Moyers & Company; 144; The Election is Over - Now What?

The Republican Party is defined, and I think accurately defined, as a party that looks out for the interests of the very wealthy. Elites in our society, including financial elites, I think that they really have in a lot of ways rigged the system in their own favor. I just think that actually markets are a cure for that rather than the disease. And, moderate Republican still exists, they're just Democrats now, so that's why the Republican Party has been distilled to its extreme. Funding is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world. The Colbert Foundation, Independent Production Fund, with support from the Partridge Foundation, a John and PolyGuth Charitable Fund, the Clements Foundation, Park Foundation, dedicated

to heightening public awareness of critical issues. The Herbalpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society. The Bernard and Audrey Rapaport Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, linked to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at Macfound.org and Gumowitz. The Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, the HKH Foundation, Barbara G. Flashman, and by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. Welcome. It's the weekend after, and Barack Obama is back in the White House, Democrats are back in control of the Senate, and Republicans are back running the House. That's what prevailed before Americans voted, when deadlocked, reigned in Washington,

little got done, and the country was frustrated and angry. Before we end, from more of the same, the talk we're hearing in Washington sounds altogether too familiar. So let's consider what's ahead with two people of different philosophies about what should be done. Bob Herbert was a long time liberal columnist for the New York Times, until he retired last year, and became a distinguished senior fellow for the National Think Tank, Demas. He's been on the road for months now, reporting for his forthcoming book, Wounded Colossus. By hand, Salam writes the agenda. That's a daily blog for the conservative national review online. He's a policy advisor at the Think Tank, Economics 21, and a columnist for roaders. He's also the co-author with Ross Douthett of the Much Talked About Book, Grand New Party, how Republicans can win the working class and save the American dream. Welcome to both of you. Great to see you, Bill.

Bob, what will you remember about this election? Well, the first thing I'll remember is the way people turned out to vote in this election in the face of tremendous voter suppression efforts. And I just think they've been really American heroes because they stood up and said, you are not going to take the vote away from us. Some people stood in line for six, seven, and eight hours. Some had been in areas that had been damaged by the storm. And I just think that they were there upholding democracy. So that's the first thing that I remember about it. They were also there making delicious pecan tarts because when I voted, the kids in the school were selling baking goods, and they were having a great time of it. What would you remember? Oh, that's a tough one to say. I think that for a lot of conservatives and a lot of Republicans, this was a very disappointing election that opened a lot of folks eyes to some of the deeper changes that have happened in the country. Much more so in some respects than the 2008 election, which I think a lot of folks wrote off as a one-off, as a fluke, something that reflected very unique historical circumstances. But I think this election really did demonstrate that there's been a dramatic change particularly

with regard to social issues and how folks talk about them. So I think that that has proven very sobering already for a lot of folks on the right. With the exception of the civil rights movement, have you ever seen change take place regarding cultural more raise and behavior more than has happened with gay people and marriage equality and all of that, which seemed to come out positively in this election? Have you ever seen a change like this? Well, I think that what's important to note though is that these changes came about as a result of the gay rights movement, which has been very fierce for a long time, and they've not given up. And I think that that effort was very similar to the civil rights movement to the women's movement and that sort of thing. I have a somewhat different view. I think that when you look at the history of same-sex marriage in particular, it's an issue that a lot of folks in the official gay rights movement were skeptical towards. But then you had some folks at the local level in Massachusetts places like that who really

kept pushing the issue, even though early on it looked like an issue that was going to be very unpopular and difficult, yet they kept pushing it, and you've really seen a sea change in the space of really a decade. I'm talking less about gay marriage than about gay rights in general. So over a long period of time, you have the gay rights movement so that you now have younger people growing up where it is normal to see a gaze in, you know, just any aspect of American life. I think the idea of marriage almost flows naturally from that. I think that's a fair way to put it. I think that a lot of it, I often think about this in the context of when you look at a lot of other social issues or things you could, for example, think about concerns about drone warfare that some folks on the right and the left have expressed. One of the barriers to that becoming a really big issue is that, frankly, there are not a lot of Americans who know people who live, you know, in the areas most directly impacted by that. Whereas there are a lot of Americans who have the experience of knowing, you know, a relative,

a cousin, a brother, a friend who is lesbian or gay. So I think that that's a big part of the transformation and it actually speaks to this larger issue of empathy and understanding in a society in which, you know, we live so far apart from each other, we live in such different contexts, we're able to be around people who look like us and think like us. So, you know, I think that's one of the deeper barriers behind a constructive change in our politics. Was this election a game changer? You know, I think that people should be cautious in assessing what may come out of this election. But what does strike me about it are the stark divides. And to me, it's so clear people have been talking about, obviously, the racial and ethnic divides that break down of the vote. But there's also a very strong class divide in this country. And so I think when people are talking about change, what they want is a change in the economic dynamic in this country.

