Reagan: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Q: Ten days away from this election. Can you believe where we are?

Reagan: Well, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I'm holding my breath and all sorts of things like that. I'm a little bit of a pessimist here. I know it looks very good for Barack Obama, but I keep looking at that electoral map and I keep seeing, you know, a long-shot way for [John] McCain to pull this out, so I'm not ready to call this just yet.

Q: Well, let's talk about the race issue first, if we may, because they call it the Bradley Effect -- you know, there are all these different names for the fact that there are many racist people in America who will not say to a pollster they're not going to vote for a black man. How significant is it?

Reagan: Well, we don't know. That's the problem here. This is an X factor. People talk about the Bradley Effect, but that's going way back to the early '80s. AP and Yahoo did a survey, a study recently, and the numbers that they came up with are that there are about 10 percent of Americans who are hard-core racists and who, you know, simply manifestly would not vote for a black candidate under any circumstances, but those people that are out-and-out racists and openly racist primarily vote Republican, so they weren't votes that were available to Obama in the first place.

However, they also found, they determined, that there were about 6 percent of voters, they say, who may be Democrats, who nevertheless will, once they get into the voting booth, secretly not vote for a black candidate. So my rule of thumb has been 5 percent. I think if -- I look state by state -- if Barack Obama is not winning by 5 percent or more, I put that state in a -- you know, in a "maybe" category at best.

Q: Ron Brownstein was just on, and he said the state that's in play for McCain is Pennsylvania, and just for these reasons. Have you heard from any Pennsylvanians on the show any sense of what's going on in Pennsylvania, Ohio, these important battleground states?

Reagan: Well, we do get callers from Pennsylvania and Ohio and all over the country, of course. But you know, it is Air America Radio, and so most of those people are liberals who are calling in, and you know, they will say occasionally that they know people who have odd ideas about Barack Obama, who keep coming up them or are sending them e-mails or whatever saying well, 'Don't you know he's a Muslim' and that kind of thing.

That's one of the more remarkable aspects of this, this whole Muslim thing, and Colin Powell addressed it the other day, I thought quite eloquently, when he said that, you know, as a matter of fact Barack Obama isn't Muslim, he happens to be Christian, but what if he was Muslim? You know, in America that's not supposed to make a difference. We don't have a religious test for public office in America. So if he were a Muslim it shouldn't make any difference to anybody. But of course, apparently it does.

Q: Well, he said it in such a powerful way, and I laughed when I went to the Drudge Report, and Matt Drudge called Colin Powell a weapon of mass destruction.

Reagan: [Laughter] Well, Matt Drudge is sort of a comedian, I guess.

Q: Well, a lot of people are reading him. And Ron, here's my other question, because people are looking at this campaign not unlike they looked at your father's campaign. That is a complete sea change in how people want to change the country. Does it feel like that at all? I know you weren't officially part of the campaign, but he was your father.

Reagan: Yeah. I don't think -- I think it's true that the people really are ready for a change in this country. I don't think you can doubt that. In the majority, people are ready to join the 21st century, frankly, and for the last eight years we've been sort of treading water in a kind of pre-Enlightenment era, half the time.

[Laughter]

Reagan: But I don't think we're going to see, as we did say, in 1984, a candidate who -- and I don't know that we'll ever see this again or at least not in, you know, in our lifetimes -- a candidate who can win every state of the union except Minnesota, for instance.

Q: Right.

Reagan: That's just not going to happen. And if you look at the electoral map and you look at the red and the blue states, you know -- and I know that that's kind of a tired way to look at it, but nevertheless -- if you look at those polls in those states you see that in the red states that you frequently -- John McCain is polling over 60 percent in some of those states, and Barack Obama down in the 30s. And if you go to the blue states you find the same thing in reverse.

So I don't know how you unify those two Americas: the America that is, you know, that mostly lives in cities or urban areas or surrounding suburbs, that's educated, that's not socially conservative necessarily, that's not scared of gay people, that's not scared of stem cells and things like that, how you marry that group of people with the people that are standing up in the [Sarah] Palin rally shouting "Treason" and "Kill him."

Q: And "socialist".

Reagan: And "socialist." Yeah, you know. Apparently if you give money to oil companies it's not socialism, but if you give it to, you know, poor people or spread the wealth around then you're a socialist.

Q: Yeah. I went to the rally in Virginia, and it was very strange. On the one hand, it's great to see all of these passionate people, but with these economic issues, you know, just dominating everything we do, how we live our lives, how you even decide where to go every day, it just feels like a different century.

Reagan: Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. Yeah, there are people out there who are -- who I think are living in a different century and, you know, again, it's a little tough to see how you unite a country that is that divided.

Q: Well, let's pretend the election is over, Barack Obama wins, and he has one looming problem that people are talking about, and that is the far left, the left, Air America folks, all those folks on the Internet, are all going to demand that their candidate really follow what they want to be done, whether it's about the economy or social issues. What happens to this candidate or this president when he has all the pressure of not just the bloggers -- I'm talking about all the extra millions of people who are voting for the first time and they think that they should have a more responsive president -- how do you think he's going to handle it?

