Hoping well keep the world at bay, hoping we will sustain ourselves with a reduced presence in the world and a radically reduced capacity for defending ourselves, defending our allies and projecting our power. So that would be sort of an an litic way to present why we are in decline. Its not a conscious choice. I dont want to play the amateur psychiatrist or even a professional one in this. I dont want to look in obamas soul but if you look at where modern liberalism is taking us, it is to recreate the choice the europeans made in the late 1940s after the second world war. The problem for us, and i think the problem for the west is if we decline and use our resources internally, who will protect us, who will protect the free world, who will keep open the sea lanes and who will prevent the rise of a hegamon like china or the chaos that will ensue if theres no leader or dominant power in the world. Its a very long answer to a short question. And the reason i did that is because on television i would have been stopped after the first minute and a half. So im going to abuse the fact i can now theres no clock here. [laughter] you say its a subconscious choice. Are you hopeful or agnostic on the question of when its presented to the public or when the public realizes consciously the consequences of going down this path that heal want to shift directions . I think you get a fairly close analogy to where we are now with the late 1970s, at which time i was actually on the wrong side of the fence. Again, i appreciate you leaving out that part of my checkered past. I was going to get to it later. Ill keep bringing it up over and over again so you dont have to. Its a form of atonement, really. The country was weary. The exertions of korea, obviously vietnam, and there was come home america which did not succeed in 197. But there was a sense we would allow ourselves to drift and that we would not spend our resources because of a, quote, inordinate fear of communism which is a phrase used in the Carter Administration. Then came reagan. I think perhaps you could argue the events of 1979 was a catastrophic year for the United States, that was the soviet invasion of afghanistan. That was the communist takeover of nicaragua. And most importantly it was the iranian hostage crisis which became the symbol of what happens when youre in decline and what happens if you think you can withdraw from the world. You cant. Because the world will come after you. So the answer possibly would be that it would take some event comparable to that, some humiliation, setback, or realization through some action in the world there is no safety in hiding, there is no safety in retreat, and theres no alternative, unfortunately, to American Leadership if the democratic experiment of the last 200 years is to actually survive. Then it dawns upon the country, and it always rises again. The other element of this would be the philosophy that we share, which is essentially one where the strength of a country comes from the private sector, from the Free Enterprise system, from the actions of the individuals and from the strength of Civil Society and not the government, which is what obama leaves believes is the objection of connectivity. If all of that is true, which i think it is, then i think four more years on the course of drift, on the course of expanding the government at the expense of the private sector will have results that will be unmistakable and there will be a shift away from it which makes me rather optimistic about the future in the medium term though im not that optimistic about the short term. Lets delve into more of the causes of it, the election result, and this may be a false choice, but to what extent do you think the outcome had to do with romneys weaknesses as an anecdote and how much had to do with the content he was trying to sell and perhaps the staleness of it, how much was just circumstances, the economy wasnt bad enough to fire obama and the Republican Party, its brand was still being dragged down with the association through the financial crisis in iraq and sundry other leftovers of the bush years . I think the clearest way to look at this is to look at 2010. 2010 was a resounding rejection of what obama had done in the first two years. It was a resounding rejection of the inintrusiveness expansion of the government. It essentially was a referendum on this kind of hyper liberalism and a referendum on the question of the size, the scope, the reach of government, and it was kind of a pure ideological election, because there were no personalities involved. You werent voting for a president , you werent voting up and down on a figure, you were voting on issues. And the dont instant dominant issue was obama, was the increase in spending, was essentially the expansion of government. Or to put it a more abstract and grand way, the relationship between citizen and state which obviously was tilting towards state. So and there when the question is put in that way, the country shows itself to be a centerright country. Had republicans been able to duplicate those conditions, that framework in 2012, they would have won. But it isnt the same election. 2010 was almost a purely ideological election, perhaps the most ideological since 1980. Then you get to 2010 when you have a personality involved, and you have a figure who represents one side. Romney is a good man. I like him. I think hes an honorable man. And i think he actually would have made an excellent president but he was a bad candidate, particularly in an election that could have been won had it been an election about ideas and philosophy. I think it would have been easily won had it been about ideas and philosophy. But number one, he wasnt the man, the best man on our side to make that case. And secondly, he decided not to make the case in either way, and to run on the state of the economy and not on the issue. I mean, hely ran ideologicalic he ran ideologically the first hour. And if he run his campaign that way he would have won and he couldnt sustain it or trust it and he subsided in the second and third debate and became passive and stuck to hoping the state of the economy would be enough to have obama dismissed on the ground of incompetence. Well, in