So you have the middle class, losing ground, you have the ranks of the poor expanding. And the number one issue in all the polls for most Americans is jobs and people feel that not enough has been done about jobs. But I don't think that we can get any kind of real healing in this country until we start acknowledging these deep divides. And we keep trying to paper over it. There's the ethnic, racial and ethnic divide, and then there's the class divide. And we're in trouble if we don't do something about them. We need to be clear that this is a party that has been hostile to the interests of African Americans and hostile to the interests of Latinos in this country and hostile to the interests of working people in this country. So you have to begin to address their concerns and the Republican Party is hostile to their concerns. Well, I respectfully disagree with that, Tick. I think that Republicans aren't hostile to the interests of minority voters. But what I do think is fair is that when you look at the folks who voted for Mittrom,

the 88% of them were non-Hispanic whites. Now what that ispanic whites? Exactly, non-Hispanic whites. And what that implies is that when you're in these conversations among conservatives, sometimes when you don't have people from these other groups who can engage in these conversations, you miss a great deal. And that's one reason why there are a lot of conservatives myself included who believe that we do have messages, ideas and strategies that would be relevant for achieving economic uplift in much else. But the problem is that when you don't have a more diverse group of people who are part of the conversation, then I think that it makes it very hard to translate that message to folks who are inclined to distrust. I would say that if you are going to target voters on the basis of the fact that they are African-American or the fact that they are Latino and try to prevent them from voting on that basis, voter suppression, that is being hostile to the interests of those groups. And if you start talking about self-deportation, that is being hostile to the interests of Latino Americans.

So I think that we really need to be clear about this because unless we understand it, we can't begin to heal that wound and that's a grievous wound in this society. Yeah, I mean, I don't see it the same way. I don't see a lot of the efforts to reform voter ID laws and what have you the same way that you do. But I absolutely believe that your perspective is widely shared and it's an important one that I think that's interesting. But didn't the governor of Pennsylvania say when they were talking about the voter restrictions in Pennsylvania saying this is how we're going to win Pennsylvania for Mitt Romney? Well, no, there was a state senator who said that this will allow Mitt Romney to win the election. Now, the implication of that is that the suggestion was that there's such pervasive fraud that he wouldn't be able to win without it. I do not think that is correct. But I think that actually when you parse what he was saying, I think that's what he meant. And I think that you're actually illustrating my point in a wonderful way. There's so much distrust that, and of course, people aren't inclined to give him the benefit of it out. Let's interpret what he said in the most favorable possible light because there is legitimate distrust that is rooted in the fact that these are communities that don't generally talk to each other.

But, you know, I brought you together because both of you from different perspectives have been writing about the people at the bottom of our economic ladder. Is anything going to change for those people? You have nearly 50 million Americans who are officially classified as poor. You have another 50 million who we call the near poor, who are just the notch or two above the official poverty line. That's almost 100 million Americans, and that's almost the third of the entire population. If you take college graduates from about 2005, 2006, up until now, only about 50 percent have full-time jobs of any kind. And many of them are not jobs that require a college degree. And when college graduates are taking jobs at high school graduates, used to have that pushes the high school graduates out of the workforce, and we know what's been happening to dropouts. I mean, they're just almost completely left behind. We have not paid enough attention to this employment crisis in this country, and we have not paid enough attention to the families who are struggling and losing their grip on the dream. I don't think either party has done a decent job in this area.

I think the Republican Party is defined as a party, and I think accurately defined, as a party that looks out for the interests of the very wealthy. The Democratic Party less so, but I think they look out for the interests of the wealthy before they look out for the interests of working Americans. I think that we certainly have had a deep employment crisis since 2008. But I think that, to my mind, the crisis started much earlier on. I think when you look at the Bush years, for example, if you look at the recovery that we had during that period of time, the housing boom, I think actually masks some of these deeper problems. So for example, during that era, you saw really dramatic losses in manufacturing employment, yet you had employment in housing construction. So there were a lot of folks who thought, gosh, this is something that can sustain people, a lot of these less skilled men who are really struggling to get on the economic ladder. And I think that when that went away, we really saw that there was this hollowing out of the middle class that had been going on for a very long time.

So I think that the problem is that this immediate crisis is a huge deal, and I would want us to do more about the immediate crisis. But I think that there's a deeper hollowing out, and to my mind that deeper hollowing out is really about something I always like to talk about, which is about networks. When you're talking about human capital, building skills, all of these other things that we want folks to do in order to thrive in a changing economy, you've got to do that by having relationships, by being embedded in stable communities. And in my opinion, the really big issue is that when you look at mass incarceration, when you look at a lot of other social changes, when you look at family breakdown, I think that these are things that are kind of like an undertow, that is shaping what we're seeing happening above the surface. And I think the problem is that policy has a very hard time dealing with some of these things. It can make a big difference on, for example, we can throw fewer people in jail and destroy fewer communities and fewer lives that way. California just took steps to weaken their three strikes and you're out policy. That's a step in the right now.

And you also have folks on both sides of the particular aisle who are making progress on that. But in terms of Washington politics, it looks to me as if all the blood, sweat, and tears of this campaign, all those billions of dollars ended up with the status quo. The Republican leadership in Washington said the day after the election, no new revenue, no new taxes, and many conservative activists are not yielding an inch despite the election results. Today for you, an excerpt from a video that was put out by one of the leading conservative activists at the Heritage Foundation, which is sort of the granddaddy of conservative think-takes. President Obama's re-election is a devastating blow, but it's not a decisive defeat. We are in a war, we're in a war to save this nation, and abandoning our post will condemn it to a future of managed decline. To win this war, we must remain committed to fight in President Obama's agenda. We will work with our friends and Congress to remain true to our conservative principles.

