>> rose: welcome to the broadcast. tonight we take a look at afghan strategy with andrew exum. he was in afghanistan for a month helping general stanley mccrystal with his assessment of the war effort and his recommendation for-to-the american leadership. >> if you look at afghanistan, there's a lot of reason to be pessimistic, to be very sober minded when looking at it, but on the other hand, i think a properly resourced strategy, especially one that builds capacity within the afghan government has a chance of success. but this is the 11th hour. at this point, we can't do anything in afghanistan that does not build capacity in the afghan... in the afghan government and in its institutions. ment. >> rose: we continue this evening with the "new york times" youngest and newest columnist in, he was ross

douthat. >> the biggest long-term problem for the republican party right now is that all of the demographics that it's strongest in are shrunking and it's not just it's strongest among white, the white population is this ringing. it's strongest among white christians. the white christian population is shrinking. it's strongest among white christian married couples. the number of americans who are married has been steadily shrinking for several decades. the two-parent family is in decline. across all of those category it is republican party is in trouble and one of the big questions facing the party is where do you get the votes in ten years? >> rose: exum and douthat next.

captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: we begin tonight with afghanistan and the question of strategy. what should be our strategy there? or, as some say, should we be there at all if things don't work out? secretary of defense robert gates recently marked next summer as a possible cutoff point for progress. he said "after the iraqi experience, nobody's prepared to have a long slog. others have asked whether afghanistan is vital to our national security interests. "new york times" columnist in tom freedman visiting the region recently asked if nation building in afghanistan is

really a good use of american power. meanwhile, the ongoing u.s.-led offensive into the helmand province has led to a spike in coalition casualties. july will be the deadliest month for u.s. and british troops since the invasion in twaun. the top commander on the ground, general stanley mccrystal has made protecting afghan civilians a key component of his emerging strategy. he's expected to complete a 60-day assessment of the war before the end of august. joining me from washington is andrew exum of the center for a new american security. he's a form u.s. army ranger with tours in iraq and afghanistan. he's working on a doctorate of militias and insurgents in the middle east and he speaks arabic. his counterinsurgency blog is widely red and respected. he's just returned from afghanistan where he was helping with general mccrystal's strategy review. i'm pleased to have him back on this program. welcome. thank you.

how many assessments are taking place now? because we had one in washington we have general mccrystal... secretary gates. what answers are they looking for? >> there have been quite a few just in this past year. actually, the way the assessment process has worked since obama's come to office is actually been pretty coherently... been pretty coherent. one of the things you want to do is set your policy first, then move down to strategy and then start looking at operations and tactics that are going to be most appropriate for executing that strategy. that's pretty much what's taking place. so in february and march you saw the president lead a policy review in afghanistan at which point he set his policy, outlined some strategic goals and then when general mccrystal took charge in afghanistan, his review was to look at our ongoing strategy, look at our operations on the ground, and then try to match the resources to the president's strategic

goals and also to answer some of the questions that the president has posed. >> rose: okay, tell me what the president said the policy ought to be? >> sure. at this stage, the policy is pretty clear, as are u.s. interests in afghanistan. right now, the u.s. interests are twofold, basically. one, that afghanistan is not used as a safe haven for transnational terror groups to plot attacks against the united states. that's most obvious. and then second, that afghanistan not be used as a safe haven for the destabilization of pakistan. so those are the two vital u.s. interests that are in afghanistan. the president's strategy is aimed at the former interests mainly to ensure those trabl regions straddling afghanistan and pakistan... keep in mind, when the president does his strategy, he can look at theñr region when the commander does his strategy, he's limited towards just looking at afghanistan. but the president's strategy and the president's policy aims were

to deny al qaeda and other transnational terror groups the use of those tribal areas that straddle the line between afghanistan and pakistan. >> rose: so he or you would define winning as? >> the denial of enemy his objectives so in that case what we're trying to do is we're trying to create some sort of lasting situation in afghanistan whereby afghanistan is inhospitable and is not able to be used by al qaeda to plot attacks against the united states. >> rose: you and others have said there are lots of problems over there in doing this. i think general petraeus has said we've been losing the war over the last year or two. the problems are the taliban is growing stronger, there is corruption in the government. there is in a sense no governmental structure that you can use. pakistan is a safe haven and pakistan seems so far to have no interest in extending its

campaign against domestic taliban to those in afghanistan. >> i think that's a pretty fair reading of the situation. what i want to stress though is that when we looked at the problem set of afghanistan, first off there were a couple things that alarmed us. the first thing is how it will well know after being there for eight years. i still don't feel that we have a close enough understanding of afghanistan, its peoples, the die dynamics. we're very good at focusing on the enemy but we're not too good at mapping social networks, trying to figure out how different tribes interact, how political figures interact. the second thing that disturbed us... the good news is that the taliban or any of these enemy groups in afghanistan, although they are getting stronger, we don't see them... they're not going to take over the country any time soon. they don't present an immediate existential threat to the government of afghanistan.

