With the Mark Foley scandal and other Republican troubles in the headlines, can the Democrats take back Congress? We ask David Gergen, former White House advisor to Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. He says yes -- as long as the Dems present fresh ideas. "I think there are a lot of Americans now open to alternative perspectives to what they've been hearing from the folks in charge. But they want to hear, if you're a Democrat, how would you do it differently? It's not enough to say 'throw the bums out.'" He tells us why the Democrats should get a spine on the torture issue, what they can learn from Ronald Reagan, and other tips for winning in November.

Also, secretary of state is an extremely important elections-related position -- think Florida's Katherine Harris -- but most Americans don't even know who theirs is. We speak with James Rucker of the Secretary of State Project, which gives nonpartisan recommendations for secretary of state elections based on who will best protect voters. He tells us why the position is so important: "Secretaries of state set the rules for elections, they carry out elections, and when things go wrong, they become the referee."

Plus, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg is the author of "Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show." He tells us that conservatives simply do a better job of using language than progressives. To prove that Republicans stay "on message" better, he decided to "take all of the speeches that were given at the 1996 Republican convention, put them in one big file, and run one of those summarization programs that looks for frequent words and constructs a five-sentence summary. It came up with a five-sentence speech that could stand in for every conservative or Republican speech that's been given in the past 50 years." When de did the same for the Democratic convention, "it produced word salad. it made no sense at all because democrats were all over the place linguistically."

Finally, we talk to Eric Steel about his new film, "The Bridge," about suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge. After releasing a film that shows people jumping to their deaths, he's become a prominent proponent of building a "suicide barrier" to keep people from jumping off. However, he says building a barrier isn't enough. "We're talking about 24 deaths a year at Golden Gate Bridge, which is a lot in a short stretch of road, but in this country we have 35,000 deaths by suicide a year. There's this enormous problem out there that we need to be more concerned about."

All this, plus intrepid reporter Morey Meniscus visits former congressman Mark Foley in rehab.

Web extra: Click here to listen to the extended version of our interview with Geoffrey Nunberg.