In 2014, there will be 20 Senate Liberals up for re-election. A strong, constitutionally conservative Senate is critical for this fight, and in 2016, with a deep bench of committed conservatives, we must choose a nominee who can best articulate our shared conservative values. And if you and I have a rendezvous with death, if we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape. This is the last stand on Earth. This is issued the day after the election of 2012. It's a declaration of war to win the election of 2014 and 2016. What does that auger? What does that pretend for getting things done? Well, I've got to say, I think that after the 2004 election, there are a lot of folks on the political left who are very dispirited by the result, and some who are very surprised by the result. And I think that in our, the way that I see our political process is that we've had some deep and enduring disagreements about a lot of things for centuries. And our political parties are very flawed vehicles, but they're vehicles for working through

these disagreements, sometimes reaching compromises, but also making the case to the country. So when you say that we spent that money and got basically the same result, here's what happened. There are folks who poured their blood sweat and tears into making that case as vigorously and energetically as they could. And it's also a learning process, particularly for folks on my side of the fence, that, you know, we made that case. And I think that there are a lot of ways in which it just didn't translate very well. So for example, this whole message at the Republican National Convention of, you didn't build that. That was the kind of thing that resonated for someone like me. It didn't resonate for, for either of you guys, I imagine, and my sense is that the problem is that what they were really trying to talk about is the importance of civil society, the importance of that space between government and individuals, where characters are formed, where new ventures are started, where we try and experiment, and we try. And I think that that space is really important. It's just that conservatives don't have the right language for talking about it. So I think that- You think that's the right language? What we just heard. Look, I think that what we just heard, you know, I've got to say I'm a lot more sympathetic

to it than I imagine other folks are. Well, I'm sure you are. I mean, you're philosophically conservative. But I think that the message, look, people have fallen to despair. There are a lot of folks on the political right, just as there were folks on the political left, the day after election day in 2004. And I think that part of this is about keeping people engaged and motivated to keep making the case. Now, I do think that- or Speaker Rebener did say that he was open to new revenue. It is an open question about how many folks in this caucus will be. There are a lot of Republican Tom Coburn, the rock ribbed conservative senator from Oklahoma, has also been very open to that. So I think that you are seeing some people who are very firmly on the political right who are saying that, look, we're willing to give an inch on revenues if we can also make some reforms on the spending side. I think we're missing the point when we look at the political parties. We should keep our eye on what's happening to working families when working families have been hurting since at least the 1970s. And they've been hanging on by, you know, one man or another that is really not fundamental way families make money through work and savings and buying a home and accumulating wealth.

But what's been happening is that first, she had wives and mothers that went into the workforce. Now, ultimately, this was a good thing for women to be in the workforce, but initially started because families did not have enough income. Then people began maxing out their credit cards, building up incredible amounts of debt. And there was the housing bubble where people started using their homes as ATMs, for example. And then ultimately came the crash, but they've been hanging on by hook or by crook. And they've been doing this because they haven't been getting a fair wage for a day's work. And because there's been a concerted effort to prevent them from organizing and negotiating on their own behalf, primarily through labor unions. So what has happened is, and both parties have collaborated to some degree or another. Both parties collaborated in the, I think, in the demise of the clout of big labor. The Republican Party has been at war with labor, and the Democratic Party has not fought

strong enough on labor's behalf. And the Republican Party has also fought to keep people from being able to make their case at the ballot box. So we need to understand that there are these attacks, these sustained attacks on the interest of working people. And those attacks have been working out. I agree wholeheartedly that this, this job's crisis did not start with the great recession which started in December 2007, it started long before then. And until we look at what's happening with working people and specifically decide what steps we can take to help them, all this chatter about the different political parties is not going to mean much. I don't think the parties are actually going to ever take the lead in turning this situation around. What I think is very important is for people outside of the political process, for people who are not elected officials, to organize, working people and organize those who are working on behalf of working people, and then to mobilize to bring pressure on public officials and the political parties to actually bring about meaningful change.

Bob and I have fundamentally different views about the origins of this crisis. I think we do agree that there is a real crisis that it's been in place for a very long time. My own view is that when you look at the biggest, most important, most crucial sectors of our economy, the health sector and the education sector, these have been the sectors that have been tremendously burdensome for middle-income families. When you think about a middle-income life in this country, I think you think about some modicum of stability. When you think about having health insurance, you think about having access to a decent education. I think that actually those sectors, our efforts to help, our efforts to subsidize, our efforts to actually introduce regulations and controls in order to perfect our health and education systems, I think have actually really backfired in lots of ways. They prevented us from having a lot of the innovation that we need that would drive down costs. I think you see a similar dynamic in housing. Housing is a domain where you're absolutely right. A lot of Americans have built wealth through accumulating housing wealth, but I think that actually our efforts to improve and perfect the housing market, I think really backfired.

