New Yorker: The Political Scene
By The New Yorker
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Podcast Description
A weekly discussion about the President and developments in Washington, hosted by The New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, and featuring the magazine's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and other contributors.
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Nicholas Lemann and James Surowiecki on the economics and politics of student debt. | Nicholas Lemann and James Surowiecki on the economics and politics of student debt. | 5/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
Kelefa Sanneh and William Finnegan on Romney's big problem with Hispanic voters. | Kelefa Sanneh and William Finnegan on Romney's big problem with Hispanic voters. | 5/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
Margaret Talbot and Ryan Lizza discuss Obama on gay marriage and reports of Romney bullying a gay student in high school. | Margaret Talbot and Ryan Lizza discuss Obama on gay marriage and reports of Romney bullying a gay student in high school. | 5/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
Evan Osnos and Ryan Lizza discuss Chen Guangcheng and the diplomatic crisis with China. | Evan Osnos and Ryan Lizza discuss Chen Guangcheng and the diplomatic crisis with China. | 5/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy on the Romney and Obama campaigns' search for a slogan. | Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy on the Romney and Obama campaigns' search for a slogan. | 4/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Evan Osnos and John Cassidy on the scandal in China. | Evan Osnos and John Cassidy on the scandal in China. | 4/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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James Surowiecki and Ryan Lizza on the politics of taxing the rich. | James Surowiecki and Ryan Lizza on the politics of taxing the rich. | 4/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
John Cassidy and Amy Davidson preview the general election. | John Cassidy and Amy Davidson preview the general election. | 4/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
Jeffrey Toobin and Ryan Lizza discuss the oral arguments on Obamacare. | Jeffrey Toobin and Ryan Lizza discuss the oral arguments on Obamacare. | 3/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
Jeffrey Toobin and Ryan Lizza discuss the upcoming Supreme Court hearing on Obama's health-care reform. | Jeffrey Toobin and Ryan Lizza discuss the upcoming Supreme Court hearing on Obama's health-care reform. | 3/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
Margaret Talbot and Ryan Lizza discuss the politics of contraception. | Margaret Talbot and Ryan Lizza discuss the politics of contraception. | 3/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
David Remnick and Steve Coll discuss Obama's options on Iran. | David Remnick and Steve Coll discuss Obama's options on Iran. | 3/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, and John Cassidy discuss a weakened Romney and Obama's new rhetoric. | Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, and John Cassidy discuss a weakened Romney and Obama's new rhetoric. | 2/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
Kelefa Sanneh and Ryan Lizza on the Ron Paul factor. | Kelefa Sanneh and Ryan Lizza on the Ron Paul factor. | 2/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hendrik Hertzberg, John Cassidy, and Ryan Lizza on Rick Santorum's surge. | Hendrik Hertzberg, John Cassidy, and Ryan Lizza on Rick Santorum's surge. | 2/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
Jane Mayer and Ryan Lizza on money and the Presidential race. | Jane Mayer and Ryan Lizza on money and the Presidential race. | 2/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza discuss Mitt Romney's attacks on Obama. | John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza discuss Mitt Romney's attacks on Obama. | 2/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy discuss the polarized political climate. | Ahead of Thursday night's Republican Presidential debate in Florida, Dorothy Wickenden, Ryan Lizza, and John Cassidy discuss the G.O.P. candidates' chances and President Obama's State of the Union address on this weeks Political Scene podcast. Both Cassidy and Lizza say that for Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, the Florida primary will determine a lot. Lizza observes: "It still seems close in Florida. The question for the Gingrich campaign would be, if he cant build on that momentum from South Carolina, that big upset victory, and turn that into a victory in Florida, is there a real strong case for him going forward?" And, Cassidy, looking at the Romney campaign, says, "If he does win on Tuesday, he will have righted the ship and he will once again go ahead and be the strong favorite to be the nominee." Of course, the Republicans have--need I remind you?--been campaigning for a while now. But on Tuesday, President Obama gave a State of the Union address that, Cassidy says, was effectively the beginning of his reelection campaign: "I don't think it was a fantastic speech by his standards. But I think he did what he had to do. He laid out a road map for the campaign, and he put forward a few popular measures, which he can get through. And he drew a big contrast between himself and the Republicans." Lizza, who writes in this week's issue about how Obama has had to put aside his hope of bridging the partisan divide, says Obama's campaign is "not really going to be 'Change we can believe in.' It'll be more like 'You think it's bad now? It could be a whole lot worse if you elect the other guy.' " | 1/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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19 |
