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Tavis: Jonathan Alter is the senior editor for "Newsweek" magazine. His latest book takes a look at the leadership and remarkable success of Franklin Roosevelt's first few months in office. The book is called "The Defining Moment, F.D.R.'s First Hundred Days, and the Triumph of Hope." Jonathan Alter, as always, nice to see you, man.

Jonathan Alter: Great to see you, Tavis.

Tavis: I'm glad to have you back on the program.

Alter: Thanks.

Tavis: I wanna get to F.D.R. in just a second, but speaking of presidents who are leading in crises, George W. Bush, of course, news tonight on immigration and what he expects or hopes to do about it with these troops, these National Guard troops, officers on the border. Tell me how you think this is gonna play.

Alter: Well, first, I think it's a good idea to try it. I'm not sure it's the right idea, but one of the things I learned from researching Franklin Roosevelt, he believed in what he called bold, persistent experimentation. In other words, you can't just let problems fester. You have to try to use government to address them. So I do commend the president for at least trying something.

It may be that this is the wrong solution, and that the American people sense that a little bit. He's so far down in the polls that he has a ways to go before he gets his credibility back where people will trust him with a new idea. So, it may be that he just doesn't quite, he's not holding enough political cards right now to make this fly.

Tavis: Where this particular idea is concerned, what value do you think it holds? There are any number of things, I suspect, that one could do as president to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. National Guard troops on the border, what's the value in that?

Alter: Well, I think he sees it as part of a broader solution. By itself, it's pointless. But if you match it with a lot of other ways of addressing the problem, and a guest worker program, a path to citizenship. Then you could use some carrots and sticks. The problem with it is, I think is less about straining the National Guard, although that is a concern. It's that what do they do with the Mexicans that they seize?

In the past, they've simply released them. They call it catch and release. And then they just try to get over the border again. So you're really just spending a lot of money to accomplish nothing. So they need some better way of figuring out what to do with them, otherwise, I don't think it's gonna work very well. But I respect the idea of at least moving forward on the issue to try certain things.

Tavis: Let me ask you about how you think a couple of specific constituencies might interpret this. First his conservative base. We all know, and I intimated at the top of this show that part of what we expect is happening here is that the president is trying to placate the conservative wing of his party. We've got midterm elections less than six months away. What's this do for his conservative base? Does it hurt? Is it too little, too late?

Alter: I think it's probably too little, too late. I think it probably helps with the conservative base a little bit, but remember, the conservatives are split on this. The business conservatives don't like it, because they don't have any problem with immigration. They want the cheap labor. The sort of talk radio conservatives, for lack of a better name, (laughs) they're gonna like this.

But I think he has a long way to go, even to get his credibility back with them. Because I've been on some conservative talk radio shows recently, and they are pounding him. The same people that used to be singing his praises not too long ago.

Tavis: Yeah. John Kerry, this last election, did not pull the number of Hispanic voters that Al Gore had pulled four years prior to that. So Kerry did not pull in 2004 what Gore pulled in 2000. So the Republicans picked up votes in the Latino community in this last presidential election. What does this do for Bush, the Republicans, well, not Bush. He ain't running again. But what's it do for Republicans where the Latino vote is concerned, come '06 and '08?

Alter: Not good. If you're talking about the National Guard, basically using military might against people who all they're doing is seeking a better life. And they are often the relatives of these Hispanic voters that the president wants to get for the Republicans. So this could have serious consequences for the Republican efforts to woo the Hispanic vote. It might be a little bit like what happened in California with Pete Wilson, where his political career and the fortunes of California Republicans were basically destroyed because they seemed punitive on the issue of immigration.

Tavis: But Rove is a smart guy. I assume they've thought through this. What are they thinking if they assume, as we certainly do, that this may very well cost you?

Alter: I think they've polled it and they found that it does help to solidify their base. It's the beginning of that process. Their big concern right now is that Republicans stay home in November, and they lose one of the chambers of the U.S. Congress. So I think they kind of figure, we'll worry about getting the Hispanics back later. First, we have to get our conservative base to at least be interested enough to go to the polls. Otherwise, we're in deep trouble.

Tavis: Let me switch to F.D.R. Before I do that, just for a second, though, the book is called "The Defining Moment." Is this a defining moment for Bush's presidency? And I ask that 'cause I wanna compare and contrast these guys in just a second. But is this a defining moment for his presidency, or is it over, essentially? Has he been written off for what his legacy's going to be or not be, as it were?

Alter: No, it's not over, because there's a thousand days left in this presidency, and a lot can happen. A lot of external events can happen. But he's in a deep hole, and one of the first rules of holes is stop digging. And he's been sinking lower and lower and lower, and it's down to historic lows for a president now. He's getting close to where Nixon was when he was nearly impeached and had to resign.

So, he needs to rethink his presidency, and I think his problem is that he's been so rigid and inflexible in the way he's approached his job that it's very hard for him to actually take a serious look at what to do better. Remember the press conference where he's asked, can you think of any mistakes you've made, and he said, I can't think of one? What kind of a leader is that, who can't even acknowledge that he has made a number of mistakes, and hasn't thought hard enough about what he could do better? That's a huge contrast, by the way, to Franklin Roosevelt.

Tavis: I'm not asking you to do something now that you haven't already done in this text. As a matter of fact, Bob Herbert, I saw in the 'New York Times' today, taking a stab at comparing F.D.R. and George W. Bush. But since you do some of it in this text already, compare and contrast Bush and F.D.R. for me.