This is a very deep and fundamental disagreement, but I think that that's certainly the perspective that I have and a lot of folks on my side of the aisle share, and I think that it is frankly difficult to reconcile with Bob's view in a lot of ways, because we tend to think that experimentation, trial, and error, and actually more entry and more innovation is actually the way to address some of these problems. One of the ways to address some of these problems is to have a more equitable sharing of the wealth in this country, so I'll give you just one quick example. In 2010, 93% of all income gains went to the top 1% of Americans. Now how is anyone who's in a working class type family, and I use working class in the broadest sense, how are they supposed to begin to make headway? If they can't get a bigger share of the advances that are being made over the course of any given year. I see that as a byproduct of a broken economic model. I see that as a product.

We agree that this model is broken. And my own view is that actually a more market oriented, decentralized model that would allow for more entry would actually give people more access to the skills that have been doing here. But isn't that what we've been doing, at least since 1980, increasingly market oriented? I have to say I disagree pretty strongly. I think that in particularly the domains of education and health, I think that we've seen a dramatic expansion, not only of public sector spending, but also of regulation, which I actually think is a bigger deal. I don't object to spending as such. If you look at societies in Northern Europe, like Sweden and Denmark, these are societies that are very free market in some ways, more free market than the United States. But the issue is actually the regulation that protects incumbent firms. When you're looking at powerful incumbent firms, whether they're public sector firms or private sector firms, I think I actually agree that they have way too much power. So I actually agree that when I'm looking at elites in our society, including financial elites, I think that they really have in a lot of ways rigged the system in their own favor. I just think that actually markets are a cure for that rather than the disease.

Let me ask both of you, if you think President Obama is going to be able, are committed to the changes that you think are important. He's already being pointed in different directions. Here's a story about David Ignatius, a very respected writer for the Washington Post, saying, Mr. Obama, take big risk. Get it done. A successful second term is less about ideology than results. This column by William Salatin, on slate, who says, cheer up Republicans, you should be happy. You're going to have a moderate Republican president for the next four years. His name is Barack Obama. He's in the same mold, says William Salatin, as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. And he stands where the GOP used to stand, and we'll be standing once again. Now you can see the tensions there that people are reading into and out of Obama. I have a quite different perspective from William Salatin. I think that actually President Obama, in passing his health law, really took a big gamble

because he really wanted to complete the project that he saw as having been started. Some could say 100 years ago, some could say with LBJ, with Medicare and Medicaid. It was very important to him. And so even when it was very clear that he was suffering some political consequences, he thought it is crucial that we complete the welfare state in this way. I agree. We'll continue to build and enhance it. And I also think that, frankly, the model of the Affordable Care Act is not in my view very sustainable. And I think that over time, you're likely to see progressives work to introduce new modes of cost containment that are going to involve a somewhat heavier hand for government. You're going to see, for example, the reintroduction of the idea of a public option for folks under 65. I think that what you're going to see is a deepening of the progressive project under President Obama, who has a tremendous amount of leverage right now. Now that happens to be something that I don't favor. I don't think that that's the right way for you to do it. Bob does. Bob doesn't think he's going to be progressive enough. That's exactly right. And perhaps that's true from Bob's perspective. I don't think that President Obama's views are identical to Bob's, but I tend to think

that. I understand that. Yeah, but I do think that Barack Obama... You've been quite critical of Obama during the first three years. But I think that Barack Obama is very much progressive. I do not think that he's an Eisenhower Republican or a Gerald Ford Republican. I think that he's someone who really does want to deepen a larger social transformation. I'm also someone... I also believe that he really does believe in this idea that public investment is what will likely grow the economy. When I grew up, President Obama would have been considered a moderate Republican, I suppose. So maybe somebody would have said he was a liberal Republican, and I might have taken issue with it. I think that we're, you know, with President Obama, we know what we've got, and I expect more of the same. I think that he's going to try and make a deal with the Republicans on this fiscal cliff thing. And I think it's the wrong way to go. I do not think that austerity and more tax cuts are going to do anything to help working people.

I think it's actually going to harm working people. I think it will end up throwing more people out of work. We should just let the Bush tax cuts expire, and we should end the war in Afghanistan and bring those troops home, and we should start to use the additional money that's available for the investments that will put people back to work. And then ultimately, not in the short term, then ultimately begin to take care of, bring down some of these budget deficits. But I don't think that that's going to happen with the political parties, as I said. So I think that it is important right now, immediately, right after the election, for folks outside the government to begin to mobilize to put pressure on President Obama and the Democrats, not to cave in their negotiations with the Republicans, and try to achieve some grand bargain that ultimately is going to hurt working people. But let me ask you a personal question. As you look at how America has changed over the last 30 years, and the elections seem to reinforce those changes, and even represent an acceleration of those changes, how do you think about the country right now?

