♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: maureen dowd is here, she is a pulitzer prize winning columnist for the "new york times." she joined the paper in 1983 as a metro reporter. her career covering politics spans nine presidential campaigns. she describes this election as the most epic battle of the sexes. she describes it in a new book, the book illed "the year of voting dangerously: the derangement of american politics." jim, co-founder, writes dowd surely captures the theater of politics better than anyone else. i am pleased to have her back at this table. welcome. maureen: thank you, charlie.

charlie: so this is the easiest way to make a buck i know. put your columns together and there it is. it's not that easy, is it? maureen: some of them are my columns and new material, in a tom sawyer move, i forced my brothers and sisters to write original essays. but also, 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 he was 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? maureen: i never feel love or hate for politicians, i try and save those emotions for my ex-boyfriends or boyfriends. charlie: or future boyfriends for goodness sake. maureen: that's not how i think of politicians.

but, you know, he represents the lost world of bipartisanship and civility -- charlie: decency. maureen: the letters are really fun. charlie: he loves to write letters, too, he is famous for writing notes and letters. maureen: right, he didn't write a memoir and so he reveals himself, he has a book of letters and then he reveals him self. that's a form he feels really comfortable with. charlie: describes what politics mean to you. maureen: 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 write about, is it what? maureen: well, you know, 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 it's the closest

thing to me that you can get to being a royal court reporter. you know, it's the drama. how people respond to power, you know, how either they become better people or it corrupts them or the pressure they're under in a campaign is the closest thing you can get to that. and now i'm a "game of thrones" aficionado for the same reason, i mean all of those alliances and feuds and trying to get power, it's fascinating. charlie: mayhem but not murder. maureen: 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 wouldn't convict me, and on her, he said she could shoot somebody and she wouldn't be convicted. maureen: yes, it's 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. maureen: 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? maureen: yes, because with hillary, it's sort of a nixonan paranoia. with trump, he lacks empathy, so he doesn't understand why he can heckle people and insult them and they get mad at him and then when they do something to him, he doesn't understand. for instance, he didn't understand why the bushes wouldn't come to his convention. he was really hurt, but he doesn't understand he eviscerated them, both of them, w., because he said, w. -- right. charlie: he can't understand why they wouldn't want to come to his convention. maureen: he is mystified. charlie: you have known him for two decades, had the phone relationship with him.

maureen: i have seen him a lot. charlie: has the person you have known over the years the same person that you see campaigning today? maureen: in one sense, the same and in one sense opposite because when we went on the 199 -- 1999 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, you know, 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.

and 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? maureen: he was telling dr. oz that he had a really high number. charlie: you think that will be in the medical report? maureen: it is, yeah. so everything with him is the numbers. but on the other hand, he has completely changed. he was this sort of bling king 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 be or has morphed into all right, anti-abortion -- charlie: you think that's genuine? maureen: anti-gun control. no, i don't 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 didn't want to write something about him. maureen: i was kidding. i was kidding about that. i'm expecting that tweet any minute though maybe as i walk out the door. charlie: you don't really care? maureen: god no. charlie: do you think he can win? maureen: anything can happen you know. charlie: of course, it can. maureen: 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. maureen: the problem is she is doing what she says is so awful what he does, which is take a whole group of people and generalize about them like he does with mexicans and muslims. charlie: a big mistake that mitt

romney made, too. maureen: exactly, so that wasn't good. the health scare, i agree with david axelrod that it's 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

charlie: look at trump on the birther issue, for example. everybody says he no longer believes that. but he doesn't say that. he can't go out front and say -- maureen: giuliani -- charlie: conway has said it, too. maureen: i asked him about it. charlie: what does he say? maureen: 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 it's the same thing. it's the same thing. maureen: you're right, but in his head, he thinks he is doing what he needs to do now and then later he'll be really flexible. you know, he said to me, the "new york times" will be very happy with me when i'm president because, you know, 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 don't recognize you on

the public stage. you are this bigoted person who is spreading hate. and that's not the person i knew in new york for three decades. i wasn't a friend of his, but i would interview him on occasion. and you know, he said, "i can be that person again." i can be very presidential, but i think he just feels that he is riding this train and he doesn't realize that train is taking him to very dark places that he can't 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. maureen: exactly. charlie: and it's intoxicating. maureen: yes, exactly. charlie: he doesn't want to do anything that will break that bond. maureen: right, that's exactly right. charlie: people who come here and talk about this all the time and talk about, which election

will be decided whether it's a referendum on him or her. and the caveat is if it's a referendum on her, that in fact he is not the perfect vessel, but because it's a referendum on her, they'll take him -- believing that he can't be any worse than what has happened before which is a gross revisionism of history. but that is his idea. if it's a referendum on her, they'll accept him and they don't think he is perfect. they know that he changes his mind. they know he is a raging egomaniac, they know all of that. but he is in 2016 the change agent. maureen: that's 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. and 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 world's greatest winner and on a day in november, he could become the world's biggest loser, will he simply rationalize that and say "it wasn't me, it was fixed." maureen: that's 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 loser. his whole brand is about winning. i don't know how you continue the brand unless you change the name to ivanka. charlie: or the business with roger. are you fascinated by what roger is doing with him? maureen: yes, it's so weird and all of these kind of motley crue

that i have covered my whole career sort of combining in this strange toxic brew. charlie: your brother and your sister, as of now, are voting for him. when you say why, what do they say? maureen: well, you know, if you read -- charlie: these are conservative irish catholics. maureen: right, it's funny because all of the other columnists are going on some margaret mead anthropological road trip, they're 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 don't even actually have to get in my car. charlie: what do they say? >> i think their essays are

really interesting because they're agonizing the way a lot of traditional conservatives are agonizing. and paul ryan is not allowed to talk about this right now. but 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 can't 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? maureen: you know, having covered all these presidencies, the qualifications issue is interesting when i think about it because if you take dick cheney 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. maureen: they led us into the worst foreign policy mistake in

american history. so it's hard to tell and -- in advance, there is a great quote from harry truman where he says you can't tell in advance how someone will take the responsibility of being president. also you don't know what historical event is going to hit. like, if 9/11 hadn't hit, w probably would have been a very popular president. charlie: vietnam hadn't hit before he was president, lyndon johnson would have been one of our great presidents, on civil rights, great concern for those social measures that changed people's lives. maureen: right, exactly. ♪