the problem is, at this stage, the legitimacy of the government of afghanistan is almost as big a threat to mission success in afghanistan and to our interests in afghanistan as is the taliban or the ha canny network or any of these insurgent groups. >> tell me about the group you went with to be part of this one month strategy. >> sure, when general petraeus took over in iraq in 2007, one of the first things he did is he put together a team of some outside think tank folks, some smart military officers, some foreign service officers, people from both inside and outside the government and he basically gave them free rein to look at the mission in iraq, identify what we were trying to do and then identify how we need to get to those goals. or get to those ends. in afghanistan, general mccrystal basically took that same model and brought a group of outside folks-- some folks from washington and europe-- to

look at the ongoing operations in afghanistan and really to, again, answer those same questions. first off, what are we trying to do here? second, in light of the mission we've been given by the nato secretary general and the president of the united states, can we accomplish our mission. second off what do we need to do differently? third, do we need any more resources or are we fine with the resources that we have, can we use them more intelligently? so imagine this is a way that some of your viewers will be able to relate to. imagine bringing in a team of management consultants to look at your business and look at the way you're doing business. soft the group of people were a mix of military officers, civilian government officials from u.s. aid, from the state department as well as some outside think tank folks like me who don't have equity, so to speak, in any of the bureaucracies and hopefully can say some things that are a little bit outside the box or i can speak freely without worry about my own bureaucracy

influencing them in a way that i give my advice. >> rose: one person there was anthony cortisman who said there's not enough money, not enough troops, there's not enough arming of the afghans and failure is a real possibility. >> yeah, i think that tony's assessment is... i think tony's assessment is bleak, but i think it's something that people need to hear. we still talk about the war in afghanistan. we talk about brigades in afghanistan the way we talk about divisions in iraq. even though we talk about afghanistan being the primary effort of the united states abroad right now, it hasn't gotten nearly the amount of attention that, say, for instance, the war in iraq has. i think what bothers tony and i share his concern is that if we think about counterinsurgency, we think about clear, hold, and build. this three-step operation that we talked a lot about starting in iraq in about 2005. we can clear, but how exactly we hold and build nobody was really able to explain how exactly we

can do that because, again, as tony has pointed out, we don't have enough afghan national security forces and it's very... i still have yet to... no one has been able to explain to me exactly how a surge in civilian capacity will work, either. so the situation, i think, is as bleak as tony puts it, but, again, i want to stress that kabul is not going to fall tomorrow. kandahar is not going to fall tomorrow to the taliban. but we have to think really hard over the next 1 months about how we're going to reverse this momentum. in old phrase in counterinsurgency operations is if you're not winning, you're losing. in addition, momentum matters. so i think we owe it to the american people and the voting populous of western europe and australia and the other contributing nations exactly how we're going to turn this ship around. because, again, we do not have an inexhaustible line of resources and we have to think very carefully about how we use those resources when we commit them into a dangerous environment like afghanistan.

>> rose: share us your assessment of the nature of afghanistan period. in terms of the narcotics traffic, in terms of corruption in the government, in terms of the power of tribes, in terms of what makes it unique and therefore different and therefore challenging. >> yeah. i think afghanistan on the one hand we've made this mistake over the past few years. we've looked at afghanistan as really four separate battles. so we've divided it up into different regional commands and we've kind of parceled afghanistan up and we've fought in the its components and not necessarily as a whole. on the other hand, you do have to admit that the war in afghanistan, the dynamics of afghanistan really differ depending on where you are. so the insurgency, for example, looks a lot different in the northeast of afghanistan than it does in the south. in the south where you're facing the quetta shura taliban, groups of disaffected pashtun more or less have some sort of centralized authority

structures. the insurgency looks a lot different than it does in the northeast where it tends to be more localized. and it's about local grievances and it's not so much... you can't really trust a lot of the conventional wisdom about the insurgency being merely directed from pakistan. so the nature of the fight differs really not just from region to region but province to province district to district. and in many cases from valley to valley. with respect to... with respect to the government, one of the things we found is that the afghan people are-- no surprise to anyone who's read the newspaper-- are quite disaffected with their government. after eight years of this war, it's very tough to see governance at the local level with very few exceptions. so if you go into a remote area of afghanistan, there's no visibility from the government of afghanistan. by contrast... to make matters worse, rather, there's a perception that the government

of afghanistan is incredibly corrupt. so what we've seen in the south, for example, is the taliban take advantage of this perception of corruption. so they'll send only buds men into the south and they'll ask people, they say "so assess your shadow governor in the south of afghanistan? what type of job is he doing? we're interested in your feedback." and the significant thing there is that the taliban is directly challenging the government of afghanistan where it knows it's at its weakest and that's a perception of corruption and a perception that the few are getting wealthy at the extense of the many. and there's a real problem in afghanistan with respect to the perceived power of regional power brokers and their corruption. now, how that all plays into the drug trade, it's significant. but i think maybe it's a little overplayed. there's a lot of criminality in the south, and it's not just drugs. it's the expropriation of land by powerful individuals, it's the monopoly on certain jobs,