What do you think about America? I think of it on two tracks. On the one hand, I grew up in a time when I thought it was the best time possible to grow up in America. Jobs were plentiful, a college education was affordable. And even though there were great deal of problems, we know that blacks and women had to fight against treatment that was hideously unfair, and that sort of thing, you had the feeling that the country was moving in the right direction because you had the civil rights movement. You had the women's movement. Later, you'd have the environmental and the gay rights movement, and so forth. So it was terrific. And so life in America is much better now, generally, than it was half a century ago. There's no question about that. But now we're going backwards. On some of these cultural issues, we may be going forward. But if you look at what's happening, what the controversy was over women's rights, for example, and abortion and birth control and that sort of thing, I just think that the country is in a period of economic decline, and it's declining in other ways as well. And so I think that we need that there should be an urgency in the effort to arrest that

decline. I see three different Americas. You have one group of folks who have college educations, who are forming families and stable relationships, who have folks who can look out for them beyond the state, who are really flourishing, who are a big part of why America continues to be such a rich country. And they're raising children in those stable households. You have another group of folks who are at the bottom who really are very socially isolated. They don't oftentimes have strong connections to each other. And I think that they're badly in need of economic and also social uplift. Then you have this group of folks in the middle. Folks who have high school diplomas, but not a college degree. You saw a lot of folks in the Midwest. These are folks who have been really buffeted by economic change. And this is a group of people who are looking more like that's folks at the bottom than they are like folks at the top. You're seeing dramatic changes in family formation. And I think that that's what I worry about the most because that broad middle group is the group that has to be the basis of shared growth and prosperity. And when those folks don't have those social connections they need in order to make investments

in their own future. I think that's dangerous for all of us. And I think it's not something we think about enough. Rahen Salam. Thank you very much for being with me and the same to you about Herbert. Bill, thanks so much. Thank you. During the final weeks of the campaign I found some welcome diversion from all the political rhetoric and ads by reading the latest book from James Fellows. He's one of our most informed and prolific journalists. The title is China Airborne. It's about why more than two thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. And what this tells us of the Chinese determination to modernize and innovate and how their ambition is going to impact America's role in the world and our lives. It's a book I hope official Washington is reading. For 40 years as a national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, James Fellows was based in Washington covering politics and culture while also traveling and living in

Asia including several years in Japan and China. Once the chief speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and editor of U.S. News and World Report, he's received the National Book Award. You can read his blog at theAtlantic.com. Jim Fellows, it's good to see you. Thank you so much, Bill. It's an honor and pleasure to be here. What surprised you about this election? I guess what surprised me is as the results sink in the days after the election, how thorough going was the repudiation of what had seemed the unstoppable tea party momentum of the previous two years. And I think the fact also that in the days before the election, essentially the right wing is saying, yes, this is going to go our way again as it did in 2010, I was in touch with lots of people in the Romney campaign who really thought they were going to win and win big. And it's been fascinating, there's been very little of the narrative from the right saying this was stolen, it was all fraud, etc., etc. And I think they may be sinking on them that they were out of touch with the actual nature of the U.S.

You wrote the other day that the re-election of Obama is actually more impressive and maybe more important than his election four years ago. Why? The impressiveness, because number one, we know the goods and bads of Barack Obama now. Four years ago, everybody could project his or her own ideal hopes on the Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee did that to right after the election. So we know it's the marriage versus first date proposition. Second, four years ago, the economic collapse helped him, you know, he was there to save it. Now the economic collapse hurt him and he was able to say, look, it's been bad, but it's going to get better or it could have been worse. And third, I think the racial dynamics, the fact that he was able to overcome them is impressive. A very sophisticated Republican ad was, it's okay if you don't vote for him again this time. You gave him a chance, we gave these people their opportunity, we see how they're doing. And I think there was a sort of permission to white Americans to not feel racist and voting against him this time. And he was able to overcome that too. You said it was important for African Americans that Obama in particular was re-elected.

Why? My colleague and friend, Tallahassee Coats at the Atlantic, who's a wonderful African-American writer based here in New York, argued that, of course, there was this historic frontier of electing the first non-white president, as country did four years ago. And even though 53% of the public voted for Obama, he had 70% approval by the time of his inauguration. There was something that people felt good about America for having crossed this frontier. But the re-election was a sense sort of the normalization of success for an African-American president, and not just saying, OK, we tried, but you saw how that went. He wasn't really up to the job. That was, again, this great Republican ad. You tried. He tried. It's not working. Let's go back to it to the way things are done. There was a fascinating comment by somebody in election eve who said, with a straight face, that this election, because of changing demographics, will be the last time there are four white males in the national ticket. And wait a minute.

That's a sign of sort of the normalization of Barack Obama like Colin Powell as a American as opposed to an African-American. Well, he is as much white as he is, but exactly, exactly. But as you well know, in the long, trivial American race relations, if you are any black, you are black. And so he is a fascinating part of his autobiography is that he has been raised outside the country, as we know from the right wing. It was the first time he had to decide whether he was either black or white when he came back to college in the United States and realized there was this black, white grid in the United States, as opposed to being mole racial, as most of the rest of the world. People are talking about the fight within the Republican Party over their future, but there is a fight already starting within the Democratic Party between the progressives and liberals and the Clinton Democrats who look upon themselves as centrist, and there are a lot of articles as we speak appearing on the web and in the press about Obama's really a centrist. He's really a corporate Democrat. He is William Salatana in Slate magazine has a piece saying he is, in fact, a moderate Republican.