Alter: Well, they came from the same part of American society. The aristocracy. They both were related to famous presidents. Bush's father, and Roosevelt's fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. They both had strong mothers. They both were depicted, derided with exactly the same epithet before coming to the presidency. Lightweight. They called Franklin Delano Roosevelt F.D. 'Feather Duster' Roosevelt. And they even used the word lightweight. (unintelligible)

Tavis: That's hard to imagine in retrospect, isn't it?

Alter: It is, 'cause we have this marbleized image of the guy.

Tavis: Absolutely, yeah.

Alter: But he was really run down. He wasn't nominated until the fourth ballot of the 1932 Democratic Convention. He was quite unpopular within the Democratic Party for a lot of reasons that I explained. And so, there are these similarities. But the similarities basically end when they become president. And I think one of the easiest ways to understand, it's not just that they came from very different political philosophies.

Despite their common backgrounds. It's that President Bush too often puts loyalty ahead of performance. And Franklin Roosevelt almost always put performance ahead of loyalty. If you're gonna be competent, if you're gonna get the job done for the American people, you have to hold people accountable for their performance, not give them the Presidential Medal Of Freedom when they fail.

And this is a big difference. And there are many others, we could talk all day about this. But I also think that whereas the beginning, when Roosevelt came in, and this is at the center of my book, and he said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And this rallied the country, calmed people's fears. It actually wasn't true, (laughs) because people had a lot more to fear than fear itself.

They had to fear how are you gonna put food on the table? They were wiped out. If you had your money in the wrong bank, 10,000 banks went under, you were done. This is a level of despair and poverty that is simply unimaginable for all but a relatively small number in the United States right now. And by contrast, President Bush, I sometimes think his motto is the only thing we have to use is fear itself.

That if they don't go to the well, once again, this fall and try to scare everybody, if you don't vote Republican, Al Qaeda's gonna attack again, that they're gonna lose. So they're gonna go back to that old Karl Rove playbook. I don't think it's gonna work for them as well this time. But that's the only politics they know.

Tavis: By all accounts, Roosevelt was personable and friendly. By all accounts, George W. Bush is personable and friendly. Likable guy if you're in his space. How is it that F.D.R. could use that style, that friendliness, that guy-next-door something, whatever you wanna call that. That thing he had, he used it. Bush apparently has the same thing, but ain't been able to use it effectively as F.D.R. did.

Alter: Well actually, I think if you go back, you're absolutely right about them both having good emotional intelligence as they call it, and relate well to people and to ordinary people. And President Bush has been very good at that as well, that common touch. And if you go back to the early days of the presidency, after 9/11, he was also in F.D.R.'s class as a communicator.

He was rallying the country, those speeches went over really well. He was way, way up in the polls. So I think the difference is less on the question of having a vision. They both have visions. Quite different visions, but they have visions. They both are good communicators. But on execution, action, competence, policymaking. This is where you really see the gap in performance.

And running the government is a complicated enterprise. And really, leadership, and I tried to give people a sense of the importance of leadership, not just in government but in business, at the P.T.A., wherever. It really is a very elusive quality. And so I tried to give people a sense of how did Roosevelt convey that? How did he lead? And, and Bush, now, his problem is that he's failing to lead.

He's lost his credibility, he's lost his trust, and he's lost faith that he is competently executing the office of president. And that's something that Roosevelt, even when he didn't solve the Great Depression, it wasn't till World War II that we got out of it, but he always gave people the impression that he was getting up every day and working the problem. Trying to work on their problems. And that's what Bush has lost.

Tavis: Let me ask you as an exit question, Jonathan, and it's obviously impossible to do justice to F.D.R.'s career, even a text about his life, in 15 minutes. But what, for you, is his abiding, his enduring legacy? And I ask that because there is no shortage of books about F.D.R. And every time somebody writes a book about him, I'm like wow, what else is there to learn about this guy? And you guys keep cranking books about F.D.R.

Alter: Well first of all, almost all the books about F.D.R. are either about World War II, which this is not, except in the epilogue, or they're biographies where his life goes by at 350 miles an hour. This is the first book that is about this brief period where he saved both Capitalism and Democracy in a few short weeks. Why do I call it "The Defining Moment?"

Here's what changed. Look at something like Katrina. There's a lot of argument, did Bush respond quickly enough? Too slow? Whatever? Nobody is questioning whether those people on those rooftops in New Orleans and in Mississippi, whether they deserve the help of the government. Before Franklin Roosevelt, it was, if they drown, that's their problem.

Maybe the government can help with some voluntary efforts, but the social contract did not include coming to the aid of people in trouble. And Roosevelt changed that. It wasn't an accident that before 1936, when he was reelected, African Americans voted Republican. That was the party of Lincoln. After Franklin Roosevelt came on the scene, they voted Democratic.

Because they understood that there was a president in office who cared about their interests on some level. It didn't always do right by them, because of the southern racists who were in the Democratic Party. But he and the government cared about them, and he believed, in his words, that you shouldn't be subjected to the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster without some help from your government.

Not a handout, but maybe a job, or some, and he created, as you know, these unbelievable jobs programs. And a lot of other things. Social Security, he created that. So I tried to explain how did he change this deal, they called it the New Deal, but it was really a bargain between the people and their government.

Tavis: And as all of his work is, it's worth reading. "The Defining Moment, F.D.R.'s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope," by my personal favorite 'Newsweek' writer Jonathan Alter. Jonathan, nice to have you here. Nice to have you.

Alter: Thanks very much. Good to see you, Tavis.