Political Commentator David Frum

DATE November 3, 2004 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: David Frum discusses the Bush presidency and
re-election
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

President Bush has been re-elected, and my guests today reflect the divided
feelings about that in America. A little later we'll hear from Hendrik
Hertzberg, who says the president's re-election leaves some saddened and
worried about the country's future. Hertzberg is the staff writer and senior
editor at The New Yorker magazine. David Frum is very pleased with the
president's re-election. Frum was a speechwriter for President Bush. He came
up with the phrase `the axis of hatred,' which was changed to the now-famous
phrase `the axis of evil.' Frum wrote a book about the Bush presidency called
"The Right Man," and co-authored a book with Richard Perle called "An End
to Evil: How to End the War on Terror." Frum is now a fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute. I spoke with him this morning before John
Kerry said that he would concede. Nevertheless, Frum was confident of the
president's victory. Frum says now that the election is over, the president
will have to work toward reconciliation in a divided America.

Mr. DAVID FRUM (Author, "The Right Man"): I know that one of George Bush's--I
know that probably his single most important regret as president is he came
into office thinking he was going to be able to make some contribution to
turning down the level of partisan rancor. He talked a lot about that, and I
can go through the litany of things he did trying to do that. I mean,
he--symbolic acts like naming the Justice Department building after Bobby
Kennedy, which had been held up in Congress for a long time. They'd
been--that was in retaliation for President Clinton's refusal to name the
Executive Office Building after Dwight Eisenhower. Very petty stuff all
around. You know, he pressed ahead and did symbolic actions like that.

Substantively he tried really to work with people on the other side of the
aisle on issues like education, and he moved away from his own party on things
like prescription drug and the overall level of spending. But obviously he
didn't succeed and he feels bad about it. And there's blame all around and he
would have to--I don't know whether he would accept blame, but he should have
to because he's part of the story.

But he now has to show the kind of leadership that distinguishes effective
presidents from really fine presidents and work on that issue. But it's gonna
take--it's not just one person's job and it's not just the president's job.

GROSS: David, assuming that you went to sleep last night, how did you feel
waking up this morning and hearing the tentative results?

Mr. FRUM: Well, I went to sleep not until about 3 in the morning, so I had a
fair idea of what was coming when I went to bed. You know, I felt enormous
relief. I, like many people, was caught up in the emotion of the period from
the first release of the exit poll numbers at around 1:00 until about 7:00
thinking that this day was looking awfully good for John Kerry. And although,
you know, I was skeptical of the exit poll numbers, I was not skeptical
enough, so I had a sensation during the evening of gradually thinking, you
know what, there began to be news and events that made you think these early
exit polls were not right. I think by about 9:00 it was pretty clear they
were not going to be right. It wasn't clear that the president was going to
win, but it was clear that it was going to be a fight, and then when they
called Florida, you thought, OK, this is it.

I think for Republicans all over it's a tremendous relief. I think we
take--you know, it's a great accomplishment. President Bush won the popular
vote this time, a refreshing contrast, three and a half million votes. He's
also, by the way, the first president since his father in 1988 to have won an
actual majority of the votes cast.

GROSS: You supported the war in Iraq and wrote some of the--you know, and
you're responsible for some of the speechwriting that set the foundation for
the war. You came up with the term `axis of evil,' although it was `axis of
hatred' when you first came up with the phrase. Exit polls yesterday, for
whatever they're worth, said that there was a lot of support for the president
on terrorism, but the exit polls showed a majority of voters perceived the war
in Iraq as having gone badly off course and jeopardizing the long-term
security of the United States. And I'm wondering your thoughts about how the
war on Iraq has gone since you have supported it.

Mr. FRUM: Yeah. I think actually the vo--that's a pretty nuanced--that's a
term of this election--that's a pretty nuanced response on the part of the
voters. President Bush has shown great leadership in the war on terror. You
can believe that, and you can also believe that, you know, we've got some
problems in Iraq, just as you can believe that other wartime presidents got a
lot of things right and yet, at the same time, made other mistakes. There's
no question that in Iraq, there's a lot of signs that things are not going
well and things have to be made to go better.