use of the government as patronage systems. so we've got a real problem with governance in afghanistan at all levels. there's some encouraging signs, there's some money industries in afghanistan that work when we look at certain institutions. there's reason to be confident that we are on the right track with the afghan national army. >> rose: is everything you just said a clear indictment of what the strategy has been over the last three or four years? >> yeah, i think so. i mean, strategy is two things. first, you need three things, really. you need a strategy, you need leadership and you need resources. and you think that afghanistan has suffered for all three of those things over the past few years. first off, the war in iraq enormously distracted not just our attention but really our resources away from the war in afghanistan. afghanistan was by public admission an economy of force mission. now, that's fine as long as the enemy doesn't get a vote. but the enemy has been able to take advantage of our neglect of afghanistan over the past five,

six years. and they've used that to wage... we talk about this fighting season in afghanistan, but that's a misnomer. the taliban is also conducting... i mean, they don't have a fighting season. they may have a season where they shoot at us more often than other seasons, but during the winter when they're not shooting at us, they're more often than not pursuing a silent war, a campaign of fear and intimidation in vulnerable communities in afghanistan. we've done a terrible job protecting those communities. so we haven't had the resources to do it, we haven't had an effective strategy and until quite recently we haven't had leadership in afghanistan that's really been able to take control of this situation. that's not an indictment of general mckiernan who, by all accounts, was a highly competent commander and just personally speaking as a former army officer i think it was disheartening the way he was dismissed, as big as a fan as i am of general mccrystal. but, again, it's strategy, it's resources and it's leadership

and we haven't had all three in afghanistan until quite recently and there's hope that we can turn this around but, quite honestly, it's quite late in the game. >> rose: okay. let's talk about leadership for the a second. the weekend "wall street journal" had a piece called "class of generals: the cadets of 1976 graduated from west point at a low moment for the army in its storied training ground but that year produced the generals running the nation's wars in iraq and afghanistan as well as their key deputies." therefore you talk about in the class of '76 at west point, odierno, now the top officer in iraq. you talk frank gupter leading efforts to train u.s. troops. david bar know, retired top commander in afghanistan and especially stanley allen mccrystal top officer in afghanistan and his principal deputy david mitchell rodriguez, all part of the same class at. so tell me about general mccrystal and general rodriques who, in fact, what are the new

leadership about. >> rose: the west point class of 1976 as a disclaimer, i am not a west point graduate. that article is written by one of my classmates at the university of pennsylvania. but the west point class of 1976 i think produced 30 general officers, a pretty astounding number. and not just 30 general officers who crashed out at the one-star rank, but general officers who have gone on to do some pretty incredible things. my first encounter with general mccrystal was as a young officer in the 75th ranger regiment and in a lot of ways he's always been kind of a larger-than-life figure. he's somebody that... it's unbelievable how much time he spent as an officer in both the ranger regiment as well as in the special operations community. he is an officer who... it's not natural for him to talk about all the things that he's done that are on his resume. all the time spent in these

elite units and in these elite special operations task forces. but when everybody else is in a room and all the military officers in the room, everyone who's ever worked for mccrystal, everyone who's in afghanistan, they're keenly aware of the kinds of things he's done through his career. he's a remarkable man. i'm... i've been an admirer of him since i was a junior officer. i think he's got a tough problem set ahead of him. >> rose: and general rodriques? >> general rod kenshin kawakami is a force of nature. i think in a lot of ways he may have a tougher mission than general mccrystal. because the war has been fought over the past few years as regional components. i think it's up to general rodriguez to unify the war effort and also to take that vision that general mccrystal has. and this is something that general odierno did really well for general petraeus in 2007. now take that commander's vision

and speak quite bluntly cram it down the throats of the subordinate commanders. general mccrystal has articulated a very challenging vision for what he'd like to do in afghanistan. we are going to assume greater risk with respect to our force protection. we are going to get out there, we're going to build relationships with the afghan people and it's going to fall to general rodriguez to try to realize that vision of general mccrystal's. >> rose: okay, but... go ahead. >> go ahead. >> rose: no, you finish, i'm sorry. >> i have tremendous faith in those men but it's going to be a tough job they have ahead of them. >> rose: let's talk about strategy and tactics. two things have come out of this: you will not kill your way to victory and body counts are out. and secondly, civilians who... whose support you need, you cannot gain that support if you're indiscriminate in your use of force so that therefore there are too many civilian casualties. >> yeah.

