always get the most clicks had been made obsolete by rose now are you saying there was no part in the digital magazine that he believed in that was one to one with the future of the digital revolution, it would not be possible, it would not be possible to have thoughtful pieces . My pages were being cut. I was constantly being pressured to put shorter, cuter things in. The fact that some of the pieces i regarded as our most valuable contributions didnt do that well online seemed to weigh heavily against them, when in fact it counted for almost nothing for me because that is not how influence works. I mean if you publish something important, you send it out into the culture and you let it find its readership and it does find its readership, influence is not necessarily a quantity final thing and there isnt a metric for intellectual leadership. There just isnt. And it takes time and one needs the long view and so on. Rose okay. Let me ask you this. When he bought the magazine, he was viewed as a conquering hero, was he not . You were a huge supporter. I was a. What did you buy that made you a supporter that turned out not to be real . The magazine, the direction i was his plans for the magazine in the beginning were nothing like the a plan that i was told about near the end. Rose so his plan for the magazine, beyond whatever it was you wrote or edited, long thoughtful pieces or they wanted Something Different from you, there is a honk tradition with the new republic, he wanted to change that. Yes, and look at it, yes. I have looked at one issue and i dont intend you know, i dont intend to look at it again. I said to someone, someone asked me i said the new new republic is to the old republic texas is paris texas to paris france. Rose there was a rebellion, because an editor was fired, correct . When frank and i quit,. Rose he quit first or was fired or no, no. You know,. Rose what happened . What happened was that he discovered that they had hired another editor and they hadnt told him is what happened. Nothing like that was done to me. I made it clear when i spoke to the staff

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