Does that mean that you have second thoughts about it? No. I mean, the
United States--let's remember how the United States came to Iraq. The Iraq
War was the end point of 12 years of diplomatic and military conflict between
the United States and its friends and the Saddam Hussein regime under three
presidents, and we probably started on the path toward war, I think, in my
view, we started the path to war in 1998 when Saddam Hussein kicked out the UN
inspectors or forced them out, and the UN then refused to take action and sort
of left the world with the choice of leave this guy alone or take action to
remove him because the diplomatic means aren't working.

And, you know, I think even without 9/11, even without a Bush presidency, I
think a conflict between the United States and Saddam would have come sooner
or later, and I think a lot of what is going on now reflects Saddam's
understanding of that and some of his preparations for it. So, you know, does
that mean that if you rewind the tape and you look at all the various decision
points, that you would not do anything differently? There are lot of things
you'd do differently. But does that mean that the basic thrust of the
president's policy is right and that he's the right person to carry it out?
That's, I think, what Republicans believe.

GROSS: A lot of election analysts are saying that the evangelical vote helped
Bush's numbers a lot yesterday, and that, you know, Karl Rove--we've been
hearing for a while now that Karl Rove thought that four years ago there were
four million evangelicals who didn't show up at the polls, and his goal was to
get them to show up this time around and to vote for President Bush. I'm also
hearing that the anti-gay marriage amendments that were on the ballots of, I
think it was 11 states, also brought a lot of people to the polls and got
them--you know, got a lot of Republicans to the polls who voted for President
Bush. What do you think was the role of the evangelical vote this time
around?

Mr. FRUM: I think it's clear they were tremendously important, and I think
they were brought to the polls by two things. One is a kind of personal
affinity with the president. The president sort of personifies modern
evangelical Christianity. This is--you know, there was a time when many
evangelicals felt themselves more different from the mainstream of American
life when they listened to different kinds of music, for example, or didn't
participate in some kinds of community activities. And what we've seen in the
last 20, 30 years is a kind of interconnection between evangelical
Christianity and the general life of the country where the music becomes more
similar, the lifestyle becomes more similar, where churches take
on--learn--where evangelical churches learn from modern psychology, and modern
psychology is very influenced, also, by a lot of evangelical ideas. So there
was a great rapport between this president and that community, and they came
out to support him.

I think you are right, too, about the role of same-sex marriage. When we're
taking this election apart, I think the role of the Massachusetts Supreme
Judicial council in this election is going to be very, very great, that the
decisions of the Massachusetts court turned same-sex marriage from a
contingency, from something that people thought my happen someday, to an
immediate prospect in American life, and state after state really had to
reckon with the possibility that their own state court might do the same
thing. Many state courts are getting ready to do the same thing, or even if
their state court doesn't, that if enough other states do it, that the federal
courts might then impose those other states' policies on the individual
states. So that action by the Massachusetts court mobilized a lot of people
all over the country to defend their local institutions.

GROSS: So if you think that the evangelical vote was very important to
President Bush yesterday, what does that say to you about what the Bush agenda
might be, giving the evangelical constituency what they want?

Mr. FRUM: Well, presidents have to keep faith with the people who elect them
to office, but because so much of his connection with this community is
personal, that is they look at him and they think, `This is a good man, this
is the kind of man we want,' it isn't necessarily that there is an enormous
list of policy demands on this president. In fact, I think the policy demands
of the evangelical community are quite modest compared to those that you would
get from labor unions or any other group that brought a large number of people
to the polls. They want to feel they have a president who understand them and
shares their values, and they've got that. They are very concerned about the
threat to marriage, and I think these constitutional amendments will certainly
have a sobering effect on some of the more adventurous state courts.

I think they are concerned, too, about the kind of judges that get sent, the
kind of judicial nominations that get made, and I think there's some interest
in the evangelical world, though this is, I think, a more subordinate issue,
in stem cells, although I note that a stem cell initiative that is in favor of
using embryos in stem cell research did pass in California. President Bush,
you'll remember, did not do anything to stop the states or the private sector
from funding stem cell research. His actions govern only federal expenditure,
taxpayers' dollars.

GROSS: You are not a Christian.

Mr. FRUM: No.

GROSS: Does a president who has what some people consider to be a Christian
fundamentalist agenda trouble you? Did it--has it troubled you over the past
four years, and does the prospect of four more years of that trouble you at
all?