one of the things that we've talked a lot about is that if you look at these conflicts, kind of the contemporary era, and this is whether you're talking about the united states in iraq, nato in afghanistan, israel in southern lebanon, the laws of land warfare are going to allow you to do a lot of things. you can... proportionnalty will allow you to do a lot of things. but you may be technically correct and operationally ineffective and operationally stupid. in other words, you can do a lot that, while legal and while permitted by the laws of land warfare will nonetheless make you operationally ineffective on the battlefield. and the use of overwhelming force is one of those things. general mccrystal will be the first people to tell you that if dropping bombs on compounds the taliban has sought refuge in, if that will help win the war, okay let's do it because these things are permitted under the law of land warfare if these compounds are being used by foreign fighters, by fighters as staging

areas or as fighting positions. but if you... if by dropping bombs on compounds you're also killing civilians, in this environment you're going to render yourself operationally ineffective pretty quick by doing that. and so what we're talking about is the cultural change not just within the u.s. military but within the militaries of all those nations that are fighting in afghanistan and trying to wean ourselves off this reliance on overwhelming firepower which, in the post-vietnam era and certainly the way that i was educated as a military officer that we were taught that if you receive one round of 5.56 millimeter then you should send 60 millimeter mortars in return. that was kind of the arithmetic we were taught at the infantry officer basic course before 9/11. but in the operational environments in iraq and afghanistan, killing civilians actually pushes the goalposts farther away. >> rose: are our interests aligned with the interest of the afghan government? >> it's actually a fuls

assumption that's present in u.s. counterinsurgency doctrine. we americans when we pursue counterinsurgency campaign wes do so normally as third parties in contrast, to, for example, the british who fought in northern ireland or the french from their perspective in algeria. when we, as americans, wage counterinsurgency campaigns, we tend to do it as third parties. that is on behalf of a host nation. and there's an assumption in our doctrine that our interests are going to align with the interests of the host nation government. there are two things worth stressing here. the first is that the reality of waging counterinsurgency campaigns as a third party is that you can set the conditions for political successbut it's not the traditional format where you are using force to achieve a political end and it's pretty concrete. in counterinsurgency, you can only set the conditions for success, but ultimately true political success depends upon

the host nation either reforming itself or arriving at some sort of reconciliation process. in counterinsurgencies. >> rose: that's nation building. >> well, it may be nation building or it may be striking there could be a reconciliation process or there could be building up institutions, but i think a safe assumption assumption is that if a golt finds itself fighting an insurgency you already have problems of reg masy with the government and that's something we americans are very reluctant to own up to. so in afghanistan, we've got a real problem with interest alignment and that's something that i think you're going to hear a lot more about in the next... in the coming year about whether or not the legitimacy of the afghan government or the policies of the afghan government are helping or harming our interests in afghanistan. >> rose: can we win this thing without... what's the definition of winning is creating a stable

government that can keep the taliban from coming to power and establishing a safe refuge for international terrorist organizations, is it not? that's what you said earlier. >> you just described the means. i describe the ends as being that afghanistan is an environment that's inhospitable towards transnational terror groups that are seeking to either destabilize pakistan or plot attacks against the united states. now, when we went into afghanistan, those were our ends. we decided that an appropriate means would be building up a strong afghan government. at some point, we started to confuse the ends with the means and i think what's going to happen over the next year is we're going to start thinking seriously about how we can ensure that are the ends are met regardless of those means. and that's going to be tough calculus that's going to have to take place in washington and the allied capitals and it's also going to take a really strong political strategy after the afghan elections. >> rose: give me the issue that

you think should be used as a measuring stick one year from now in july or august of 2010. >> i think we can look at certain metrics in afghanistan to gauge progress. i think a good time to gauge progress in afghanistan will be about august of 2010. at that point we very much feel and i think the command group in afghanistan very feels that they're going to have to demonstrate some sort of progress on the ground in afghanistan. because justifiably the policymakers in washington and the other allied capitals are going to start wondering why exactly we're in afghanistan and questioning the strategy. so i think some metrics that are going to be appropriate in afghanistan is to look at, for example, to what degree are we protecting the afghan civilian population? in the past, we have looked at enemy body counts as a metric of success. maybe we've looked at significant activities against the u.s. and allied troops. but we know that violence is

going to go up, at least in the near term. i think the questions that we need to ask are to what degree are we going to be able to protect the people of afghanistan? do we see civilian body counts falling? do we see incidents whereby civilians are killed? do we see those falling? those are good short term metrix. when you start looking at other useful metrix, i think we need to start looking at the afghan national security forces. the a.n.s.f. really are kind of our commit strategy for afghanistan. both the afghan national army and the afghan national police. and we need to look at those not just in terms of how many police we've trained or how many army people we've trained but we need to look at the perspective of how effective they are in the battlefield. look, a metric does not have to be a quantitative assessment. if you look at... when we measure a unit readiness in the united states military, we use quantitative assessments, we use things like manning percentage

but we also use qualitative assessments, we ask how good they are at certain tasks. and we make those same assessments with the afghan national army. so i think when you look at gauging success a year from now, i'd look at two things, afghan civilian casualties and how much success we've had fielding capable units within the afghan national army and the afghan national police. >> rose: and the consequences of failure? >> i think the consequences of failure... i want to sketch out what defeat looks like. >> rose: right. >> defeat, the fall of kandahar, the fall of kabul, it's not going to look like the taliban rolling down the streets in tanks. what it will look like is a steady campaign of fear and intimidation that renders a city like kandahar completely inhos pit to believe the government in afghanistan. it looks like radical mullahs supplanting moderate mullahs in the city of kandahar. and it looks like this campaign of fear and intimidation