Yes. What do you think about that? I think on the one hand, that's true, that moderate Republican still exists, they're just Democrats now, and that's why the Republican Party has been distilled to its extreme. Second, it certainly is true that as you've written about and broadcasted about, there's a huge cleavage in the Democratic Party between essentially the Wall Street Democrats and the more progressive Democrats, and that's an important issue that affected our views, the first Obama administration and the second, too. However, I would contend that in most of my conscious lifetime, this is the most coherent the Democratic Party has been. Compared to the Republicans, the Republicans are falling apart and in complete, you know, clan war, whereas as you had the previous Democratic incumbent being the most impressive advocate for this Democratic incumbent, whereas the Republicans can't mention the guy who was their previous incumbent. And so I think- Yeah, George W., yeah, who just, you know, didn't come within a thousand miles of the convention, or it wasn't mentioned in the speeches. So, I think that the Democrats have the- they do have these tensions, but at least it's-

they can have some sense of a majority party, which they hadn't thought of themselves as for a long time, being able to say, okay, how do we address the basically progressive narrative we have that's not just tax cuts and it's not just the top one percent? Before this campaign began, I picked up and reread the book you wrote many years ago on the press called Breaking the News, right? And I read it- I watched the campaign inform about you were tough on the media in that book and have been in many of your long articles. So what did we miss in this campaign, the mainstream press? I think that there is the mainstream press, there is a tropism that we both talked about towards the horse race of politics, we did better in that part of the coverage than the right wing press, which I think is now shocked to realize they created a bubble for themselves, which until now has been a message advantage. They could sort of discipline their troops, now they're realizing it's a strategic disadvantage because they didn't know what was going on in the world, they were cut by surprise.

Talk about that bubble. I have a beloved family member who is a loyal- whose- whose information intake is entirely from Fox News. There's an older woman who I'm related to, and she honestly believes that Obama is not was not born in the United States or is- I think that's an open question that is a socialist agenda. And I think that people in this bubble really did think that Romney was certain to win because everybody knew, supported him and opposed Obama. It's like that the flip side of the old unfair joke about Pauline Kale and the- who said of, how could Nixon win in 72? Everybody I know voted for him in the government, apparently she never actually said that, but we know the attitude it exemplifies the right is now in that bubble. Everybody they knew, hey, Obama. So how could all these people be voting for Obama? In the hours leading up to the election, Fox News devoted itself to speculation about Romney's win, Newt Gingrich and others were talking about how big the Romney lands

slide was going to be. Gingrich thought it would be 300 electoral votes at least. I believe the minimum result will be 53, 47 Romney, over 300 electoral votes, and the Republicans will pick up the Senate. So are you suggesting that the conservative propaganda machine was blindsided by its own ideology? I think that is so. And I think who may have seen a tipping point in this election because in all previous elections, notably the 2010 Minterms, we were impressed by the way the conservative propaganda machine was able to really mobilize people who thought that the deficit was the greatest threat to the nation, et cetera, et cetera. And now it seems to have shifted to the liability question because they didn't know what country they were operating in, which was the way they would have caricatured liberals over the last couple of generations. They don't know what the real America is like. Peggy Noonan, whom we probably both like. You wrote just before the election, if I know anything about the real America, the real

America is coming together and the real America did come together and it wasn't the one they thought was there. You've been tough on those pundits whose chief claim to fame is that they know something so special that their predictions are more credible than the rest of us. George Will, Michael Barone, Dick Morris, all predicted a landslide for Romney. Are any of them likely to be to pay for being wrong? Yes, the way why bookies are sort of morally preferable to pundits. The bookies have to pay. And I guess I have been hardened, I was hardened by at least the initial reaction in right-wing pundit world that some of them seemed shell-shocked as opposed to being in denial and saying the win for the progressive side generally seemed to be so profound that they were able to kind of move beyond what they would have preferred to say, which I think somehow this was all a fraud, somehow it didn't really happen. But they won't, we'll see if they pay including Carl Rowe with his consultant fees. You were candid over the three years of the Obama administration about his weaknesses,

his failures and his flaws, but a few months ago you wrote that you saw Obama improving and you thought he would be a better second term president. Why? Part of my argument is that everybody fails in the first term as president because it's too big a job and so you sort of reveal what the weakness is and what particular lack a president has and we've seen some of those with President Obama, I think one way in which he'll certainly be different is that he knows who he is dealing with now. The first two years of the administration he thought that there was going to be able to make sort of a split-the-loaf deal with the current public and party and they weren't interested in that. So I think he will have a firmer approach from the get-go. He now doesn't have to worry about re-election as we all know. I think he's become more sophisticated as a judge of executive talent around him and just sort of knows what he is doing. Now he's been four years making hard decisions after no executive experience essentially. So I think he has shown only growth that I've seen rather than a regression and I hope that continues.

You have lived much of the last three years in China and you've spent a lot of time since I first knew you in China. How do you think Obama's re-election is being seen there? Secondly, they were appalled by his election by and large four years ago among other reasons because he was not white. They thought, yeah, how can you do this? We're used to dealing with these George W. Bush, father and son figures, Nixon, Kissinger and all the rest. So there was some shock. The Chinese have a, their preference would always be more of the same, whatever the American policy is. So they didn't like Mitt Romney because of his fairly crude anti-China threats, which he would never have carried out. They like the idea it's going to be a familiar team now with Obama. And I think interestingly, to telescope a long argument, the area of greatest continuity in U.S. foreign policy since the time of Nixon has been our dealings with China. We're on the one hand, we think it's better if they grow than if they don't. On the other hand, we have all sorts of problems with them. And I think that is the way Obama has pursued it and will keep pursuing it. So I think they actually are relieved to have a second term. What are they all for?