Mr. FRUM: It really does not. I'm not a Christian. I'm Jewish, both by
background and by practice. But, let--I have, I guess, two responses to that.
First is, you know, that in a country of 285 million people, it's simply
unlikely that there's ever going to be a president who precisely reflects my
personal policy preferences. Any president whom I support is going to have to
win the support of a whole lot of other people and we're going to have to make
a coalition and there's going to have to be give and take. So that would be
my first answer.

But secondly, I am impressed by the moderation of most of what is on the
agenda of modern evangelical Christians. You know, it doesn't strike me as a
shocking demand that marriage, as it has existed in the Judeo-Christian
tradition for the past 2,000 years, should continue to exist in the United
States. Nor does it strike me as shocking that the president should choose
judges who defer on issues that aren't in the Constitution to elected state
legislatures. My own feeling is, you know, that there's--that on an issue
like abortion, for example, I'm mildly pro-abortion, but I could live with a
lot more restrictions than exist now, where you could have an abortion at any
time for any reason, and where states are patrolled by the federal judiciary
about what rules and restrictions that can have each in their own state.

I think there is a lot of room for a lot of compromise on a lot of these
social issues, and certainly inside the Bush administration the
evangelical-minded people I've met with have been the opposite of all
demanding. They have been reasonable, very realistic, very willing to enter
into the spirit of give and take so long as they're shown some respect and so
long as their concerns are treated as legitimate ones.

GROSS: My guest is David Frum. He worked as a speechwriter for President
Bush, wrote a book about his presidency and co-wrote a book on the war against
terror.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: We're talking about the president's re-election with David Frum, a
former speechwriter for the president and co-author with Richard Perle of a
book about the war against terrorism. Frum is now a fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute.

President Bush said that he wouldn't use a litmus test to support Supreme
Court justices. Do you think he'll follow through on that, or do you think he
will only be interested in Supreme Court justices, you know, who oppose
abortion?

Mr. FRUM: I think he will find there are a lot of justices who personally
favor abortion, who happen to think that Roe V. Wade was a bad case. And I
think what he would be looking at is judicial philosophy. And you can--and
that is, I think, a somewhat different thing from a litmus test. You want to
know how a judge thinks, you want to know how he approaches the law, and I
think you'll have ideas about that. But I don't think it works, they sit with
a judicial candidate and a check list of policy issues and say, `How do you
feel about this and this and this?' They will look through the vast corpus of
cases that, if the person's on a lower court they've presided over, they'll
look at their writings, they'll look at the way they've litigated things and
say, `Is this a person whose philosophy is broadly congruent with ours?'

But, you know, the thing about judges is they do always surprise you. You put
them on the court, they're there for life, and there are all kinds of issues
that are coming down the pike that you never anticipate at the time that you
name them. That's one of the reasons why a litmus test is not only sort of
bad judicial politics, it's not even good political politics because you never
think to the ask the question that you're going to want to know 20 years down
the road. So you're saying, `What kind of person are you? How do you
approach the law? Do you have a bias in favor of letting legislatures make
decisions, or do you think judges should do it?'

GROSS: Now what President Bush's critics say is that one of the reasons why
you get clear answers with him is he doesn't do nuance, he doesn't entertain
the ideas of critics, and he doesn't see ambiguity, he doesn't see gray, he
sees things in black and white. Do you agree with that? You worked closely
with him.

Mr. FRUM: Every president has to do nuance. You have no choice about it.
The decisions are complicated, the choices are often more limited. You often
find yourself struggling with a bad hand that was left you by your predecessor
or with adverse circumstances of one kind or another. It's so seldom that a
president gets to do things exactly as he would want to do them, and few
presidents would even imagine they could.

Given the extraordinary constraints on presidential decisionmaking, it's
really, really important that a president have a clear idea of what he came
into the office to do, because if he doesn't, to make an appreciation for
nuance an excuse for lack of a clear idea of what you want to do means that
you as president will be ruled by your in box, which is the great danger of
government.

