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Tavis: Bill Press is a longtime political analyst and commentator and a past chairman of the California Democratic Party. He is also the host of his own syndicated radio show, which can be heard weekdays on both XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. His new book is called "Train Wreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution and Not a Moment Too Soon." (Laughter) Ouch. Bill, nice to have you back. How you been, my friend.

Bill Press: Hey, man, it's great to see you. It's great to see you.

Tavis: It's good to see you.

Press: We started out together a long time ago, yeah.

Tavis: We did, a long time ago here in L.A. You gave me a chance, and so I appreciate for that so many years ago.

Press: I recognize a star when I see one.

Tavis: Yeah, well, you have good judgment. Anyway, thank you -

Press: Even a budding young star at the time.

Tavis: It's a great story, for those who are trying to figure out what this is, before I hit the national airwaves on radio on television I was doing commentary here locally. But Bill Press is one of the persons that pushed me into it and gave me good advice when I first got started. Here we are years later, talking on PBS.

Press: It's great, isn't it?

Tavis: It's good to see you.

Press: God bless America.

Tavis: Absolutely. (Laughter) Only in America.

Press: Right.

Tavis: The book is called "Train Wreck," as I said, "The End of the Conservative Revolution, Not a Moment Too Soon." Let me start by asking you what makes you believe that the end of the - that's a bold statement, the end of the conservative revolution.

Press: I think it's over, and I think - I'd like to believe that we progressives or liberals - I call myself a liberal - had better ideas and we kind of shot them down. But they shot themselves in the foot. We didn't do it, they did it to them. And you know what - I make three points in this book, and just looking at the facts. One fact is they came to power and they controlled everything. They owned the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court and the media, I would argue. They owned everything.

Number two, they screwed everything up. They did. Everything they touched, they trashed. Therefore - and the point I really try to make in the book is they shouldn't be trusted with power again. They should be - their permanent position ought to be in the minority, making sure that those of us in the majority just don't go too far.

Tavis: Wishful thought; we'll come back to that latter point in just a second.

Press: Let's hope so, right.

Tavis: But my sense, though, is that every - every party, every political ilk in this country has - it's like a roller coaster, Bill, it goes up and down.

Press: Oh, yeah.

Tavis: It ebbs and flows, and that's why I'm pressing you, respectfully, on this notion that they're dead, that it's over, as opposed to them having a season where they're out of touch, a season where they're out of the majority.

Press: Well, I would - of course, I'm an author right? So I get to embellish to make a point. (Laughter)

Tavis: I'm on talk shows on PBS, I can't do that.

Press: And I'm willing to admit that someday way far in the future, they might come back. But this conservative movement started about 40, 50 years ago with Russell Kirke and then William F. Buckley Jr. and then Barry Goldwater, for example, Robert Taft. And they built up and they built up and when they finally came to power, Tavis, they delivered the exact opposite of what they said they were going to deliver.

So for now, I'm convinced for now the conservative movement, as we knew it, is dead. Think of what they promised. They promised - what do they stand for? Conservatives, we all know. Smaller government, fiscal responsibility, a non-interventionist foreign policy, and a Constitutionally limited president. And what do they deliver, right?

The biggest government we've ever had, the biggest deficits we've ever had, the biggest national debt, this trigger happy foreign policy, and a president and a vice president who think they're above the law. So that's why I say, and I think what the problem is, that there's a genetic defect in conservatives, I find, which is when you start out hating government, you can't make government work.

It just doesn't - it's not going to work. When you're convinced, as Ronald Reagan said, that government is not part of the solution, government is the problem - well, if you start out with that mind set, look what Bush did to FEMA.

Tavis: It almost begs the question, if you feel that way about government, why want to be a part of it in the first place?

Press: Exactly, exactly. Why even run for public office? But then, you see, so they run against government, and then they get in there and they've made government bigger and more expensive and wildly out of control than ever.

Tavis: Respond to the argument, the notion that many people have in this country, and legitimately so, if not about you before now, maybe about you now but certainly about people like you, who write these books that take these rabid positions. In other words, they say that people like Bill Press are the problem.

That it's books like these, books that come out and demonize the other side, say they're dead and say they should never be trusted with power again, how is that advancing the cause of America? How is that advancing the cause of the conversation we ought to be having when we're demonizing, slamming each other, inside the Beltway?

Press: I'm a radical, right? I believe telling the truth is good for the American people, and that's all I do in the - I don't demonize in this book. I looked at the facts and I went back to the writings of the original conservatives and I go through the environment, honesty and integrity, foreign policy, every area, and I show what they promised and then I contrast that with what they delivered. The facts speak for themselves.

As I say, I think every conservative - I've talked to Bob Novak about this book, I talked to Pat Buchanan when I was writing this book. They're friends of mine. They agree. The conservative party - when they came to power, Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan and George Bush, they went off the tracks. We didn't get a conservative governing philosophy, we got more big government.

So I think I just tell the truth. Now, if they can't abide by the truth and can't swallow it, that's their problem.

Tavis: What about the difference, though, Bill, between individuals who happen to be members of the conservative movement being train wrecks themselves as opposed to the conservative movement being a train wreck?

Press: I think we've got both, actually. You have some, like a Duke Cunningham, who's cooling his heels in federal prison now, rightfully so, because he abused his power so much in taking so much money for his own personal gain that he broke the law and he got caught.

But it's more than a Newt Gingrich, who also came to power and lost it because of his personal problems, but it's more than just the individuals, a collection of individuals. I think there, again, is an inherent flaw in the governing philosophy that if you begin not trusting government - and I'm not - you and I, we've talked about this. I don't believe government is the solution to all of our problems.