basically doing to kandahar what we wish to do to kandahar for the enemy. in other words, making it inhospitable for the government of afghanistan to operate. and at that point, then you'll start seeing... you'll start seeing areas of afghanistan that are essentially lawless, that we can't go into even with military force and you'll start seeing safe havens start to develop. that's a good example that our strategy is failing. i don't think it's going to happen any time in the near future, again. afghanistan is not about to fall to the taliban. but the problem is that, again, in counterinsurgency, if you're not winning you're losing. i think if you look at afghanistan, there's a lot of reason to be pessimistic, to be very sober minded when looking at it. but on the other hand, i think a properly resourced strategy, especially one that builds capacity within the afghan government, has a chance of success. but this is the 11th hour. at this point we can't do anything in afghanistan that does not build capacity in the

afghan government and in its institutions. >> rose: can we do it without a change in the policy and tactics of the pakistani army? >> in order to be successful in afghanistan we have to see a destruction or reduction of safe havens across the boarder in pakistan. as you pointed out in your introduction, thus far the pakistani military has shown willingness to go after what they perceive as existential threats to their state. but we also need to see a reduction in safe havens of transnational groups that are attacking into afghanistan. and by transnational groups, i don't necessarily mean al qaeda, but the quetta shura taliban, these groups that can stage in pakistan and can operate in afghanistan,. so, yes, we, we need to see some movement in pakistan. i do not think we can be successful if we do not reduce

at the very least the safe havens in pakistan. the degree to which we need to reduce those safe havens, i think is a question that i don't have the answer to. i think that's a question for the intelligence community. >> rose: and finally there's this, you mengsed appomattox courthouse where general lee surrendered to general ulysses s. grant. you have suggested that mccrystal may be lee or grant. which is he? >> it's tempting to call him grant in n that he is a general that finally an illinois lawyer turned president has settled upon to win his victory. but on the other hand, struck by reading shelby foote's history of the civil war and he talks about grant marching north into second invasion of the north.... >> rose: lee? lee marching north? >> i'm sorry. lee marching north into pennsylvania with the stars and their courses sliding against him. and it's tempting to see a little bit of both then in mccrystal. i think that he is a dedicated

and talented west point product with a glittering military reputation. somebody that i deeply personally admire. but i very much know that, like either grant at chattanooga or lee in gettysburg, he definitely has the odds stacked against him. whether he can be successful as grant or whether the states are conspiring against him like lee remains to be seen. i wish i knew the answer to your question because i think it would save us a lot of time. >> rose: andrew, thank you for joining us, pleasure to have you on the broadcast. >> yes, sir, thank you, sir. >> rose: we'll be right back. we'll talk to russ douthat, he's the new 29-year-old columnist in for the "new york times." back in a moment. >> rose: ross douthat is here, he joined the "new york times" op-ed page this spring.

becoming its youngest columnist in ever at the age of 29 years old. he was formerly a senior editor and blogger at the atlantic magazine. he's the co-author of the book "the grand new party, how republicans can win the working class and save the american dream." i am pleased to have him at this stable for the first time. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: we'll talk about the book first then issues in politics. in the republican party can win the working class like ronald reagan won the working class-- so-called reagan democrats-- >> right. >> rose: they can be an ascendant? >> they can, yes. >> rose: what do they have to do to win the working class? >> they have to do basically the same thing that they did in the 1970s and early 1980s when reagan won the working class. which is to say they need to have an agenda and especially a domestic policy agenda that's focused on the particular issues that really hit home for middle america.

if you look back to the... i guess we can call it the original republican majority, because whatever republican majority exists in the future it will have to be a new one. that majority was built on a very specific set of issues that won voters away from the democratic party, voters who had been democratic voters all the way back to f.d.r. and through truman and through l.b.j. and those were issues like crime, the soaring crime rates of the late '60s through the '70s and '80s that it seemed like the democratic party and the liberal establishment didn't have an answer for. >> rose: they used to argue the democrats were soft on crime. >> they argued the democrats were soft on crime and frankly i think they argued it pretty effectively and accurately. so there was the crime issue. it was a big issue. there was the taxation issue. people look back on the '70s and '80s, especially labor rales look back and say "well, ronald reagan came into office and offered tax cuts for the rich." but if you look at the packages

of tax cuts that reagan offered, they were tax cuts for everybody and they were tax cut particularly for middle and working class americans. the average federal tax burden for a median income family of four in 1979 and 1980 was 12% and 20 years later it was down to 6%. that was part of how the republican party won those voters. then you obviously had the issues that everybody remembers, national security, the soviet threat, the perception that the democratic party was weak in foreign affairs and so on. >> rose: those seems to me like an argument made against mcgovern. that was the way they characterized mcgovern democrats they're soft on crime, weak on national security, they're... >> tax-and-spend liberals. >> rose: all those old arguments exactly what you are saying, in fact, you believe about barack obama. >> those... i mean, those are arguments that republicans are using against barack obama. >> rose: will they stick? >> well, they'll stick if barack