the end the economy turned up a bit, obama ran a brilliant campaign, he created some issues out of nothing like the class war issue on taxes, which romney was not able to rebutt or make the argument for. Look, lets be honest about this. Romney was a man who spoke conservatism as a second language. You remember in one of the primary debates he wanted to show up as conservative as he was and he ran a severely conservative administration as governor of massachusetts. Severe is a word you associate with head wounds and tropical storms. [laughter] not with the government. He had trouble making the case. We have a strong bench, half of whom is here at your conference, young governors, ryan, we have rubio in congress, a whole slew of gun governors, a generation who is adept, you could say marinated in conservative philosophy. Thinking very deeply about a new kind of conservatism but they for their own reasons, some personal, some they were simply too new and young and raw, werent quite ready to not run. We had a weak field in the primaries, extremely weak, of whom romney was obviously the best and only possible president ial candidate. You he was but he was weaker than the ones sitting on the bench and who will be out there in 2016. That is the source of my optimism. But there was a case that could have been made and wasnt. I think thats largely the reason. He is a very good man, mitt romney, but you got a sense of him with the groucho marx line. Ive got principles and if you dont like them, ive got other principles. Its not just Walter Mondale thats one of your vulnerabilities, theres also the thanks for bringing it up again. Were up to three now. There was a period of two, maybe three krauthammer columns in 2009 right around the first of the inauguration that were very soft on president obama. And i remember you saying your wife, robin, didnt respect you again until you sort of snapped out of it. What made you there was an element of you that was hopeful about his presidency initially, what was that . That must have been a very short period. [laughter] it was probably as short as my marxist period in college because that lasted a weekend. It was a hell of a weekend. [applause] something of a haze hangs over when i think about it. Perhaps i can recreate it again in denver or Washington State one day. And not have to worry about the law. [laughter] obama was very interesting. In my defense, a week before, two weeks before the election in 2008, i wrote a column, sort of separating myself rather severely, to use a romney word, from some of my colleagues on the right who had defected to obama, and i named them, and i said that i was going down with the mccain ship because i knew it would be going down and i wasnt going to waiver. I never imagined i would support obama over mccain. I was very strongly for mccain. I thought he was a very good man. He didnt run a very strong campaign. We seem to have a habit of doing that. But heres whats interesting about obama. If you remember the transition, he made very centrist appointments. He appointed a he had, for example, he kept gates at defense. He picked geithner for treasury who had worked and hand and glove with the Bush Administration through the financial crisis. He picked hillary as secretary of state, volcker was one of the major advisors. The former president of harvard, im getting summer was in treasury. These are not radical appointments. Whats interesting about obama is when he ran in 2008 he ran as a rorschach test. He was a man into whom you could pour all of your own visions and hopes. He was not a very distinctly radical candidate when he ran. That was the brilliance of his 2008 campaign. And even the inaugural address, the first, was anadine and didnt tell you anything about him. And then he made a speech on february 24, which i referenced in my column this morning in define. That was the in 2001. That was the address he made to congress, the equivalent of a state of the Union Address where he unveiled a shockingly radical democratic agenda and gave a series of speeches culminating in june of that year at Georgetown University where he expounded on his philosophy and it was clear to me he had dropped the veil. And i give him credit for honesty, openness and courage. It was not clintonian in any way. He said, im not here to trim, im not here to reform around the edges, im here to transform the United Nations the United States of america. And he was very specific. It wasnt some kind of abstract notion he was presenting. He said, im going to do it in health care, education and energy. Now think about that, health care is onesixth, and then you control the production and the price and you control everything and he tried to with cap and trade but failed. And education is the future. You control the three elements there and youve goten what lennon would call the commanding heights of a post industrial society. Thats what he said he wanted to do. But you dont remember this because unlike me, you have real lives, you dont have to watch everything the man says, i do for my sins and they clearly are many, but he sprinkled that speech and the subsequent speeches until the georgetown speech with a phrase, the new foundation, which was never picked up on and never remembered, but it was in there. In fact, the name of the speech when they give out the printed version of it was called the new foundation. He already saw himself one month into the presidency as a successor to the new deal and the new frontier. He wanted this appalachian, the new foundation, to be what obama is and would be. So it shows you how ideologically ambitious he was from day one. So at that point i knew who he was. Im not sure anyone knew who he was up until then. I do think the thing the incident youre recalling is a week before obama was sworn in, he was i was invited to a dinner with a few conservative columnists to meet with the president elect. And i remember when the word leaked out, liberal columnists were extremely upset so they quickly scheduled a breakfast the next morning. We got steak and they got corn flakes. That was the only victory our side won. And obama was extremely affable , extremely genial. And what impressed me, and thus is the reason