The family, fundamentally, our churches, our other institutions. But government can be part of the solution to a lot of problems. But if you start out distrusting government period, across the board, it's not going to work.

Tavis: On the back of this book, and I want to pull a couple of them out in just a second, on the back of the book you say - the book reads "Ten things 'Train Wreck,' the book, reveals that Republicans hope you never find out." Ten things you reveal the Republicans don't ever want us to find out. There are three or four of those I want to pull out here in just a second.

Before I do that, though, since you raised a guy that we both know well - you know him better than I do because you've actually worked with him on a TV show over the years, Pat Buchanan. You saw this - I'm trying to find the right word, and this is public television here - I'm trying to find the right word to describe that nasty open letter that Pat Buchanan wrote. The whitey letter. You know what I'm talking about?

Press: I do, I do.

Tavis: You saw this?

Press: Yeah.

Tavis: I was on Bill Maher's "Real Time" show I guess a couple of weeks ago. Bill asked me to come on and we talked about this Pat Buchanan letter. A lot of Americans have read it on the Internet, it's been circulated widely everywhere, and I said on Bill's show that I thought Pat Buchanan, for me - who I've known and worked with - had become, with that letter, a racial arsonist.

I was so - disappointed in Pat is not the right word for me because of what he had to say in that letter about Black people in America. He's your friend, that's what you said earlier. How would you define, how would you describe what Pat wrote in that letter?

Press: I think your description is a good one. I hadn't heard that before. I've enjoyed a good working relationship with Pat, and on some issues Pat is - Pat and I are brothers. When we were doing our show on MSNBC, "Buchanan and Press," the reason we both got fired, they ended the show, is because both of us, liberal and conservative, were against the war in Iraq, even before it started, in the build-up to the war.

He because he believed in this non-interventionist foreign policy, me because I didn't believe the lies we were hearing out of the Bush White House. Let me - and another issue, when we were on "Crossfire," Pat and I, medical marijuana, trade with Cuba. Two issues we used to battle on. Pat has come around on both of those issues.

So on so many things Pat, I think, is a clear thinker, but he does have a problem on race and on racial issues. On Tucker's show not so long ago I accused him of being a White supremacist.

Tavis: Not a compliment.

Press: No, exactly, right? (Laughter) So you and I kind of maybe both went (unintelligible). And Pat just went off the reservation on that. I thought it was an ugly letter, I thought it was unfair, and it was close to being racist, and it was demeaning to all the achievements of African Americans in this country.

Tavis: I just wanted to ask you because you guys did do a TV show together, and so I know you have a relationship.

Press: We did, and sometimes, you know, I think Pat's coming around and then he'll do something like that and I think, "This is the old Pat."

Tavis: These 10 things that the book reveals that Republicans don't want us to ever find out, three or four I want to pull out right quick, in no particular order. You argue in the book that Reagan was worse than Nixon, and that Bush is worse than both. What do you mean by that? Bush worse than both of them?

Press: Yeah. Oh, I think he's the most incompetent of all the presidents in so many areas. Let's just take - let's take the environment, which is one we don't much talk about. That's one chapter in here. When I first started out as a kid working in Sacramento, Ronald Reagan was still the governor. And as governor, Ronald Reagan was a pretty good environmentalist.

He appointed a great guy who was resources secretary, a man named Mike Livermore, he signed the Wild Rivers Bill, he supported a lot of environment legislation. And Richard Nixon, by the way, if you look at all the presidents, after Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon was probably the greatest environmental president.

He signed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency - all came along through Richard Nixon. Now, he either believed in it or he thought it was politically advantageous, but he delivered it. When Reagan got back to Washington, by that time, he's in the "if you've seen one redwood you've seen them all" philosophy. So he was very anti-environmental as a president, Nixon, again, being the greatest and Reagan being very bad.

But then George Bush comes in, the former oil man, and his philosophy from the beginning - on the environment, the worst president that we've ever had. But I think you could say the same thing on the abuse of presidential power, and I think you could say the same thing on just simply running the government. I think Bush has proved to be a very incompetent CEO.

Tavis: You raised this issue earlier in this conversation; I want to come back to it now - why you think conservatives can never again - never again be trusted with power?

Press: Because as I've said a couple of times, I think when they approach a problem, right, first of all they run against Washington and then when they get there, they go out of their way to make sure that government is not doing its job. And that's kind of theory, but let me give you - to me, the classic example is FEMA.

Under Bill Clinton, FEMA was probably the most efficient of all the government agencies. Jamie Lee Whit was the head of it; he was an emergency management expert. He was in the Cabinet, he had direct access to the president, they were ready. We saw with the earthquakes out here in California, with the fires, the brush fires, FEMA was on the job.

When Bush became president he appointed his campaign manager, Joe Allbaugh, as the head of FEMA. Had no emergency management experience, he gutted the budget, he moved FEMA from the Cabinet down to the bowels of the Department of Homeland Security. So Joe All Baugh, if he wanted to get access to the White House, he had about 10 layers to go through.

And Joe Allbaugh went in front of Congress about two months after he was nominated and he said, "We don't think it's the job of the federal government to respond to natural disasters. That's the job of the states." So -

Tavis: You don't need FEMA then.

Press: Exactly, so what happened? Katrina. Where's FEMA? They didn't deliver, they couldn't deliver, they didn't have the resources to deliver and we saw what happened.

Tavis: I've just scratched the surface of Bill Press's new book. It's called "Train Wreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution and Not a Moment Too Soon." And a lot of stuff in here he argues that Republicans don't want us ever to find out but Bill puts it in the book. Nice to see you, Bill.

Press: Great to see you too, Tavis.

Tavis: Good to see you, as always.

Press: Thank you so much for your time and for the great work you're doing.

Tavis: My pleasure.