obama proves himself a tax-and-spend liberal. i mean, this is the interesting thing. we wrote this book in 2006 and 2007 before barack obama won the presidency, before a new democratic majority appeared. and so the arguments in the book were pegged to the political landscape at that moment. and that was the landscape in which republicans had run out of things to say to the working class. because the working class, their taxes had been cut, crime was low, the soviet union no longer existed, they were concerned about issues like health care and education and these were places where the republicans hadn't found a message. so part of the argument in our book is what should the republican message be on those issues? but since the book came out, of course, barack obama has swept back into power and... swept into power and for a lot of people on the right and increasingly for a lot of people in the country as a whole, it looks like we're actually going to have a replay of the debates of the late '70s and early '80s.

in a way, this is, though, a problem for republicans because it means that in a sense they could potentially win elections in 2010 and 2012 simply by rerunning the messages of the early '80s because they'll have barack obama as a foil. the trouble is once happens to republicans once they get back into government? they'll be back in the same position they were in in 2004 and 2005 where voters will say "okay, we voted for you because barack obama spent too much money, raised our taxes and so on." but these problems that we elected barack obama to deal with still exist. the problem of health care access in america, the problem of health care affordability. >> rose: so what happens if barack obama passes health care reform? what happens if the economy turns around? what happens if, in fact, the spending of the money slows down because the stimulus gets the economic growth rate up? >> well, then republicans will lose. >> rose: (laughs) >> and they'll lose for a long time. >> rose: i want to double back through your biography to a question about the president, some of the things that you speak about in terms of america.

where are you born? >> san francisco, actually. >> rose: and made your way... your parents were... >> my mother was from maine, my father was from southern california and i grew up in connecticut. >> rose: and then went to harvard? >> then went to harvard. >> rose: and while there wrote a book near the end of your... >> i wrote it after i graduated. so i graduated in 2002 and the book came out in 2005. and it was a book about... it was about, basically, undergraduate experience in elite academia. >> rose: what did you argue? >> i argued... well, it's interesting. i argued that basically in... and this was the late 1990s and early 2000 at harvard, so it was mostly pre-9/11 and certainly before the bursting of the financial bubble. but i argued that basically you had a situation where the modern university embodies the worst of the left and the right alike. so it was... on the one hand it was a university run by a sort

of grasping money conscious status conscious administration that was spending.... >> rose: administration or fact you will any >> administration. it's an... i mean a place like harvard intensely corporate when i was there, intensely focused on fund-raising, intensely focused on squeezing every last cent out of donors and building its global brand and so on. and at the same time, in sfwernl campus politics-- and especially the fapl usty-- you have the wackiness and madness of the american far left. so you have this odd symbiosis between a far-left faculty and a very corporate sort of.... >> rose: establishment? >> establishment rockefeller republican administration. >> rose: like larry summers? >> well, larry summers as president was the embodiment of technically a liberal democrat but clearly a sort of centrist business-focused heavily focused

on making harvard ar sciencecentric institution, buying up huge tracks of land for future campuses and so on. >> rose: and what's wrong with all that? >> well, a couple things. >> rose: making harvard a science-centric institution, what's wrong with that? saying look, science is the future and we want to build a great university that makes sure we're a leader in science. >> i would say there's nothing wrong with a great university focusing on science but i think larry summers came into harvard and he said "look--" i may misquote this line slightly but he said something like "somebody would be ashamed to have gram waitd from harvard without having read the works of william shakespeare, but they wouldn't be ashamed to graduate without knowing the structure of d.n.a. " i'm pretty sure that that's not true. i think plenty of people graduated from harvard without reading the works of shakespeare or knowing the structure of d.n.a. >> rose: (laughs) speak for yourself! >> well, i mean, i think focus on science ignored the fact that the sort of... both the

corporate side in the administration and the sort of left wing politicized side and the faculty hand left places like harvard incapable of really offering a humanistic liberal arts education which has to be the focus of an undergroj watt institution. now, harvard is a research university, you're going to have scientific laboratories and fantastic research facilities but all of that meant that the university when i was there was neglecting what should be its core competency, as they'd say in larry summer's... you know, in the corporate board room. and that is providing a liberal arts education the other thing... but then you see this in the last few years and actually the last six months that the corporate fund raising side of harvard, like the corporate money-making side of all kinds of american businesses went way out of control then crashed. now harvard can barely afford...