why im so disappointed with him today, is he showed a very keen capacity to understand and to respect a contrary argument. We asked him a ton of questions, and he would restate your side without creating a straw man, giving the sort of best and most open and generous interpretation of your argument, stating his and then speaking about trying to find a resolution. So he has that capacity, which is why im so infuriated whenever he makes these speeches and he does this all the time, when he always attributes to his opponents bad faith, what he calls, you know, the party over national interests, personal interests over anything else, quest of power, where he i know he has the capacity to understand the other side, but he demagogues by pretending the other side is not serious, is only seeking to use these arguments on a way to power. So thats my defense and im sticking with it. Do you find him likable as a politician or do you understand his appeal . Ive only had three hours with him. Just watching him on tv as he performs . No, i think he is consciously exercising sort of very demagoguic tactics where hes not a man i think i would say it, im not sure he believes it, because i saw him in action acting in a prophesorial way so you know hes capable of it, or perhaps he fooled me for three hours and the real obama is out there so i leave it up to you to decide. But i made a decision when i left psychiatry that was it, im not going to practice it again, and especially not in public. [laughter] and im sure its useful to delve into the motivations. You judge a politician on his actions and i think his actions have been rather demagoguic and i think hes been extremely successful at it. I will say just as an aside about psychiatry, it is true i was a psychiatrist and technically im still licensed but the truth is, im a psychiatrist in remission and ive done rather well. I havent had a relapse in 25 years. And people ask me, you know, whats it like, how different is it to be a political analyst in washington versus what i used to be which is a psychiatrist in boston. And i tell them, as you can imagine, it really isnt that different. [laughter] dont get ahead of me now. In both lines of work i deal every day with people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. The only difference is the paranoid in d. C. Have access to Nuclear Weapons which makes the work a little more interesting. [laughter] where were we, rich . I think were working our way back around Walter Mondale eventually. Thats number four. If youre keeping score. Obviously, events and circumstances will have a lot to do with the political battles over the next two or four years. But from this particular juncture, is there one or two things, three things, that you would recommend to the Republican Party and how to react to obama and how to renew their appeal and make their case to the public, what would those couple things be . Well, number one, suicide is not a good option. Suicidal charges, you know, charge elect brigade to the fiscal cliff or if i can mix metaphors, is simply stupid. And the record here is fairly clear, sometimes you dont hold the cards. You hold we hold one half of 1 3 of the government. And the idea that you can govern from one house of congress is simply an illusion. You can block and you can strategically make small advances. But i would say given the ambitions of the obama presidency, as you heard in the inaugural address, second inaugural, blocking is a virtue unto itself and would be an achievement unto itself. But if you think that you can use the fiscal cliff which is a tax hike on all americans, the largest in u. S. History, or if you can use the debt ceiling, which you cannot in the end pull the trigger on, because even though you could probably go without technical default for months and months, it would be catastrophic. It would mean youd have to cut spending by 40 overnight which you cant do. So unless you can execute the bluff, dont do it because obama will call it, as he called it on january 1 of this year, as he would with the debt ceiling. Dont if you cant carry out the bluff. I hope you werent plauding carrying out the bluff, in which case my entire argument is undermined and has gone nowhere. I think thats a small contingent against suicidal charges. And they are on suicide watch. I hope their shoelaces have been removed. [laughter] so you do what i think the house members and their retreat in williamsburg very cleverly did. You pick your fights and dont try to govern from one house to get very small advances. I thought i recommended last week that in return for a temporary debt ceiling hike of three months, they demand that the senate produce a budget. And they accepted or whatever adopted that idea, and theyve already succeeded. The senate is now going to produce a budget, which will allow the fight to be a fair fight between democrats and republicans on spending because the other side is finally going to have to show its cards. This is a fairly elementary step. We got it out of them within a day and a half. Without having to threaten armageddon. So thats how i think they ought to proceed. Secondly, they have to understand that obama is going to try to use administrative actions because the house will block actions by legislation, which is why im extremely encouraged by the ruling you may or may not have heard by the First Circuit today, throwing out the nlrb appointment. [applause] ive been quite shocked by the open lawlessness of the administration by legislating around congress in a way that i think is clearly unconstitutional. For example, passing the dream act. However you stand on the dream act, it should be done by congress and not by the administration, and it did that. Its as if a conservative had decided to instruct the i. R. S. It would no longer collect Capital Gains taxes. Which would be a way to enact the Capital Gains tax elimination without congress. We would all be astonished by that and clearly said you cant do it but thats what the dream act was, passed administratively. Similarly with the attempt by the h. H. S. Department to pass regulations which essentially undermines the work requirement in the abolition of welfare which is one of the great successes o