Reagan: Well, that's the million dollar question here. Or the $700 billion question, or something. You know, hopefully he listens to us and does whatever we say, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. I don't know that I don't take issue with the idea of the far left in this country. I'm sure that there are a few scattered people out there who could really legitimately be called far left -- you know, they are Maoists or something like that -- but you know, for the most part when you talk far left in the United States you are talking about people who may prefer universal single payer health care or...

Q: Right. But I'm not really saying...

Reagan: ...favor marriage for gay couples.

Q: I'm not using the GOP brand of far left. I'm really talking more about activists, and it could be, you know, if this were a Republican president in this scenario we're talking about, it would be the same thing. People now feel that Washington's completely tied to their, you know, to their homes, and to how they live their lives. So I really feel there's going to be this huge expectation that things are going to turn around. So in all of these terrible issues that need to be resolved that Obama is saying he's going to deal with, whether it's energy or the economy, whatever the issue is, I just wonder how you govern with that much pressure.

Reagan: Well, with some difficulty. It'll help, of course, if the congressional elections, Senate and House elections, go the way the Democrats would like them to go. If, for instance, they can get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, that will make things a lot easier for Barack Obama.

Having said that, though, you know the Democratic Party as a whole is not on the far left. I mean, these are not, you know, fringe lefties out there, progressives, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and people like that, they're pretty centrist-y kind of people. So I'm not really sure what issue you have in mind when you're talking about pressure from the far left. What do you imagine the far left, as it were, pressuring Barack Obama to do?

Q: Well, I don't mean -- I misspoke. I shouldn't have said far-left-far-left. I'm talking about the activist left, just like the activist right, you know, when we hear people at these campaign stops, right, saying "socialist" and all the things that you said. So now all of these folks -- I mean I consider it a good thing, as someone in the industry and someone who cares about politics, I think the more voices heard, the better off they are, I think better off any government is. I'm just curious, you, as a long-time broadcaster and coming from a political family, if you wonder how that's going to manifest itself. I mean, we've all been around when there's been these telephone campaigns. Well, now it's the Internet, and you go right into the Web sites of each of the candidates, the president -- this White House had quite an extensive outreach online -- and I'm sure Barack Obama, just as they've done in the campaign, is going to do the same thing.

So to me this is less about issues and more about, what do you do when America has a way to come right to you and say, we need this thing done; we want to have more money in our paycheck, you know, we want to have the Supreme Court nominee we want. I'm not talking about the traditional issues. I just think it's a fascinating thing to look at.

Reagan: Well, you're talking, yeah, methodology, I suppose. Well, you're right that the people can come right to the White House, as it were, online, but the White House can come right to them, too. It's a two-way street, of course, so Barack Obama, I would expect, would use the Internet -- and probably effectively -- to spread the word to people online and explain himself, use it as a sort of e-bully pulpit, I guess, and how effective that will be remains to be seen, of course.

Q: Right. Because you've hosted shows for years, right. Now that you're doing this show, OK, you've got people who call you every day and they want results. They don't want to just talk to you, they want to convince you. They want to hit you on the head and have you on their side, right? People no longer just want to talk. They want action!

Reagan: Yes! Well...

Q: You better be ready to give it to them, Ron!

[Laughter]

Reagan: It's all on my shoulders.

Q: It's all on your shoulders. I have to ask you, how is your mom doing? I know she had a bad fall.

Reagan: Actually she's doing quite well. She's back home now, of course, and she's getting up on her feet. It wasn't quite as bad as it sounded. She did crack a couple of bones in her pelvis, but they were hairline fractures, so there's no surgery needed or anything like that. And you know, I'm hoping it was a bit of a wake-up call so that she can make a few necessary changes in her lifestyle that'll, you know, prevent this sort of thing from happening again. This is something that people, you know, go through with their elderly parents and grandparents all the time.

Q: It's so tough, so tough. Well, as you know, everyone cares about what she does. Speaking of that, is she going to vote for Obama?

Reagan: [Laughter] Well, you'd have to ask her that question. You know that she's officially endorsed John McCain.

Q: I know, but I didn't ask that!

[Laughter]

Reagan: No, I know you didn't.

[Laughter]

Q: Well, because you told me for Newsweek that she likes what Obama has to say.

Reagan: She does. She likes him. She's impressed with him as a candidate. I think that she may -- not to, you know, oversell this or anything, but she sees elements of her husband, of my father, in Barack Obama and his ability to connect to people and communicate with people. Now, beyond that I have no idea, you know, what she's going to do when she gets into the voting booth, or probably vote absentee. So I just don't know.

Q: Alrighty. Ron Reagan, thanks for being with us. Give her our best.

Reagan: I sure will. Thanks.

Q: "The Ron Reagan Show" is on Air America 8 to 9 p.m. on Eastern Time. Take care, Ron.

Reagan: Thank you.