They want essentially a chance to develop. And I've been developed economically and just to sort of breathe. When I lived in Japan, I was quite alarmed and remained so about sort of a zero sumness of many of Japan's economic ambitions. We sort of came out of American achievement. In the China's case, I think it's different. It's a gigantic poor country where most people are still poor. The per capita income is still like one-fifth, what it is in the United States. A lot of very rich people, but still they have more farmers than we have people. And it's a giant challenge. And so I think what they want is it's better for them, for the foreseeable future, for our lifetimes, for our children's lifetimes, that China just have a chance to kind of make people richer. And so they would like for the U.S. to basically give them space to do that. What do we want from them? We want them to become more liberal and responsible as they become richer. We want them not to destroy the world's environment, which they will do if other things

being equal. So we want to work with them on avoiding environmental destruction. We want them to continue bringing people from rural poverty to sort of urban working classness, which is what they've been doing. We want them to grow up in both international and domestic ways, grow up internationally in having a foreign policy. It's not just whatever is good for them commercially, which is what their foreign policy is now. And to say, okay, you have to play a role in Iran and Syria or whatever of being responsible. We want them to gain confidence so that they don't have to have their foot on their people's neck. Most of the time in China, you don't know the government's around. It's just kind of a sort of state of the AAS and, yeah, I mean, I like Russia, the Soviet Union. You can let that blanket. It's entirely different. It's most of the time that areas the government cares about. The internet, democratic protest, or whatever, Taiwan, Tibet, they're all over. If it doesn't involve that, you can basically do what you want. You start a business, etc.

So we want them to allow their people to have more of sort of liberal, normal life, as time goes on, which, and the government is, it's a country becoming more confident, confident with a government that's still sort of nervous, antique. It's a Dick Cheney government with, if not a Barack Obama, an FDR-type nation behind it. Here's an illustration. Before the Olympics, the foreign ministry said, we're going to have an authorized protest zone so that everybody can say, you know, Beijing Olympics four years ago, we're going to show the world we can tolerate protest. When people applied to protest, they were all arrested. So there's parts of the government to say, this would look good to allow protest. There's parts to say, we can't tolerate this, we're going to arrest people. Did it, did it strike you during the campaign, Jim, that neither Romney nor Obama mentioned human rights in China? They didn't, which is part of the heel that nobody mentioned, climate change. They mentioned the Supreme Court. There's all sorts of things. You could write 20 books and things that didn't come up in the campaign. On Obama's side, in a way, he didn't need to, because his policy, the Chinese know his

policy is, as it has been for the U.S., we want to work with China, but there's things we're not going to give up. We're going to, the President, we'll meet the Dalai Lama, even though you hate that. We will send arms to, sell arms to Taiwan, even though you view that as a causes beli, et cetera. So I think Obama could say, okay, I've had four years of a balanced approach. Maybe his currency bluster was sort of proxy for saying he would be blustery in all ways. Tough on China. Currency manipulation. First day in office, he would accuse them of, and bring them to the court of public opinion. Which he would not do. We'll never know that for sure, but I tell you that for sure. There wasn't an odd, interesting little ad that kept running over and over in the weeks leading up to this campaign about China. Let me play it for you. America can determine our own future, but only if we own it for American independence.

We must cut spending and waste. Unpack that for me. I actually love that ad. I first saw that ad two years ago and I was running it in the 2010 midterms. I did an article of the Atlantic site calling it the wonderful Chinese professor ad. Here's what I love about it. Number one, it's evident from minutes, second one of it, it's not filmed in China. Because these people just, they're all, and in fact it was some junior college in California or some place, or maybe in Northern Virginia suburbs, they ever came to these Americans. Because they just look so healthy and their teeth are not what Chinese people's teeth look like in all the rest.

It was Asian-American audience who didn't really know how it was going to be used and didn't understand the narrative that the actor, the Chinese actor was giving to the professor. Number two, I thought it was actually a skillful use of the foreign menace in the sets. The professor is saying these empires rise and fall for their own reasons. He didn't say we pushed them over. He was saying they undid themselves. I disagree with his narrative about how we undid ourselves. I don't think healthcare would undo us. I don't think foreign debt would undo us. But I thought it was part of the good side of the foreign menace tradition in our life of saying we should do better as opposed to these foreign rats. You know, they're tricking us. That's what they had. It used to run many years ago against the Chinese menace. Yes, exactly. They're coming in their hordes, they're going to overtake American and appeal to people's fear. This doesn't appear directly or explicitly to fear. It ends with that of their chuckling. Now they work for us, now they ask for jobs for us. And so that final part, you could say, is sort of China menace, menace bashing. But I thought it actually was a very interesting snapshot of the American psyche.