I mean, I think you can look at, for example, what is happening with Iran as a
perfect example of the president's--of both the president's capacity for and
the inevitability of nuance. Here's a situation where, you know, you've got a
very dangerous regime working on nuclear weapons, and what has the United
States and this president done? They've gone first through the International
Atomic Energy process, which leads to the Security Council, which leads to
sanctions, and they've been following that. Now there are many people in the
Bush administration who don't have a high regard for the Security Council, but
they're going that way anyway because, under the circumstances, it makes a lot
of sense and maybe there aren't a lot of other good alternatives besides.

But it's important as you go through that, that you remember what it is you
came to do, and that, I think, is for tho--I mean, I appreciate nuance. Sure.
But one of the things I appreciate the president's clear vision is because I
understand how nuance means you can forget entirely who you are and what you
believe.

GROSS: Now you were a supporter of the war in Iraq and, you know, you were a
speechwriter for President Bush. The Bush administration told us that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction and that there were direct ties between Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda. Neither of those have turned out to be true, at least
certainly there's been no real evidence so far that they've been true, and
some people think that President Bush should have acknowledged that more
clearly, perhaps should have even apologized to the American public. What do
you think the president should have told Americans about the fact that we
haven't found WMD or ties to al-Qaeda?

Mr. FRUM: Yeah, I think the president, when he talked about this before the
war, did make some very strong statements based on the best intelligence that
he had, based on the best intelligence that everybody had. I mean, there were
not a lot of international organizations in the period leading up to the war
in Iraq saying, `Don't worry. It's no problem.' In fact, the argument was
very much to the contrary, that these missing Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction were often used as a reason not to go to war with Iraq because it
would be too dangerous.

So I don't think he has to apologize for relying on the best information he
had and everybody had when he made his decisions. And I think we've learned
since the war more about what a dangerous place Iraq was. I mean, this whole
Al-Qaqaa story that has got so much attention the last week of the campaign,
Al-Qaqaa is a munitions dump with a perimeter 30 miles around, and it was
packed with dangerous stuff, including, as we now learned, this explosive
that's gone missing that you can use to trigger a nuclear reaction. So I
don't think--I think he got it right on the question of whether Iraq was
dangerous.

And I think he, you know, needs to be very explicit with the American people
at all stages about what he has in mind, and I think one of the things that
probably would have served him well is at--instead of the `Mission
Accomplished' banner if, at that point, he had talked about some of the other
stakes in Iraq, not only the direct security of the United States, but some of
the things the United States is trying to accomplish in the Arab world.

GROSS: Patrick Buchanan recently said that--actually he says this in his
book, that if President Bush won a second term, that there would be a civil
war within the Republican Party over fiscal policy, you know, social spending,
cutting of taxes in times of war, failure to defend America's borders from
illegal aliens, trade policies, and launching a war to attempt to democratize
another country. Do you agree that there might be a civil war within the
Republican Party?

Mr. FRUM: Well, Pat Buchanan's appetite for that kind of inflammatory talk is
exceeded only by his inability actually to produce this civil war that he so
badly wants. Look, we have--are living through in this decade a time of
ideological transition in the United States generally. That the politics that
we all grew up with were defined by the politics of the Reagan and really
going--stretching back to the Nixon years. Nixon, Reagan built a new kind of
Republican coalition and Newt Gingrich took that forward, and it sort of--that
kind of politics ended up in stalemate in the 1990s. That's why we had three
presidential elections in a row in which the winner couldn't clear the 50
percent barrier.

So we are moving into an era that's going to be defined by new kinds of
issues, so we're going to have new kinds of coalitions, and there's going to
be a lot of pretty frenzied debate about that. But I don't think you're going
to see--I don't think it's--I don't think the image of civil war is helpful
here. Yes, you're going to have a debate inside the Republican Party about
whether President Bush should veto more spending authorization bills, and I
think you're going to see from the president more effort to hold the level of
spending down. What to do about migration? These are going to be big
questions. But I think--let me put it this way, to sum it up. I think
winning parties do not engage in fratricidal internal debates. It's losing
parties that do that.

GROSS: As a speechwriter, as somebody who wrote speeches for President Bush
early in his presidency, is there a speech that he gave during his campaign
that you thought was especially influential?