they're cutting hot meals at breakfast, cutting shovel service, cutting salaries, firing people. >> rose: so are you happy you went to harvard? >> absolutely. >> rose: what was the value of your edge declaration? what did you learn there? >> i think i learned... you know there are a lot of things that i learned, but i think the most important thing that harvard delivers is an education in the ways and attitudes and values of the american elite and i think i have a better understanding of how america is run and how the people who run america and run our corporations and run our government.... >> rose: is that what you got out of harvard? how the american elite thinks? >> i think that's the most important thing a harvard education delivers right now. i also read the works of shakespeare and learned about the structure of d.n.a. >> rose: was this kind of a god and man at yale book for you? >> in a sense. i think buckley was "god and man at yale." he really had a specific... he had a very specific point to make which was that... and this was in the early 1950s and he was arguing that yale then still

officially a christian university was on the one hand becoming anti-christian and on the other hand was promoting collectivist if not to say communist values. so buckley's book was a clarion call, a defense of... yale is a christian institution and a defense of capitalism. my book was more.... >> rose: in fact he went right to the heart on one particular issue of a university that he loved in a state what he loved. >> absolutely. but i think what i was trying-- hopefully semi successfully-- to do something a little bit more socialogical and look at the everyday life of students and what that means for the american elite as a whole. >> rose: let's talk about america then. you went on and end up at "atlantic", wanting to a journalist? wanting to be a writer? wanting to be what? >> wanting to be a writer, yes, and a journalist. >> rose: but writer first in a sense. wanting to write books and things, not necessarily wanting to report on the news. >> not... i mean, well, i was... i worked at the atlantic. i came to the atlantic in

2002/2003 as a researcher in the washington office. the magazine was then in boston and later moved down. and my experience there ended up being on the one hand as an editor of short and eventually long magazine features. and on the other hand as a political writer, opinion writer in washington, d.c. so i did do some reporting, but my focus has always been... at the alt lann tick it was a combination of editing long form work and doing... i ended up as a blogger on the magazine web site and doing pundit tri, i guess you could say. >> rose: (laughs) yes. a lot of people aspire to that. how did the "new yorkç times" t interestd? : they... well, they got in touch with me... what is it, now? it's july. they got in touch with me during the winter. >> rose: they? who called you on something like that? >> well, i met with andy rosenthal and david ship by,

beth editors on the op-ed and editorial page. and then we talked and a month or so later we talked again. >> rose: is there some sapphire chair that bill kristol and now you inheritd? is that the way it goes? the same way... a foreign policy chair that freedman now occupys? >> i'm trying not to think about it that way. and i think that they... certainly my editors are very resistant to thinking about it that way, that there's a conservative slot at the "times." you know, i think unquestionably i offer a set of political opinions somewhat different from the rest of my colleagues on the page. but i don't think that that's... i don't think it's healthy certainly for me as a writer to just think of myself as sort of... i am sitting, though, in what used to be william safire's library, the walls are lined with vocabulary books, dictionaries, the oxford english dictionary from 1827. >> rose: everything you can know about words and languages. >> right, so safire's shadow is

hanging over me in that sense. >> rose: america today and the question of our demographics and the question of our ethnicity. texas, california, at some point soon-- if not already-- will have a minority majority. >> right. although what that means... what it means to say we have a majority of minorities is an interesting... it's an interesting question. is it even meaningful to use the term. >> rose: what does minority majority mean? >> a minority majority under the census bureau's definition means that by the year... i think it's 2043, a american majority of americans will be classified as non-white, they will be black, they will be hispanic, east asian, south asian, american indian, so on. >> rose: that's the problem i think... what do i know? (laughs) >> quite a bit, i imagine. >> rose: that's the problem with the republican party. >> that's a big bob with the republican party. >> rose: you have to look at where the political reality of the country is. >> absolutely. >> rose: in terms of where the trending is and say "how do i

speak to the aspirations of those people? how do i bring them within my vision? how do i incorporate their vision? >> no, and it goes beyond ethnicity. the biggest long-term problem for the republican party right now that all of the demographics that it's strongest in are shrinking and it's not just it's strongest among whites, what t white population is shrinking. it's strongest among white christians, the white christian population is shrinking. it's strongest among white christian married couples. the number of americans who are married has been steadily shrinking for several decades and the two-parent family is in decline. so across all of those category it is republican party is in trouble. and one of the big questions facing the party is where do you get the votes in ten years? where dough do you get the votes in 20 years. here i think george bush and karl rove-- we were talking about them before-- were absolutely right. the party has to be able to win. it certainly has to be able to win a large number of hispanic

votes. it even has to be able to win black votes. and they were able to do that temporaryfully 2004. the trouble is they were able to do that in ways that i don't think you can translate in the long run. i mean they were able to win black votes especially over the issue of gay marriage and in that issue i think in the long run, whatever happens legally it's not going to be aing issue for republicans. >> rose: they were able tin because they got more of their people out than the other party did. >> but bush also won a larger share of the hispanic vote, for instance, than john mccain did by far. but some of that also had to do with the housing vote. >> don: did he win a larger percentage of the hispanic vote than john kerry? >> no. he did not. but you don't have to... i mean, this is... this is where the numbers... if you're a republican, you don't have to win 51% of the hispanic vote, you just can't win 20%. you have to win 35%, 40%. >> rose: what did the sotomayor confirmation hearings say to you when you watched them? >> the hearings themselves i

think didn't say... they didn't say very much. >> rose: (laughs) "you're wasting many i time." >> they said you're wasting my time. there were a lot of dynamics going on. so one dynamic is that clearly the confirmation hearing has become intensely boring because nominees are coached to say absolutely nothing that's controversy. and with each nomination the number of controversial statements has gone down and down and down. and sotomayor, if you took her comments, she sounded like she could be a conservative jurist. now, we know that's not what she is. but republicans would say do you think judges should just apply the law, never bring their personal feelings into it and she said "absolutely, just apply the law." that's clearly not the overall vision of liberal jurisprudence and it's not the kind of judge she's going to be. >> rose: do you think that most judges don't somehow have deep in their d.n.a. their life experiences? even though they don't acknowledge it, it comes to play in how they see the law? >> of course it does. i think question, though, is to what extent do you then turn that into a theory?