You know, that ad was not about China. It was about America. And how we feel that this is the latest foe is going to overtake us. Do the Chinese think America is in decline? Some of them do. And follow the same rhetoric. And that feeling is more about China, not about the U.S. So I think that there is a confidence in what China has done the last 30 years as there should be, that any family there, if it looks back 30 years, their prospects are unimaginably better off. And they were 30 years ago when they didn't have a refrigerator or any of that stuff. And so they're confident in that. There are tremendous opportunities, but there is tremendous cynicism in China, tremendous dissatisfaction. Their problems are worse than ours in every dimension, environmental, economic, which is really right about in this book. Political legitimacy. There is more cynicism about the Chinese political system than we have about ours. And the contrast to the world's two great powers are changing their leadership in November of 2012.

And the only thing about America is in the open to a fault, everything about China is mysterious. Nobody knew the day before they started this process, exactly who would be in charge, how many people would be in charge, wouldn't be announced, et cetera. So it's really a contrast. We took that off the Americans for prosperity, the Koch Brothers Front Group, off their website. Why would they be running this ad, right? It's an old ad as you say, two years ago, running it again in 2012. It was part of the narrative that started with the Tea Party that the worst problem for America is the national deficit. No, I think that that is a problem in the long run for America. The real economic problem for right now is joblessness and inequality. And so I think it was part of a Republican Tea Party narrative that the way the big minus two America was a deficit, therefore, deficit spenders who they allege to be Democrats, not talking about the Bush administration or anything. That is why it was essentially a Republican Tea Party inspired narrative that happened to produce what I view as an artistically very interesting ad.

Do we work for the Chinese, and if we even do to some extent, are they likely to use that to their advantage over us? We know, we don't work for them. When Japan was rising, its companies were head-to-head competitors with American companies. It was Toyota versus GM, it was Toshiba versus IBM, et cetera, et cetera down the line. Chinese companies are subcontractors for American brands. Every Apple product is made in China two weeks ago, is seeing where they were made. But of the $1,000 for an Apple computer, only about 80 or 90 stays in China. The rest is with Apple and the screen makers and advertisers and retailers and FedEx and all the rest. And so we have a trade deficit with China. The debt that the Chinese hold over us, actually they view as a weakness on our side for them rather than that. Number one, it makes them hostage to the value of our dollar into our financial markets. If we were having this discussion in China, people would say, what are we thinking having

all our savings in these US Treasury notes? What if they default? What if they interest? What if they have runaway inflation, et cetera, et cetera? This is the imbalance between the two countries, the sign of imbalance in both of our systems. We've been too debt-dependent and too over-consumptive. They have been too export-dependent and they haven't lived as well as they should. A poor country is lending money to a rich country that is odd and needs to change it well. If you were having this conversation with President Obama, he might ask you, he might say, Jim, you say that more than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. You call your book, China Airborne, why should I as president? Why should our people think about China building airports? I was using this as a proxy for the tech ambitions that China will need to ascend. The question I try to address in here is whether the miracle of the last 30 years in China of going from being a peasant society to a de-Kentian working class society will be able to take the next step to becoming a truly modern society, having their own bowings, their

own apples, their own Googles, their own Mitsubishi's, their own Mercedes, and I argue that's going to be really hard for them. There are three or four test cases for it. Their ambition to become an aerospace power, bowing is always our largest exporter, aerospace is always our largest export industry. Are they going to be able to do that? Pharma is another one where they're trying hard, infotech, things like Google. I look at all these test cases and I say, if they're going to be able to do this, it's going to have to become a different kind of country, with not so much censorship, with real universities as opposed to these kind of diploma mills they have, and so China's ambition to become, and they're going to have to reduce some of the military overhang and some of the security states, so if they can become a real rival to bowing, if they can have a real rival to Google, they'll become a different kind of China in a way more threatening but a way less threatening, because they're more sort of civilized country in the broadest sense. If you were sitting there with President Obama and he asked you for, what should I say about China in my state of the Union message, what advice would you give him?

Say that we, the relationship between America and China, matters to the entire world because we will either destroy the world's environment or have some chance for saving it together or else, if we don't work together on this, there's no hope. The two most strongly growing economies in the world need to help the world continue to grow and deal with inequality, and the stability and sort of decency of China as an international player is something only the United States is in a position to affect it, if it all, it matters to our children of China, how China uses its power, and so the greatest state we have, the greatest outside our own borders, the greatest state we have, and the conditions for our children and grandchildren is our relationship with China. So this then is a very timely and important book. I'm going to ear-borne, but James Fowlos, thank you very much for being with me. Thank you so much, Bill. That's it for this week.

Naomi Klein will join me next week. She's the author of the Seminole book, The Shot Doctrine, on the Crisis of Capitalism we're seeing play out today. Meanwhile at our website, BillMorias.com, we ask some of our past guests for their quick visceral reaction to President Obama's reelection and what it might mean for America. Andrew Basovitch, Simon Johnson and Barbara Aeronrock are among those who contributed. Now it's your turn. Read their entries and send us yours. That's it, BillMorias.com. I'll see you there and I'll see you here next time. Don't wait a week to get more moyers. Visit BillMorias.com for exclusive blogs, essays and video features. This episode of Moyers and Company is available on DVD for 1995.

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