Mr. FRUM: I thought that convention speech, which was from the point of view
of the speechwriters' art not a highly polished speech. It was discursive, it
was kind of baggy, didn't have a great structure to it, it didn't have a lot
of memorable lines. But it was a very carefully thought out speech that
reminded people, first of all, that this is a president who came to office
mostly as a domestic policy president and he spent much of the first half the
speech dealing with a who--reminding people of his domestic agenda and
reminding them also that this is a president who is not a conservative in the
Reagan-Gingrich mold. I say that with some pain because I am a conservative
in the Reagan-Gingrich mold, but I think one of the things the president's
critics have consistently misunderstood about him is not to understand the way
in which he has been trying as a political project to change the Republican
Party.

GROSS: Well, David Frum, thank you very much.

Mr. FRUM: Thank you.

GROSS: David Frum is a former speechwriter for President Bush. He
co-authored the book "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," and is
now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

In the second half of the show, we'll hear from Hendrik Hertzberg of The New
Yorker magazine, which endorsed John Kerry.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Coming up, we talk with Henrick Hertzberg, a staff writer and editor
at The New Yorker magazine, about why the Bush victory leaves him worried
about the country's future. And we talk with media critic John Powers about
media coverage of the election.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Hendrik Hertzberg comments on Bush's re-election
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Today we're talking to two people whose reactions to the president's
re-election reflect the divisions in the country. Earlier we heard from David
Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush. He's greatly relieved by the
Bush victory.

My next guest, Hendrik Hertzberg, is troubled by it. Hertzberg is a staff
writer and senior editor at The New Yorker magazine. The magazine doesn't
usually endorse candidates, but the editors felt so strongly about this
election, they endorsed John Kerry. A book collecting Hertzberg's writings
was published this year titled "Politics: Observations & Arguments,
1966-2004." I spoke with Hertzberg this morning, before John Kerry conceded,
but Hertzberg was assuming that Bush would be staying in the White House.

How did you feel this morning waking up, assuming you went to sleep last
night?

Mr. HENDRIK HERTZBERG (The New Yorker): Yeah, I did go to sleep. And I
didn't feel great. I felt a mixture of all kinds of emotions but along the
lines of sadness and grief really and worry for the country.

GROSS: What are your biggest concerns about four more years of a Bush
presidency?

Mr. HERTZBERG: Well, my biggest concerns have to do with foreign policy.
That's where the existential issues really are. I have concerns across the
board, but in foreign policy particularly, one of the first thoughts I had
this morning was that now all that anti-Bush sentiment around the world--in
Europe and in the rest of the world--there's a great danger now that's
transmuting into real anti-Americanism. And I think we're in trouble both
because of the attitude of the rest of the world toward us--and when you're
the most powerful, you're always on thin ice, in that department--and also
because the kind of judgment that the administration has shown in the last
four years is not reassuring when it comes to the judgments it'll make in the
future. And the grown-ups in that administration are likely to be departing,
beginning with Colin Powell or to be powerless.

GROSS: This time around President Bush has won the popular vote. What do you
think the vote says about America, how it's changed, how it's not changed, how
divisive it is? Is it more divisive or less divided than it was four years
ago?

Mr. HERTZBERG: Yes, he has won the popular vote, the first apparent absolute
majority won by a presidential candidate since his father. And it certainly
shows that we are becoming two countries in a way that's extraordinary. It
would have shown that had Kerry won, too, by the way. The way the vote seems
to have broken down is so strongly along cultural lines. What you're hearing
this morning from most of the commentators is that moral issues--a euphemism
for gay marriage, for abortion, for guns, for that set of concerns--suddenly
surged to the front and became the decisive issue in the election. It
certainly is extraordinary that at a time of not a particularly good economic
picture, a war that is disapproved of by a good half of the public, maybe
even more, a lot of uncertainty about terrorism, that a candidate like Bush
could be elected. There's got to be some explanation, and the one that people
are groping for today seems to be this cultural explanation.

I think we might be entering a period not too unlike the 1920s minus the
prosperity where what I call the cultural elite will feel alienated from
national life in a way that's not too different from or at least it echoes the
'20s and the '50s. And I also think and worry that this could be a prelude to
a destructive kind of counterculture to political extremism which has been
limited, for the most part really, to the right in recent years. The real
ugly kind of extremism that was on the left in the '70s especially has been
absent, and I fear a resurgence of that.

GROSS: You mean as the response?

Mr. HERTZBERG: Yes, as a response. Remember, we are going to have one-party
domination now of a government in a more decisive way than we have had it
since FDR and the New Deal, since FDR's second term really.

Despite the fact that the country is so extremely narrowly divided--it's not
an overwhelming majority on the red side--the red side will have all the
formal labors of power. And powerlessness is an incubator of
irresponsibility, and so I worry about a breakdown on the left-of-center side
of the spectrum.

GROSS: You use the expression `cultural elite.' Do you feel that when people
on the right critically use the expression `cultural elite' or `liberal elite'
that you are included in that? And if so, what does that mean to you?

Mr. HERTZBERG: Yes, I certainly do think so. And it means--I live in a big
cosmopolitan city. I have lots of gay friends, I don't see why they shouldn't
get married if they want to. I like art and music, I like country music but I
like lots of other kinds of music, too. I guess I believe in progressive
taxation and I would like to see a European-style welfare state in the United
States. I guess that makes me pretty much dyed in the blue, a liberal elite,
liberal/cultural elite. I guess they're two different things, but they
overlap heavily. And The New Yorker--I run The New Yorker which is, by
definition, an elite publication.

GROSS: Are you feeling today alienated from your own country?

Mr. HERTZBERG: No, but I am feeling alienated from half of my fellow
countrymen, and it's distressing. I certainly don't feel alienated from my
country. This is my country just as much as it would be if Kerry had won in a
landslide. But this split which, as I mentioned earlier, would exist no
matter which of the two candidates had won the election, is increasingly
distressing. And I do feel an alienation from half the country, from half of
the people in the country. I don't really understand where they're coming
from. It's probably a failure of imagination on my part, I suppose, but I
don't really understand how it can be that a majority of Americans can vote
for George W. Bush after the last four years.

And I think on their side, there's a similar, maybe greater, failure of
imagination which is symbolized in the reification of people like me as a
liberal elite, a cultural elite that is content to go and dehumanize--I mean,
God knows I'm as good an American as any Bible-thumping, draft-dodging radio
talk show host or evangelist you can name. You know, I served my country in
the military. I am a solid bourgeois citizen with a wife and a child. I work
hard in my job. I'm as good an American as any of these people. I'm not
alienated from my country, but my country is divided bitterly, bitterly in a
way that, of course, is not as serious as in the 1860s but is at least as
serious as it's ever been in my lifetime. I can only compare it to the
Vietnam period, but there was something warmer about that period than there is
now. The division now is cold.

GROSS: My guest is Hendrik Hertzberg. He's a staff writer and senior editor
at The New Yorker magazine. A collection of his writings from 1966 to 2004 is
titled "Politics." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Hendrik Hertzberg. He's a staff writer and senior editor
at The New Yorker magazine. We're talking about the outcome of the election.

There seems to be a lot of agreement that the evangelical vote was very strong
yesterday, and that's apparently what President Bush's chief political
adviser, Karl Rove, wanted. He wanted to get the evangelicals who didn't turn
up four years ago, those four million evangelical voters that apparently he's
been talking about to turn up yesterday. And apparently he did well in that
category. What does that suggest to you about what the president's agenda
might be like in the next four years?

Mr. HERTZBERG: Well, I think that his agenda and the agenda of most of the
people around him is not really the agenda of the religious right in any
really sincere way. I think that that analysis is as good as any, that he's
captured formerly non-voting evangelicals and that the size of the evangelical
community and vote has also presumedly increased in the last four years and
over the last decade or so.

I'm sure that they will try to dole out as much red meat to that part of their
base as they can, and that'll show up in judicial appointments certainly. And
those judicial fights are going to be horrific. And they will serve to rile
up the cultural conservative base further because I think that there will
probably be appointments that will be firm right-wing, quasi evangelical
appointments to the Supreme Court, that Rehnquist is as far left as it's going
to go. Bush is likely to keep his promise to appoint justices in the
tradition of Scalia. And an appointment like that is likely to be blocked by
a Senate filibuster, by the Democrats, this last remnant of the Democrats in
the Senate. And that's going to keep the bitterness at a high level. And I
think it is in the interest of the Rove strategy to keep it at that high
level, to keep the evangelicals angry and riled up and beleaguered on a more or
less permanent basis.

GROSS: In the editorial that you co-wrote in The New Yorker that endorsed
John Kerry, you wrote about there being a new sense of the meaning of
separation of church and state within the Bush administration. And I'd like
you to elaborate on that and to discuss what, if any, your concerns might be
in the next four years.

Mr. HERTZBERG: I should say that that editorial, that endorsement, which was
unprecedented in The New Yorker's history, was really very much a group
effort. It cannot be said to have an author. David Remnick and a half
dozen of his staff writers all got together to write that endorsement.

Well, the Bush administration and its evangelical component do seem to have a
different idea about the borderline between organized religious life and
organized political life. I don't know how far this will go. I think, for
me, the most worrisome aspect of it is not really things like prayer in school
or that sort of issue or even gay marriage but, rather, the idea that you can
make decisions of state on the basis of divine inspiration or of trusting your
gut, trusting your heart when you have defined that as being a conduit to the
Almighty. That is alarming.

And I think that Bush will now be--having been elected in his own right by
this impressive popular majority, outright popular majority, is going to have
more confidence in himself. He'll be less inclined to listen to his father's
friends. He triumphs pretty definitively over his father now, and he's going
to have a lot more self-confidence. People like Colin Powell are not going to
have as much sway over him, and we are going to be led increasingly by the
Bush gut. And the Bush gut is connected to the Bush brain which believes that
it has got a pipeline to Almighty God. At least that's the way it certainly
looks.

GROSS: What do you think will be on the agenda in the next four years with a
Republican president and a Republican House and Senate?

Mr. HERTZBERG: Well, the agenda that Bush put forward in the campaign was one
of continued tax cuts along the same lines that he's been proposing and
achieving for the last four years that is skewing the tax system more toward
taxing work rather than wealth and lightening the tax burden on the wealthy
and then, therefore, making it heavier on the non-wealthy.

And he has proposed privatizing part of Social Security. I don't think that
that latter part of his agenda's going to be fulfilled. He is going to be a
lame duck, and Congress is vulnerable to gridlock, particularly in the Senate.
And when it comes to the really hardball issues like Social Security, I don't
think that the Democrats in the Senate are going to roll over and play dead.
I think they'll be willing to use a filibuster to tie the Senate up in knots
and keep the lower extreme elements of this agenda from being fulfilled.

But he's certainly going to be able to appoint conservatives to the Supreme
Court. They may be radical conservatives or they may be simply activist
conservatives, but they're not going to be judicial restraint conservatives.
They're going to be activists of one sort or another, and they're going to be
on the right. I think that's where he'll have the biggest success and the
most lasting legacy will probably be in the judicial appointments, especially
to the Supreme Court more than in the way he'll be able to restructure the tax
or Social Security systems.

There will also be continued neglect of the environment. That could have
extremely serious consequences globally. And there will be continued battles
over these sterile cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage.

GROSS: You've made it clear that today is a sad day for you. Is there
anything in history or literature that you've been thinking about today?

Mr. HERTZBERG: No, there isn't yet but one of my tasks for the day is going
to be to find something along those lines that I can draw some comfort from.
I'm feeling a very cold kind of grief right now, and I'm going to look for
that kind of comfort where I can find it. So far, I haven't been able to
access that particular part of my heart.

GROSS: Hendrik Hertzberg, thank you so much.

Mr. HERTZBERG: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Hendrik Hertzberg is a staff writer and senior editor at The New
Yorker magazine. A book collecting his writing was published this year. It's
called "Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004."

Coming up, media critic John Powers considers media coverage of the election.
This is FRESH AIR.

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Analysis: TV coverage of the presidential campaigns
TERRY GROSS, host:

Our critic at large John Powers has channel-surfed through the night, watching
how the broadcast and cable stations covered the election. He also followed
media coverage of the Bush and Kerry campaigns. I asked him if he thinks the
Bush victory will result in winners and losers within media pop culture.

JOHN POWERS reporting:

Well, I think, oddly enough, that the clearest loser to my mind will be FOX
News, strangely enough. You know, although they're a conservative network and
would be happy that the president had won, in fact, they would be better off
with a Kerry presidency. You know, just as talk radio rose during the Clinton
presidency, similarly, FOX News would be better off being in opposition to a
president rather than having to defend a particular president. The entire
style which is built on controversy and in-your-face and a certain kind of
grievance works much better if, in fact, you're not controlling every branch
of government.

GROSS: And yet, hasn't FOX News' ratings really gone up in the last four
years?

POWERS: Oh, FOX News' ratings have gone up in the last four years, but now
you'll be five, six, seven years into a time when the Republicans are
controlling everything. FOX News would be better off, would get more viewers,
I'm certain, if, in fact, they could be the source of the countermyth to a
Kerry presidency rather than being the source of the myth of the Bush
presidency.

GROSS: Had you wondered if Air America, the new radio network that is very
pro-Democratic, whether they would kind of go off the air if John Kerry won?

POWERS: You know, it's interesting to know what will happen to Air America.
You know, it's interesting to know, in fact, whether the liberal left will
continue to fight against Bush with the same fervor it has or whether it will
sink into a kind of defeatism, the kind that you found in Britain during the
satirist period where all of a sudden many of the people of the so-called
liberal elite just thought, `Well, we're not going to beat this person for a
while so let's get on with our private lives and just forget about it.' It'll
be interesting to see whether that happens here.

GROSS: How do you think the mainstream media will be affected by the
election?

POWERS: What I think will actually happen is that the mainstream, which had
grown more critical of Bush because they were allowed to because Kerry was
attacking Bush, will go back to its earlier posture which is to basically be
deferential to the president.

GROSS: The blogs were expected to play a bigger part in this election than in
any previous elections. Have you been following the blogs, particularly like
the political ones and the campaign blogs? And do you think that they really
made a difference one way or another? Do you think a lot of people were
reading them?

POWERS: No. I think what's interesting is that a lot of people read blogs
and especially people in the media read blogs so that within the kind of echo
chamber of media worlds, blogs are hugely important. What's fascinating about
the way the results came down is they were almost what you might have
predicted a year ago if you'd never read any of the blogs, is that it came
down to a referendum on President Bush. And in a time of terror, my sense
always was that people would choose the person they knew vs. someone they
didn't know unless that person gave them an overwhelming reason to choose
otherwise.

GROSS: You know, it's been remarked by many people, although for a lot of
people, particularly younger people, the comedy shows are a major source of
news, most notably Jon Stewart's show. So, you know, looking back on the
election, what do you think the importance of, say, Jon Stewart's show or Bill
Maher's show, the shows that specialize in comedy and political satire, what
impact they had?

POWERS: Well, I think there's something slightly misleading about the power
of those shows because, in fact, they aren't hugely watched. I mean, you
know, more people watch Bill O'Reilly than watch Jon Stewart. But there's
something about the way that Jon Stewart is extremely funny and liked by
people on both the left and the right that means he's often being quoted in
the media which makes it seem as though he's actually more powerful than he
actually is. The same is true of Bill Maher. You know, when you actually
break the numbers down, in fact, "The Daily Show" isn't as powerful as you
might think from its number one best-selling book and all the rest.

GROSS: Any reflections on how each campaign used the media during the
campaigning?

POWERS: Well, I think that, you know, the Bush campaign was better at using
the media, in fact, partly because they're very, very good at keeping focused
messages. In fact, the Kerry campaign was not so good at that, you know,
partly because Kerry himself tends to wander a little bit and isn't very good
at soundbites, but, in fact, that the Bush campaign is very, very good at
using the news cycle.

And what was interesting was they had, in the last week, a bad week for them,
you know, as they would admit, you know, because of the revelations about Iraq
and because of Osama bin Laden. Those weren't the things that the Bush
campaign actually wanted to be having happening but, in fact, they were very,
very good for most of the campaign in controlling the news that was going out
and presenting their particular vision of the election. I always said they
were running a mythic campaign which is to say that it turned on sort of
mythic qualities of leadership and virtue whereas the Kerry campaign was doing
something which is, I guess, more reality-based which was to say, `Let's look
at the facts on the ground.' And usually in a pinch, Americans will go for
the more mythical campaign rather than the more reality-based campaign.

GROSS: Well, John Powers, thanks so much for talking with us.

POWERS: Happy to be here, Terry.

GROSS: John Powers writes a media column for LA Weekly. He's film critic for
Vogue and author of the book "Sore Winners."
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.