commission that's going to come back inn december. pie all indications are whatever that group comes back with he'll put a stamp on and say this is what i want to do. even some very tough stuff. >> charlie: we conclude with the new tenor perstorming vittorio grigolo. >> we're talking about experience, about stories, stories that makes you feel, you know, makes you feel in love, make you feel pain inside, make you feel all these things all these emotions. in order to believe these emotions, to communicate those emotions in public, i always say better, the most important thing is not the technique you do every day, lalala the tone but to realize. >> charlie: politics and opera coming up. additional funding provided by these funders: captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> charlie: we begin tonight with politics and the aftermath of the midterm elections, republicans swept to the majority in the house while democrats narrowly managed to hold on to senate. now president obama will have to work with a divided congress and new republican leadership. earlier today the president said he invited congressional leaders from both parties to the whitehouse on november 18 to discuss issueshey could cooperate on for the remainder of this year. >> in sum, would he got a lot of work to do. people are still catching their breath from the election. the dust is still settling, but the one thing i'm absolutely certain of is that the american people don't want us just standing still. they don't want us engaged in grid lock, they want us to do the people's business. partly because they understand that the world is not standing safe. >> charlie: john boehner the expected speaker of the house will have his own challenges. we will need to balance an agenda that satisfies the tea party caucus without alienating the dependence that rose the republicans to victory. mark halperin and "new york" magazine's john heilemann i'm happy to have them this thursday looking at the election results and what lies ahead. well come. >> nice to be here. >> thanks for having us back again. >> charlie: this is "the new york times" which this pictures says a thousand words. >> maybe even more. >> charlie: maybe even more. could this be the beginning of the 2012 books. >> it's incredible to think about 2010 versus 2006 which is a big part of game change when we start to frame barack obama. four years ago barack obama road high, he was in demand around the country. the coalition that got him elected president was boeing formed. the coalition in people not just in purple states but in red parts of red states and purple states. >> charlie: like north carolina and in a. >> part of what the democratic saw in him and got harry reid to bring barack obama in the race was this is a guy who could expand the map for democrats, geographically and demographically not contracted which was their worry about hillary clinton. what happens in four short years is that coalition which he built to get to the whitehouse and massed a lot of legislation has been shattered and now he has o built a new coalition. this is an incredible moment for him thinking about not two years ago but four years ago when he was the star of the democratic party in the mid terms. >> charlie: here's the question, can he do it and does he look at this with fresh eyes or does he go to the same eyes what's looked at him in the past. >> one of the things you see in game change in the book when we wrote about 2008 was this tendency that he has, which is on the admirable side he has this real stay the course tendency, right, so in the fall 2007 when he was behind by 30 points with hillary clinton and his campaign was not very well, people said you have to change course. he said no we have a plan we're going to stick to that plan and it worked in iowa and he was off to the races. in fall 2008 mccain and palin come out of the republican convention they're ahead four or five points the democratic party is in panic change course attack palin do this, do that. dismisses them as bedwetters. i don't know says no i'm going to stick to may plan and he executes on it and he wins. now fast forward, administration, healthcare, scott brown gets elected to the massachusetts elected. you have to abandon healthcare this is all wrong. obama says no, one again i'm going to double down. we're not going to abandon healthcare or scale back. again he is rewarded, he passes the bill. at least rewarded in the sense of the legislative accomplishment. this is a guy who does not doubt his prior course very easily. he's not someone who is looking for flaws in the way that he set things up. he had a lot of confidence in how he ran for president and how he's been president the last two years. i don't see him having like a dark night of the soul right now in thinking boy i really screwed this whole thing up over the last two years. i think he still has a huge amount amazingly, has a huge amount of confidence in the fact he did things that were right and necessary over the last two years. obviously he's seen the results. this is not a guy who is going to easily make some massive mid course correction. >> charlie: then the question is should he have seen it. >> i think he thinks what he did and the major piece of legislation he passed, they, healthcare, wall street regulation. he thinks those things were essential in terms of a crises, essential in terms of putting the country in long term better footing fiscally and i think he's willing to lose over it. he doesn't think he's going to because he thinks republicans will nominate someone he can beat. everybody says, is looking at this election in the context of his political health and chance of re-election. i don't think he sees it that way. he thinks i believe that they need to adjust to the new reality but not throwing out what he cares b not changing the way he operates at all. >> charlie: there are no new voices in the inner council. >> there are now. the things he doesn't do easily, i read about this in time time this week he doesn't brand new people, change course, admit mistakes or do what clinton did in 94 which is again the model everybody is pointing to which is to say i need to now fight for what i believe in but compromise or compromise is the right political course. these are not things we've seen him do. >> charlie: if someone would say where are you in the political trump i'm in the center or center left of middle. >> this remains one of the biggest problems he has which i talked about before. the coalition, he did what clinton did and what george bush did when they got