♪ charlie: hillary, tell us what her gift is. what makes people, she walked into this nomination, everybody thought it was hers and bernie sanders showed up and he found a constituency that was not hers, young millennials to the left of where she was, but she has impressed people like david petraeus and people like bob gates and people like barack 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 it's like "game of thrones," the young handsome african-american prince comes along and usurps the queen. charlie: someone with an equally great claim on history, the first. maureen: yes, she and obviously bill were dumbfounded by that, so acted out and was really upset and so then -- charlie: jesse jackson. maureen: 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 74-year-old 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 vulgarian who is like a toon.

its almost like who killed jessica rabbit. it's this toon and now has come and drawing close -- charlie: closing the race and behaving. maureen: 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. maureen: 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 on the assembly lines who tend to want to support trump, what it's 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. maureen: amazingly, right, because barack obama, as it turned out doesn't like politics.

charlie: richard nixon and jimmy carter. maureen: 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. maureen: young african-americans are reluctant to vote for her partly because of bill's record on criminal justice. charlie: incarceration which he has apologized for. maureen: and nafta which is no longer -- charlie: all part of the center when she has moved away from the center. maureen: 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 don't? what is it that attracts her powers of observation? maureen: yeah, i am really not so interested in the horse race. charlie: policy? maureen: i'm interested in

policy as it pertains to the person. for instance, you know, i have this essay in this book where i re-reported the whole relationship of papi bush and w, the father-son relationship. their braiding of love 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 didn't do and trying to at the same time revenge his father because saddam hussein tried to kill his father. maureen: yes, and i went back and re-reported the whole thing and i hope like with john meacham, i have done a definitive essay on this. and so voters go along and they think they're voting for someone

and they don't realize and the clintons have been the same, you know, that they're also dealing with this family dynamic that helps 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 -- maureen: like hillary, you know, health care, she did not listen to bill's advice and he didn't 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 jones thing 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. maureen: it's nighttime. or it feels like it is. charlie: feels like it in the studio. maureen: it feels like a casino, you never know if it's 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 -- maureen: that's what i meant to tell you about shakespeare, the appeal 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 didn't keep. and so 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. but 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?

maureen: well, this is interesting because in hollywood, the only storyline they care about is bill clinton as first lad or as first vlade -- laddy, which he says he wants to be called in the same way that hollywood was mesmerized by sarah palin, a young woman could play the dick cheney 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. but 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. i think if we saw bill clinton do it, we might modernize the role. charlie: i actually said to bill, i want you to give me more than anybody else. always the same, i'll 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 when i talked about it, he got, it appealed to him, nobel prize opportunity, too, he doesn't have a nobel prize. maureen: i think he would be great at that. also, i watched him, i covered him, i went to ireland with him when he was trying to help with the irish peace process and he knew every street in northern ireland. he knew everything and i think he would be -- charlie: irresistible. maureen: he would be wonderful. charlie: he would be very good

at it. i think that obama should have appointed him, but i think there may have been some rule about it because, i guess he can't, if in fact she is elected, he can't be a member of the government, can he, you can't appoint your husband or can you? maureen: he appointed her on health care and that was 16% -- charlie: that was a cabinet job or was it? maureen: no, it was just -- charlie: a commission or something. maureen: it was kind of like do it. charlie: i don't know this, some constitutional scholar, maybe 10 of them will tell me as to whether he could be secretary of state. i don't think he can be secretary of state. maureen: well, robert kennedy got to be attorney general. are: he did, the brother. hmmm. because it will be hard for him, if you're secretary of state and bill clinton running around the world representing his wife, that makes secretary of state a bit less appealing. maureen: that's true. but you know, he does have a prodigous range of talents, not as a citizen, but as a

journalist, if trump is president, i'll be there every day from noon till midnight on twitter. charlie: looking for what. it would just happen. maureen: it would just be insane. charlie: do you worry? maureen: you have to understand, charlie, i have gone through entire years of my career where i covered bob dole who was very grumpy for a year and not happy -- charlie: but funny. maureen: he really wasn't funny as a presidential candidate. he really wanted to be back on the treadmill watching c-span. and i covered michael dukakis for a year. i said what do you do for fun? he said black mulch. what do you do with black mulch? and he goes, i put it on my tomato plants. that was the level of fun. that wasn't much fun. charlie: actually david wrote a column on something like that. he basically said we don't know what she likes, even with obama

you know he loves golf and basketball and books all the time. bill, you know what he liked. maureen: and fred hyatt wrote that trump's big sin is being a bore, b-o-o-r and b-o-r-e. charlie: both of those. maureen: he is like the guy you sit down next to at a dinner and he talks about him. charlie: when you look at obama, somebody else you have written a say,bout , is it fair to in your mind, it is not whether i like them or do not. it is how i see them at moment. maureen: exactly. i am so proud of you for knowing that. that's so true. charlie: how do you see obama at this moment in his presidency as he looks at three or four months to go? maureen: