The Ricochet Podcast - 2015 NRI Ideas Summit: Charles Krauthammer

Episode Date: May 2, 2015

National Review’s Rich Lowry talks with columnist, author, and Conservative wise man Charles Krauthammer. Source

At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football. The excitement, the roar and the chance to reward you. That's why every day of the festival, we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race. That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets.

Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie We are ready for the next portion of our programme, which is a conversation with Charles, I mention how it used to be that when I wanted to try to impress people, I would introduce myself. I'd say, hey, I'm Rich Lowry. I'm the editor of National Review. Now what I do is say, hey, I'm Rich Lowry. 20 years ago, I very briefly worked as a research assistant for Charles Krautham.

And then suddenly I can see the new esteem in which I'm held. And it's a little hard to remember, but I actually worked for Charles before he was a TV star. But Charles is a most unusual TV star. He is the most dour TV star on television. In fact, a couple years ago, executives at Fox were very concerned that the political panel was just too serious and too dark and too

sour on Brett Baer's show. So they decided to lighten it up. They needed someone who's much brighter, more cheerful presence, so they added George F. Will to balance Charles. I was asked last year actually to participate in a roast of Charles that Commentary Magazine had, and it was the inspired idea of John Podoritz that it must have been really funny for me to be a frightened, green-behind-the-ears, 21-year-old working for this formidable giant of journalism and conservative thought. And I assure you, yeah, it was hilarious. But I really objected to the whole idea of the roast,

which I really thought was like gathering a bunch of lesser scribes to get together to try to roast Maimonides, which was... But I was very proud of that, because it was really the only commentary-appropriate historical reference I could come up with. If it was a National Review event, it would have been much easier. I just would have compared Charles to Pope Gregory I.

But ladies and gentlemen, please once again welcome Charles Krauthammer. Thank you. Thank you very much. You know, you're right about the dour and the grim. Whenever I give, well, this used to be, because I've now changed, I've become sunny and optimistic in my speeches because I simply got tired of what was happening to my audiences when I would hear sobbing from the back of my head. Tears, handkerchiefs, noses being blown. It was terrible. And the only thing I could do would be to offer my services as a psychiatrist and offer to write a prescription for

antidepressants for anyone who needed them just to get home that night. But now I try to cheer people up rhetorically rather than pharmacologically. I am the stories that Rich tells you about his days working for me years ago are mostly true. He told one at the commentary roast that I don't remember, that I'm sure was invented, but it was very funny and it made me look awful.

So I'm going back and having it checked to make sure that you actually got it. It was like a Brian Williams moment for Rich. We're trying to find witnesses. I'm very happy to be here. I admire what National Review does and what the National Review Institute does. I've met some of you before. Many people are very nice. They come up to me and they say that they feel that I'm a guest every night at their home at the dinner table. Johnny Carson once said it was humbling to realize that 20 million people are watching you every night between their feet. So I'm just happy that people are upright when I'm in their house. So happy to be here, happy to be once again with Rich.

But truth be told, I'm happy to be anywhere where Juan Williams can't interrupt me. So, take it away, Rich. Alright, so, I don't know whether you saw this piece, Charles, but it got a lot of attention. Mike Duran of the Hudson Institute wrote this piece for the online magazine Mosaic. policy from the beginning can be explained by the fact that he had the set goal from

the beginning to have an opening to Iran no matter what. And this explains the silence during the initial protest, explains our Syria policy, where we're kind of happy to let Hezbollah run riot through Syria, explains being Iran's effective air force in Iraq, and it, of course, explains the negotiations where we've given away concession after concession after concession, and that process hasn't even stopped yet. Do you buy that line of analysis? I buy half of it. I think to attribute that to Obama, to give him this overarching strategic idea, is to give him too much credit for strategic thinking.

My view is that he ended up exactly where that thesis puts him. But my view is slightly simpler, so I think I have the advantage of Occam's razor on this one. Obama was not thinking strategically at all for the first two years. You know, he did say in that, I think it was a tweet question during the 2008 campaign, would you meet personally with all these excreble dictators around the world? And he said, yes. That's sort of a very naive Columbia graduate student answer to that kind of question. And I think he went into the presidency

as a Columbia graduate student, his wisdom tempered only by his vast experience with international affairs as a community organizer. But I think he went in with a singular idea that was not strategic. It was the idea of withdrawal. Because he promised it, because he saw his sort of place in history

as the peace president who ended the war in Iraq, ended the war in Afghanistan, sort of ended the war on terror by renaming it and ignoring it. But again, I'm just telling you what he's thinking. And felt that that was what he was going to do. The strategic surprise for him that explains the overarching Iran idea was that he didn't really understand what anybody,

any freshman student in International Relations 101 would know, that when a great power withdraws and retreats, the vacuum gets filled. I think he withdrew with the idea, if he had the idea. I don't think he thought it through, and I'm not sure that his great strategic advisor, Valerie Jarrett, corrected him on this, that he would withdraw and things would remain as they are. I mean, it's pretty obvious that when a great power withdraws, something comes in to fill the vacuum. It's usually opponents, adversaries, enemies, and irredeemables. ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Arabian Peninsula. So then he had to face a new strategic reality. He pulls out of Iraq. You know, he does this. He's fulfilled his promise, vindicated what he

said he would do as a candidate. And then he discovers all these terrible things happen. ISIS rises, Iran is on the march, all the way through the Shiite crescent, through Iraq, through Syria, through Hezbollah. Finally, it gets really ambitious and bold and shows utter contempt for the United States and does Yemen, trying to add that on. And then he begins to realize he's got a problem. And that's when I think he came upon this idea, which I think explains what he's doing now, which is to establish, and I called it

in a column two weeks ago, an inverted Nixon doctrine. When a great power withdraws, when a great power has had a tough time in one of the frontier wars, as we did after the Vietnam War, the instinct is to withdraw. And what Nixon did, and the reason he called it the Nixon doctrine, is because you withdraw, but if you're responsible, you try to leave in place a proxy ally who will defend your interests. So, of course, for the Nixon Doctrine, it meant mostly Vietnamizing the Vietnam War.

But then it evolved and developed into something larger, which was to find proxy nations who would defend our interests in the region. And in the Nixon Doctrine, the proxy, the number one proxy for the United States was Iran. So Obama harks on this idea. Iran should be the proxy for American interests, become the regional dominant power

with our assistant, except he overlooked one minor detail. You know where we're going with this. You know, Iran in Nixon's day was run by the Shah. The Shah, for all of his eccentricities and greed, he was largely responsible for the tripling of oil prices. Nonetheless, was pro-American, pro-Western,

very much anti-clerical, and represented our interest in the Gulf very well. It was a very good strategic choice. So now we're recapitulating with an enemy, enemies, apocalyptic, clerical, radical, jihadist enemies in charge in Iran, which is strategically insane. But again, I'm not sure that the entourage around Obama,

which is not very, unlike in the first term where Obama surrounded himself with people of independent stature, like Gates, Clinton, Summers, and others. Obama has surrounded himself with people of no independent stature, and he's running this himself. And he's decided that the way to deal with the chaos, with ISIS, the complexities, with all of this, even with Iraq, is to deputize Iraq. And this is the famous statement he made in the NPR interview at the end of November. If Iran gets its act together, it begins to act responsibly. It could be, and it should be, a successful regional power. Imagine if you're sitting in Riyadh, you're sitting in the UAE, you're sitting in Jordan or Egypt,

or sitting in Israel and you hear that. That's why they're apoplectic. So yes, he came to a strategic idea, insane as it is, to have Iran as the dominant power in the region and is now doing everything he can to assist that. But I think he came to it after having some other idea that we wouldn't need that because stability would enforce itself. What do you think accounts for the evident distaste for Israel, which seems to go much deeper than merely a burning personal hatred for Bibi Netanyahu?

Well, for that I think you ought to ask a psychiatrist. I go on O'Reilly, you know this, and every week he keeps asking me a variation of the same question. It goes like this. First, the proposition, Obama is doing something insane. And he goes on for about eight minutes explaining. Then in the 30 seconds remaining, he asked me, how do you explain what Obama's thinking?

And I have decided that I'm going to answer every time, what do you think I am, a psychiatrist? I'm going to be very charitable, I think. He has the thinking of a liberal, naive, graduate student about how the world works. He's begun to accumulate some further knowledge about how

the world really works, the way I try to outline in the other answer. And now he's improvising. I think he probably grew up looking at Israel through the classic eyes of the left, somewhat imperialist, colonialist,

reflexively having sympathy for the underdog. That's sort of a classic way that the left looks at the U.S. international relations. I mean, you could see it in the apology tour. I love the way liberals keep saying, there wasn't a single apology in that whole tour. It wasn't. Well, because he was in no mood

to apologize for us. He simply wanted to convict us. So everywhere he went, he confessed one sin after another. The list is very long. I remember it including Hiroshima, disrespecting the Europeans, and not showing enough respect for the Muslim world. A very long list.

But that's his conception of the United States. And for that, I think what comes with that part of the bundle is this John's view of Israel. So that's, I mean, truly, I'm not sure that we can say more without knowing what's in his heart. And I've always thought that when dealing with statesmen,

what is in their heart doesn't really matter. What matters is what they do. And we can see what he does. I should remind everyone that if you have questions for Charles, write them on the note cards on your table and we'll pick them up and bring them up here.

Charles, the rise of ISIS, is ISIS a JV team that can be managed or does it need to be destroyed? And if the latter, how do you go about doing it when we're not going to at live score bet we love cheltenham just as much as we love football the excitement the roar and the chance to reward you that's why every day of the festival we're giving new members money back as a free sports bet up to €10 if your horse loses on a selected race.

That's how we celebrate the biggest week in racing. Cheltenham with LiveScoreBet. This is total betting. Sign up by 2pm 14th of March. Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Re-invade Iraq or invade Syria? Well, two things. The first is there's got to be a hierarchy of adversaries and enemies here. ISIS may one day become a strategic threat to us, to the world, to the West,

but it's not now. Would it grow to become one? It's quite possible. But right now the great strategic threat is Iran. Iran is not only taking territory, is not only acting as the regional hegemon. I don't know whether... I was sort of traveling this week,

so I don't know how much coverage the action of Iran in seizing this Marshall Island flagged freighter in the Strait of Hormuz, God. But that was a significant challenge to the United States. First of all, because the Marshall Islands have a written, a treaty, we have a treaty obligation with them where we are pledged to defend them and to conduct their foreign policy in return for them giving up having any foreign policy.

Of course, they wouldn't be able to have one anyway, but this is a treaty with the United States, so they tend to be somewhat unbalanced. Nonetheless, the Marshall Islands, they're important to us strategically, so we pledged to defend them. So this is not the end of the world. This is not the Caesar or the Mayagaz. But nonetheless, it was a provocation, and from what I can tell, we've done absolutely nothing about it,

the same way we've done nothing about the Washington Post reporter who's being held as a hostage in a pond. I'm sure at the end of the day he'll be handed over the way the guy was handed over in the Cuban deal, where they take everything and we take nothing and we get a hostage and we declare it a great victory. So I think that'll happen. But it just shows Iran is both confident of its own power and confident that the United States, led by Barack Obama, is a paper tiger. And that, I think, is a big threat.

The biggest story right now, and I don't want to discount the cruelty and the menace, the savagery, sort of unworldly savagery of ISIS, their attack on Christians, what they're doing in destabilizing the region, and the threat they are to states like Jordan, which are run with some decency. You know, the few decent areas in the region are being threatened. But I said, I want to minimize that. But what I don't want people to minimize is the staggering magnitude of the threat of what is about to happen with Iran. Iran is about to have its hegemony legitimized. It's about to have its economy jump-started and take off, probably with a $50 billion bribe upon signing. I mean, that's more than Max Scherzer got for the Washington Nationals.

Now we're talking real money. Reviving their economy. I mean, for the two years before the talk started, Iran's economy was sinking. GDP was collapsing. The Riyadh had lost half the value, and their inflation was running about 50, 60 percent. We had an extremely successful sanctions regime going on. And remember, the Shah fell when he lost the middle class and the merchants. And that's when the grumbling was beginning to start in the shooks among the middle class and the merchants. And that's when the grumbling was beginning to start in the shooks among the middle class and the merchants. And that's when we stepped in and the genius of this administration

softened the sanctions. Their economy is now growing again. And it will simply take off as soon as the deal is signed. And then essentially says to Iran, in 10 years, if you don't cheat, you'll be a nuclear power. They will be able to assemble a nuclear arsenal because in the 10 years, they're going to be accumulating the material to produce the arsenal and the way to weaponize anti-uranium.

So in 10 years, you're going to become not only a nuclear power, a significant nuclear power, but one legitimized by the entire world, we in the West, the United States, and the Security Council. But if you cheat, which I think of course is going to happen, and the mechanisms for finding the cheating, adjudicating the cheating, getting it approved by the finding approved by the U.N. Security Council, and then what Obama says we would do is snap back on the sanctions is a pure fantasy. There is nothing in the agreement that will prevent, will have any significant effect on preventing Iran from cheating. So we are guaranteeing that Iran is going to be a nuclear power. And even if you believe that we can responsibly deal with that and contain them, which I don't, just assume for a second that you do.

And you use the U.S.-Soviet example in the Cold War to encourage you to believe that. That's not what's going to happen as soon as Iran goes nuclear. In fact, they're not going to wait for Iran to go nuclear. As soon as a deal is signed which ensures Iran going nuclear, the Saudis are going to acquire the bomb, the UAE likely, Egypt next, Turkey next. Think of the Middle East five years from now. It's going to have five or six nuclear powers. This is going to be five- or six-sided deterrence, where even two-sided deterrence with the Russians was very unstable and difficult. We came near the nuclear war in 1962, very near the nuclear war. And that was in a stable, two-sided, with neither country being apocalyptic. Imagine a five- and six-sided deterrence situation in the Middle East.

Not only is that a hair-trigger danger for the whole world, but these regimes are inherently unstable. You could wake up one morning and find that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, bristling with nukes, could be switched, could be taken over. The way Yemen was overnight, Yemen was an ally. Obama was touting the great success of our working with Yemen. And then we wake up in the morning and the Houthis backed by Iran are in charge. Imagine five or six powers in the Middle East, each of whom is unstable to a degree that's unimaginable. In the West, you know that whatever happens in France, you're not going to wake up tomorrow and find that it's a jihadist regime.

Well, maybe not France. Maybe Britain. That's a better example. Well, maybe not Britain. It could be 50 years. But this is a place where these weapons would be in unstable regimes, which means they could be easily acquired by the worst people on Earth. And here you get to the ISIS and the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. So my answer is keep your eye on the ball, and that is Iran.

Everything else is secondary. Right now the strategy for ISIS, I think, is reasonably good in the sense that it's rollback in Iraq, containment in Syria. But that's a temporary policy. That's a holding action while you're trying to deal with Iran. Charles, just following up on that, this is inherently a counterfactual question,

but given what you know now, do you think the Iraq war was a mistake? That question is asked so many times, and it's a bogus question, because the implication is this. Some of my best questions are bogus, Charles.

But that's why I could say it, because you were reading from cards. So you could disavow ownership of it, which I knew you would. It assumes that the one thing we now know that we didn't know is that Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons. Well, if you were to have told me at the time, number one, Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. Number two, if we were at the top of the regime, the one thing we could not possibly do,

because it would be a disaster, would be to dismantle the Baathist army, to completely overturn the government, to prevent any of the Baathists from having a position in the new administration so they would all become enemies of the state and they would become active opposition to the state, that the light footprint that we chose as our policy upon occupation was precisely the wrong thing to do. When you take over a country like this

and you have to remake it, you need the heavy footprint. That the surge in Iraq, which meant a certain kind of counterinsurgency strategy that involved being in the neighborhoods, working with the locals, which was a fantastic success.

In 2007 and 2008, it turned the rocket to what Obama himself said when he announced the withdrawal of American troops into a successful and stable state. Still tenuous, but nonetheless not what we saw. If you were to tell me all of that, then you have a completely different equation. Then you would have had a choice of saying, you want to go in, overturn Saddam, knowing he's not a threat for weapons of mass destruction. But he has started four wars in the region. He has tremendous ambitions. The sanctions against Iraq were disappearing.

They would have been gone in a year or two. And his economy would have been gone in a year or two, and his economy would have been restored, that he had two sons who would continue the work. We know what kind of work it was. And that we knew what to do upon victory. The victory to overturn him was very quick. It took three weeks. The number of casualties were, relatively speaking, astonishingly small, but that we would have to follow the complete opposite policy of what we actually did

until we got it right with the surge four years late. Then you have a completely different calculation. I'm not sure exactly how people would go on it, but it's not the cheap question of, well, if you knew that he didn't have WMDs, would you do it? Because that's a question that implies that anybody who says otherwise is a fool. There were other factors

we did the wrong policies upon occupation. And had we had the right policies upon occupation and produced a regime reasonably friendly, reasonably stable, reasonably stable. Imagine the strategic position we would have had in the region. And we actually had something like that in 2011 when Obama was in office and he did not

negotiate a status of forces agreement, which would have left a residual American force, would have left us in control of all of these facilities that we now are trying to rebuild or reclaim, would have left us in control, for example, of Iraqi airspace, because they had no air force, would have left us as the dominant power in Iraq, the mediator between the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds, which we had done successfully in places like Mosul.

Imagine those conditions, which we had to some extent at the end of the surgeon, which were completely undone by Obama's liquidation of our presence. Imagine if we'd had that all the way through. I'll give you one if you want to do counterfactuals. So let's imagine we're in Iraq. We are the dominant strategic power. We have control of the air. We have control of the air bases.

And we can influence everything happening in the region. We would have been in an infinitely more advantageous position to, at the time when the rebellion in Syria was rising and when Assad was teetering and before Iran could resupply by air over Iraq, Assad and his dictatorship, we would have been in a position to tip the scales and to make sure he fell. That would mean that it would keep Iran out of Syria. Our own Secretary of State said in testimony, I think a month ago in Congress, that Assad is a puppet of Iran. Iran has extended its influence all the way to the Mediterranean, in large part because of its control of Syria. Imagine if we had been the strategic power in Iraq, controlling airspace, preventing any resupply.

Look at what's happened in Yemen. When the Saudis decided to come into the war, the first thing they did was to interdict the air supply from Iran to Sana'a. The Iranians yesterday protested that the Saudi Air Force bombed the airport in Sana'a to prevent Iranian planes carrying humanitarian assistance. Humanitarian tanks, humanitarian missiles, humanitarian light weaponry. And so

that was an act to do exactly what we need to do with Iran is if you keep their proxies from getting the supply, the training, sometimes, as in Syria, even the manpower, the Revolutionary Guards, it can have a tremendous effect. So the decisive strategic position we might have had if we knew everything that we now know, it would have been ours, and I think it would have been a choice that would have been difficult to make, but it would not at all have been, I think, on its face wrong to have made the choice to go and become the strategically dominant power in the most important strategic country in the region, which was Iraq at the time. So one big question about our domestic politics, and then we'll go into some of these 2016

candidates. At the beginning of the Obama administration, Charles, you said that usually American politics is played within the 40-yard lines, but that President Obama had an ambition to carry the ball much further down the field than that. Has he succeeded or failed in that ideological endeavor? I think that's exactly right. And I think his ambition was to carry the ball into the red zone. No pun intended.

I don't want anybody tweeting, Krauthammer calls Obama communist. Just talking about the football team. I thought you were going to work with the red line thing there, like the 20-yard line is red line. That's too complicated. I leave that to the National Review staff to work with the red line thing there, like the 20-yard line. Yeah, that's too complicated. I leave that to the National Review staff to work on that metaphor. Yes, I think that is what makes Obama unique, and I think he's had partial success.

I think the way to measure this, how much success he's had, is to go back to his State of the Union address, 2009, the first one, where he basically stopped being the Rorschach test he was during the campaign of 2008, but announced his political agenda. And he did it honestly, openly, boldly, I think, courageously, if if you like he was quite specific now you don't remember that speech because you have real lives I for my sins am sentenced to watch, listen to and annotate this man

24 hours a day clearly my sins are many because I remember this speech as if it was yesterday he basically said I didn't come here to reform around the edges. I'm here to fundamentally transform America. And then he was very specific.

He said, I want to do this in three areas. Healthcare, education, and energy. Imagine how ambitious that is. Healthcare is one-sixth of the economy. And I say he succeeded. Maybe parts of Obamacare that can be dismantled, should be dismantled. But he did manage to get it through, I think, by ramming it through a reluctant Congress and surely over a reluctant electorate. But

that will be, if he was hit by lightning today, that would be his legacy. And it will haunt us for a very long time, for all kinds of reasons, the damage it's done to our deficits, to and including the mandate for contraceptives, the substance of which I don't have a problem with, but a lot of people of faith do, and they deserve respect. I mean, I think sort of the great symbol of Obama-ism, the way it's sort of, and it's Gruberian arrogance. I've got to wait for that one to settle in. Decides what's good for you. And if you don't have stuff in your plan, it gets canceled.

I mean, this is what they've managed to do. I don't know about you, but I don't need lactation services. I did 50 years ago. By all accounts, I had a wonderful time. But it's one of a slew of things we don't need. They tell you you need. But the worst is, of course, the contraceptive mandate. And the case that I think exemplifies all of this, I'll just give you the name of the case. This is a bunch of nuns who do God's work.

They treat the dying in hospices, and they refuse to institute a mandate for contraceptives. The HHS has sued them with penalties of millions of dollars, which will put them out of business, unless they provide contraceptives to the people they work with. They have challenged that, and the name of the case is Sibelius versus Little Sisters of the Poor. Now, what side are you on?

You don't have to read the case. You don't have to hear the witnesses. You don't have to hear the witnesses. You don't have to know anything. Sibelius, it's not even the big sisters of the poor. It's the little sisters of the poor. So he succeeded on that. On education, he's done stuff that I think is less well-known than it should be. He has nationalized student loans.

He has, he's on his way, if he gets his way, I don't think he will, but he's trying to. He said in the second inaugural address to, on the way to nationalizing higher education by starting with community college, which he wants to make a federal entitlement. He's done a whole lot of things in destroying the for-profit higher education

system. But the last thing he does I'm sort of sympathetic with, that he wants universal preschool run by the federal government. And the reason I have some sympathy with that is that I think that five-year-olds in America are having all too much fun and it is time that we force them into schools regiment them in a government-run school for that year during which time they are forced to eat Brussels sprouts for lunch that's the way the Chinese do except that American kids will not have to work in the the Nike factory that's the part that I think is better. But, you know, this ambition, and he's doing all of this education stuff,

not through legislation but through regulation. Now, the last bit, so he succeeds on health care. Education, he's got a mixed bag. And energy is the interesting one. Remember, in his first two years when he had control of the Congress, he proposed cap and trade, and it failed. He couldn't get it through a Congress overwhelmingly Democratic. That cap and trade is the most dangerous of all because he would have gotten – the federal government would get control of the pricing and production of energy.

And once you get control of that, you control the sinews of the American economy, and you are in charge. You command all three, health care, education, and energy, and you've got control of what Lenin would call the commanding heights of the society. That Lenin quote was just for historical reasons. I am not calling him a communist.

So, I think half the record, and the real, let me just, I'll finish by saying this. He succeeded with one of the major things he wanted to do. The minute he lost the midterm election in 2010, the Obama agenda, the Obama ideology, the Obama hyper-liberalism died as a matter of legislation because he lost the House. He was never going to get it back again. So nothing of that importance has passed the Congress since 2010, and nothing will between now and when he leaves office. But that's why he's in a hurry to do stuff to legislate through regulation and executive order.

So the immigration, which they could not get through, the DREAM Act you were not able to get through Congress, he does unilaterally, there's legalization now, which he could never have gotten through Congress. He's doing by executive order. They're changing the drug laws without changing the drug laws through what is scandalously being called prosecutorial discretion. It's nothing of the sort. And between EPA and the Energy Department, they're going to destroy coal. Again, not through legislation.

They wouldn't have gotten it. But through regulation. So they're going to get a lot of their agenda through this way, some of which I think will be overturned by the courts, because they are clearly unconstitutional. But that will take years. So I think he gets a 50% rating by his own standards and ambitions. So as all of you know, this is billed as an ideas summit.

And if you heard Larry Kudlow last night, you know we now have a consensus that adult men of a certain age do not need lacation coverage. I don't know whether this is a new idea, but it's certainly an idea. So we've delivered. Charles, we only have about 7 minutes or so left so let's do some lightning round style reactions to 2016 candidates I'll throw out the names

you give us a 30 second or so take on them Hillary Clinton do you want to defer on that one? No, no, no. I'm just winding up here. You know, you throw me a hang in the curve ball. I'm not swinging early.

Don't you love the way they said on Friday, there is not a shred of evidence for any of this? Well, of course not. She shredded the evidence. My bottom line, since it's a lightning thing, is she's a lot weaker candidate than Democrats think. This is a big mistake on their part. She has a constituency that's very loyal,

but she has a lot of people equally fixed in their view of her. The number of undecideds about Hillary's candidacy, probably seven people. They all live in northern New Hampshire in a shack with no running water, and they are all related to each other. I don't think she's going to persuade a lot of people. And I do think she's a weak candidate. Look at what she did in the rollout. When she said, I left the White House broke, we had trouble paying the mortgage on our houses. You know, politics 101. When pleading poverty, do not refer to your domiciles in the plural. Doesn't work.