elected and when they were governorring successfully. they see you as a kindred spirit and you care about the core values of your party. one of the great defeats of the democrats and of obamaism was the swing from independence in 2008 away from the democrats. i think he's now in much different and dangerous place. his base doesn't trust him, they think he's too centrist. >> charlie: because in the healthcare -- >> i think he would put himself much closer to the center than people on the right would. and i'm sympathetic to that, i agree that's where his instincts are. his mistakes are he governed too lib wul with the democrats, pelosi and reid. >> charlie: do you think he let other people define him. >> oh sure, yes. >> charlie: healthcare on down. >> it was astonishing is the degree to which he's had some successes that he's done a terrible job even putting those across. most people in the country do not realize that barack obama cut their taxes. motes people have not had their taxes raised over the lease two years. most people do not know the administration has been remarkably successful in the area of illegal immigration. i'm forcement is better now than it was under george bush for the last eight years. it's a huge scels story. no one knows that. they've done a tear been job not selling their successes generally but selling the kind of successes that moderate independent swing voters would have looked at and say that's actually a success. >> charlie: there was a consensus for the boilout. >> there was a consensus for the boilout and it wasn't his bailout. >> charlie: exactly. >> it was something he has pointed out on occasion but not at all successfully that this policy which he agreed with was one he inherited not just from george w. bush but people like john boehner. this was a bipartisan and very much the republicans are very much invested in tarp back when it happened. now it's the obama bailout. they haven't made a job good making it clear that that policy that hurt him is a policy that has con newity that goes back into the other party and it's the previous administration. >> charlie: he should be wary of changing his policies of changing his direction because truth be known he is essentially a centrist and as john just said it's a question of the public catching up to him. >> he has to be more assertive than he has been. he said at a photo opportunity with his cabinet, he has to be part of what gets down now. he can't be part of it he must lead it. he's identified very well the challenges the country must deal with. deficit reduction, afghanistan, education, jobs first and foremost and immigration. i think he's picked all the right energy. he's picked all the right things. he must, this is a mathematical reality he accepts, he must find ways to cooperate with republicans without abandoning his principles. >> charlie: these republicans and democrats cooperate over the next two years they can reduce the unemployment to something he can run on? >> if it does. i think it's possible he must get republicans to feel like his policies will benefit business. and business must feel that way. it's great -- >> charlie: not wall street but business. >> real businesses, brick and mortar, people building things, must feel safe that washington is lowering the deficit, stimulate demand through tax policy rather than through spending and that he has a vision for how to build the economy back and he's fighting for it every day. in his press confidence and photo op jobs jobs jobs. he's now saying that's where the focus is going to be. three things, it's jobs, producing the influence of special interests, he's big on that again, and working together. and if he focuses on those things, i think republicans are going to have to at least consider working with them. >> the place that's going to be the place where he can get, where he can start to reclaim some credit for being a centrist or not being a big will you be rule is reduction. he's got this reduction commission coming back in december. whatever that group comes back with he's going to put his stamp on and say this is what i want to do. even probably some tough stuff. it may be the republicans have a mutual interest in getting together with him on that. now that is a place where very similar to the clinton analogy back in 1994. bill clinton was able to, but through deficit reduction, working with after a horrible government shut down and a terrible year of fighting with republicans in 1995, by the time 1996 came around, here republicans were able to get together on deficit reduction. that made clinton along with his deck calculation that big government is over and made clinton look like a moderate centrist again. the problem that obama has and this goes to your question earlier charlie, bill clinton had one thing barack obama doesn't have. by the time this happened to him in november 1994, the economy was taking off. the recession was long behind him, and the massive 90's boom was well in effect. the big locomotive of the american congress chugging along. that's not the case today. no one thinks unemployment is much different a year from now than it is today. where it will be by the summer, early fall of 2012, i don't know. but it's not going to be where it was for bill clinton and that is going to be a challenge for obama. he's going to make the argument that the trend lines are in the right direction but he doesn't have a boom on his hand. >> charlie: he grew up in a political environment which he lost and b he constantly had to appeal to a diverse rea of people running in a conservative or moderate state that south. >> big environment. >> charlie: that's a huge difference. >> he was painting himself for the country on his terms. he is now defined for a lot of people. you talk about him having to build a new coalition. there's large segments of the country, institutions and individuals, who are lost to him now. they'll never. >> charlie: independents are included in that. >> there are people who voted for him last time i can tell you no matter who the alternative is, as a version of what happened where some republicans will have congressional races without a lot going for him. >> charlie: they will vote for him in 2008, though people who never voted for a democrat generally. >> they were sick of the war in iraq, they were sick of george bush and his policies and they wanted a new direction that they thought was centrist, post partisan and optimistic. and he's got to find a way to bring that back. >> charlie: also made him feel young and culpable. >> he talked in his photo op at the cabinet on thursday about getting waste out of government, lowering deficits, getting washington working again. he's now talking the language. we need to look through the prism is he doing what clinton did to capture the appeal to independence. talking about getting rid of government waste is something that he needs to do if he's going to remake his image and build a coalition that's more centrist than a big healthcare bill. >> charlie: i never heard if you're running for public office you wouldn't always address the themes that seem to be so dominant in this campaign. i don't care, you're running in massachusetts or san francisco, address these themes. >> and in his press conference on wednesday he said i'm going to look for good ideas, i don't care if they have an r on them or a d. that was a line directly out of the obama campaign. he said that all the time incredibly appealing to a lot of people in the country. people think i don't care if it has a d on it or not. >> charlie: the idea is they're not red states or blue states they're american states. >> very very pragmatic. that pragmaticism going back to that last question, there are people in this country who has a huge thursday for that kind of pragmaticism. obama did not, that did not happen in the first two years. you can say that obama compromised in certain ways republicans in the course of the first two years, he included a lot of talk cuts in the stimulus bill for instance but by and large the improvision that he and the democrats and congress gave was, we're not interested. anything has an r fixed to it we don't want malpractice reform in the healthcare bill. it is our way or the highway and that's not appealing to americans. >> that seems like the polarized thing they voted against when they voted for obama. >> charlie: you guys are the boswell's of the campaign. tell us what the smart people are saying to you they may not be saying to the newspaper reporters covering this campaign in terms of the odds of this president being able to get it back on track. >> i think people, i thought the press conference was good in the sense that he cauterized what could have been a much bigger problem. he came out with the right tones and right acceptance of the results but people still believe that he doesn't get it enough to make the kind of changes that he needs to make. >> charlie: he doesn't get what just one more time. >> here is what people are saying. he doesn't get that the democratic brand coming into this election is in really bad shape. and that in fighting with republicans in congress next year and for democrats including him running in 2012, the democratic brand needs to stand for something besides what it now stands for in the public's mind. he doesn't get that, the importance of that or the reality of that is what a lot of democrats say. >> charlie: what does this election say about us. >> what i say is interesting you've had now over the course of the last 20 years when this polarization we've seen in our politics the defining feature of our politics basically. we've seen a series of elections where people thought, i think using the old model in their heads, potentially realigning elections. 1994 was supposed to be the beginning of the lasting republican realignment didn't happen. the 2004 election karl rove dreamed this was the beginning of a republican reign. none of them were true and the reason is the voters who are now swinging elections, these people and we think of independent voters as being centrist voters. moderate voters. i think of them being more unaligned voters. what they are in the old days you competed for those people and if you won them over there was a chance they would become affiliated with your party and that's how realignments work. they would attach themselves to the democratic party for a general recess. now this is a very very, these are free radicals. these people are very alienated from a lot of big institutions, government for sure but also media, also big business, also wall street and they are frustrated, they're angry. >> charlie: because they don't think the country is working the way it ought to be. >> correct. there's a sense of decline and they attach themselves in a provisional way to a given party for one election, two election cycles and when they're not satisfied by the outcome they're perfectly ready to switch teams again and that has created this wildly unstable system that we've had for 20 years and i don't see any end in that. this election to me says we could see this whip saw effect going on for the foreseeable future in our politics. >> charlie: the country needs certain kinds of things. we need an investment infrastructure, we need to think about the quality of our education. >> energy. >> charlie: and the energy. the press has already said cap and trade is dead. we need these kinds of things. that is a left/right decision. with a need to deal with these kinds of issues. but is there a possibility to deal with those issues in the politics that we have? >> it's all personal as far as i'm concerned because on substances i think the president and mitch mcconnell and john boehner could write an energy bill with a lot of compromise in 45 minutes. they could do deficit reduction that way, education. it's going to be a matter how far can the president convince republicans to trust and respect him and vice versa. and he's going to have to lead on that and i think he's going to have to show from their point of view, more compromise and more humility than they're expected. >> again watching mitch mcconnell this morning, he gave the speech. sticking to his guns on the notion that his main goal is to -- it may be that, i don't doubt that mark is right the president needs to do all the thing he just said but it may be no matter how humble he was, no matter how much he tries, we'll see, the republican attitude is they feel as though that they took this recalcitrant stance over the last two years and were rewarded for it amply. on tuesday they may be beyond bringing it into the circle of trust. there attitude maybe this worked for the last two years we're going to be blooded mindedly even in areas where we agree with him we'll be opposed to him. >> charlie: why does the country turn against that attitude. >> that may help re-elect obama in 2012. >> charlie: barack obama the best thing he has working for is the likelihood or unlikely the republicans will choose somebody who has the ability to attract independentance and a new kind of direction. >> people talk the time about how obama has the clinton 94 road to recov