or to what extent does it remain in the background? >> rose: the architecture for w which you look at the decision. >> do you enter a decision saying "i'm aware that my personal background biases me in this way" and so on. "but i have an overarching theory of the constitution that i'm going to a. the to apply." or does your overarching theory take into account explicitly your background, the idea that, you know, barack obama has said we want judges... we want judges to ere on the side of compassion. ere on the side of empathy and so on. and that makes a big difference many the decisions that people make. >> rose: do you think that you could look at the decisions of judge scalia and say anything that you might imagine about his religious beliefs and life? >> well, scalia would say no. >> rose: but... >> well, and he's been very... for instance, on the issue of the death penalty where, you know, the last two popes

especially have moved catholic teaching on the death penalty towards a more pro-abolition anti-death penalty. scalia has exprison it isly.... >> rose: against the death penalty and against abortion. >> right. but scalia has specifically said on the death penalty what the pope says does not bear on my reading of the law. but also on abortion scalia has said... scalia's clearly pro-life and he's clearly in favor of overturning "roe v. wade." but i don't think scalia would rule... would... he wouldn't rule to ban abortion. because he would say "i'm going to vote to overturn "roe v. wade" because i think it's a clear misinterpretation of the constitution. there's no implicit or explicit right to an abortion in the constitution. and then i leave it to the legislature to decide what to do. now, this doesn't mean... you know, i think if you go through scalia's decisions, i'm sure you'll find cases where it seems like his personal biases are pushing his theory in one direction or another. but that's always going to be true.

>> rose: you were not born a catholic. >> i was not. >> rose: you became a catholic. >> i became a catholic. >> rose: where do you differ with the church? on who dorsch? on abortion? on the death penalty? where where? >> i try not to differ on the church with w a general rule. >> rose: what the f you do. >> well, there are endless and complicated debates over where catholics are supposed to defer to the church and where they're not and you saw this with the pope's encyclical which it just came out and it was focused on the global economy, the environment, labor law and so on caritas inveratite. as a convert, i never learned the latin. there that's church latin. romans would have pronounced it differently. so there are various gray areas where officially catholics are bound to fol he the pop's teaching on matters of faith and morals but you get into questions of what is a matter of faith and morals and the line gets blurry, i think in

political terms, especially on economic issues. and you have sort of this endless back and forth between liberal and conservative catholics over the pope will say something that is interpreted to support a left wing position and conservative catholics will say "that's not a matter of faith and morals." and i don't have... i mean, i guess my instinct on those issues is i don't... i don't have a certain view on exactly where the line is. i think catholics owe the papacy a certain kind of def rens even when they don't owe it explicit agreement. >> rose: the papacy? >> the papacy. the pope. yes. the chair of st. peter. >> rose: (laughs) >> which is to say if the pope makes a pronouncement and you're not clear on whether you're bound by it or not, you don't have to come out and say "i'm absolutely bound by it" but you have to take it seriously. you have to digest it and reckon with it and so on. but that's sort of a male you

mouth answer, i suppose. >> rose: (laughs) ... mealy mouth answer, i suppose. a supreme court confirmation hearing where i'll deny that... i'll say i'll resign from the "new york times" op-ed page. it was kennedy, right? kennedy said "i'll resign the presidency if there's ever a conflict between my duties as a catholic and my duties as president of the united states." >> rose: he basically said "i don't tell the church what to do and they will not tell me what to do." this is what somebody wrote about you. you are a late 20s public intellectual with a sensibility of a 60-year-old the range of hitchens and the page of a.j. taylor the historian, the conscience of lieber and the intellectual honesty of andrew sullivan. >> rose: who said that? >> i don't know. but i got it! (laughs) >> wow, i need to take them out to lunch. >> rose: (laughs) yes, indeed you do. it was probably one person. >> probably. >> rose: you'd do good taking all of those people out to lunch. anyway, congratulations. i hope you'll come back and you're... >> i hope you'll have me back.

i really appreciate it. >> rose: and continued success at the "new york times." >> thank you, charlie. >> rose: this book is "the grand new party." david brooks, a favorite of mine as everybody knows said "if i could put one book on the desk of every republican office holder, grand new party would be it. the best single road map of where the party should and is likely to head. grand new party. ross douthat. thank you for joining us. see you next time. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org