Marco Rubio, who so far is looking like your best bet in the candidate casino outside of Wine, Women, and Song. Wine, Women, and Song are doing pretty well. And they're a consolation if you lose the rest of the bet. For a while, I was putting that money in a 401k, but we're never going to get there anyway. Marco is a very strong candidate. You can see a root for him. And he's the perfect antithesis to Hillary. If

you ask Democrats, we were talking about this before, Rich and I, if you ask Democrats who they fear the most, I think the answer is Marco. He's the perfect foil. New versus young, you don't have to stress that. It just presents itself. And, you know, when Kennedy ran in 1960, Nixon was about his age, but he basically ran against Eisenhower. And he said, you know, he talked about the new and the new frontier.

Remember what he said in his inaugural address? It's kind of a slight for Eisenhower. After all, he did win the Second World War. Kennedy said the torch has been passed to a new generation. I think the generational contrast is huge. I think the baggage contrast is huge. I think the baggage contrast is huge. And one other thing, the thing about Rubio is

foreign policy is going to be a far more important issue in this campaign than it ever was. Generally, it never is, because Americans are not exactly interested in what happens overseas, for an obvious reason. Bismarck once said that America is the most blessed country in history. It's the

only great power in history ever to be bordered on two sides by weak and friendly countries, and on the other two sides by fish. That explains our long history of isolationism and explains why Rand Paul is a much weaker candidate than he would have been two years ago. I don't think he would make an 11-hour filibuster on droning American citizens. I just heard in the car over here that the latest poll on droning American citizens, not in Topeka but, you know, in Yemen, is overwhelmingly pro. So I think this sort of libertarian, non-interventionist view, which would have been popular in the past is much less so. And Rubio, who I think

is the best articulator of the interventionist, activist, American view, he benefits from that automatically. And one other thing, he expresses it with absolute, sincere passion the way only the son of immigrants can. I'm the son of immigrants can.

I'm the son of immigrants. I know exactly how he feels. He doesn't have to do it off cue cards. He doesn't have to be prompted. He loves America. He believes in American exceptionalism. And when he talks about it, you believe him. And that, I think, is going to be very important

as foreign policy and our defeats and our embarrassments over it begin to rise. My favorite comment about Rand Paul is from the writer Molly Hemingway, who says Rand Paul is what you'd expect, pretty much expect, if you combined Ron Paul with a normal person. And I don't want to be too graphic, and I don't know Mrs. Ron Paul, but I think pretty much that's what happened. So, Charles, I think they're going to give me the high sign soon, so I want to get to one question for the audience and then one last question. So here we go.

Dr. Krauhammer, you are a man of astonishing wisdom and discernment. Oh boy, this is going to be really bad. I hang on your every word every evening at 6.40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. So how is it that you, a man of such formidable intellectual gifts, once wrote speeches for Walter Mondale? I really just made that question up. I've got to get the Walter Mondale thing in any appearance by Charles Smith. That question was written by

Juan Williams. I'm asked that all the time and my answer is always the same. I was young once. So Charles, one last question. So the cast of this conference is much more optimistic than the usual National Review Institute conference, which is usually mired in despair after some terrible debacle. Are you optimistic about America?

I am. I always have been about America in general. I'm not a religious person, but I do believe there's something providential about American history. I mean, when you think of the American story, we start out as a sort of distant civilization, 3,000 miles from Europe, hired by the wilderness on one side, fish on the other. And we produce the greatest generation of political thinkers in history who give us two documents unparalleled in the history of political thought. One, a defense of liberty and advancement of liberty, and the other, a constitution miraculously created from nothing that lasts for 239 years. The French, for example, are on their fifth republic. We are on our first.

The reason I have to add that is I can't go a full hour without mocking the French. So you'll have to forgive me. That's a take of mine. In the 19th century, we need a Lincoln. We get a Lincoln in the 20th. Some of you aren't going to like this, but I'll say it anyway. We need an FDR to get us through the Depression and to win the Second World War. And we get an FDR. That's why I'm a neocon.

Then in the last half of the 20th, we need a Reagan when we're at our lowest ebb and feeling quite demoralized. We get a Reagan. Now, I'm not optimistic because I think we're going to get another Reagan or we're going to get another Lincoln. Surely not. But I don't think we need to. The reason I'm optimistic, the reason we always find our way is because, and here's where if you don't want to be providential about it, there's just something basically decent, wise, noble about the American people, their love of liberty and their willingness to defend it, that is unusual in human history, and then accounts for the fact that we always recover.

It was Churchill who said the Americans always do the right thing after having tried everything else. Well, we just had six years of trying everything else, so I'm confident we are going to do the right thing. Thank you very much.