Steve Coll and Amy Davidson on Obama's Iran problem. | Steve Coll and Amy Davidson on Obama's Iran problem. | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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20 |
John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza discuss the attacks on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. | John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza discuss the attacks on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. | 1/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hendrik Hertzberg, Jane Mayer, and Ryan Lizza on the new Super PACs and their unrestricted money. | Already, the 2012 Presidential campaign season is shaping up to be different from campaigns past. On this week's Political Scene podcast, Hendrik Hertzberg, Jane Mayer, Ryan Lizza, and Dorothy Wickenden discuss the fallout from the Iowa caucus and the rise of Super PACs. "Iowa proved that money mattered," Lizza says. "The pro-Romney Super PAC destroyed Gingrich in Iowa. There's no doubt about that." The attacks on Gingrich, who ended up in fourth place in Iowa, cleared room for Rick Santorum to gain momentum, Hertzberg says. "There wouldn't have been any surge if the three or four who were in line ahead of him hadn't destroyed themselves.... It was essentially a matter of superb timing--not timing of his making. He got wildly lucky." There was another factor at play, however, Mayer says: the debates. "I think they have really tested the candidates. It's not just about money so far, because if it were, Rick Perry would be way up at the top of the pack along with Romney," Mayer says. "What stopped Rick Perry is Rick Perry." Once the nominee is in place, Hertzberg predicts, the unchecked spending of Super PACs will mean that Republicans will "be able to go after a sitting President with a kind of viciousness that has never been seen before." | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Former Senator Alan Simpson answers questions about Gingrich, Romney, and Obama's failure to get a deal on the deficit. | On this week's Political Scene podcast, former Senator Alan Simpson joins Dorothy Wickenden and Ryan Lizza to discuss the failed Bowles-Simpson plan for fiscal reform, the G.O.P. candidates for President, and the polarized political climate. Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, remembers attempts to work across party lines under President George H. W. Bush, which, he says, fell apart at the hands of Newt Gingrich--Simpson calls him "Newtie"--who refused to increase taxes. Simpson is succinct about Gingrich's run for President: "Those of us who know him the best are probably the least enthused by him." He has more to say about Romney: "I think he's the only one that will be able to cut the mustard, cut through the crap, and say, "Wait a minute, who are we looking for here?" We're looking for a person who has learned how to take a failing operation of large magnitude...and put it on a solid, solid financial basis.... The others have no concept of that. None." Simpson says that both sides play the partisan game: "Every speech the President gave about bipartisanship was beautifully phrased. And, then, because in a hell of a intense fundraising mode, he gets to L.A. or San Francisco or New York or Detroit, and he just blasts the Republican party.... That's hypocrisy. You can't do that at your base and just make them froth at the mouth, then come back and play sweet talk with the opposition." | 12/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ryan Lizza, John Cassidy, and Jeffrey Toobin discuss the race in Iowa and beyond. | Ryan Lizza, John Cassidy, and Jeffrey Toobin discuss the race in Iowa and beyond. | 12/16/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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George Packer and Ryan Lizza talk to Barney Frank about partisan gridlock, Newt Gingrich, and Occupy Wall Street. | George Packer and Ryan Lizza talk to Barney Frank about partisan gridlock, Newt Gingrich, and Occupy Wall Street. | 12/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Jane Mayer and Ryan Lizza discuss the Gingrich surge. | Newt Gingrich "just doesn't play by anyone's rules," Jane Mayer says on this week's Political Scene podcast. Mayer joins Ryan Lizza and Dorothy Wickenden to discuss Gingrich's rise, which is beginning to look more lasting than the spikes of popularity that other Republican candidates have enjoyed. "Gingrich only looks like a plausible alternative to Romney after you've gone through this carnival of implausible nominees," says Lizza. Mayer adds: "I think anybody who has covered Gingrich over the years realizes that there is no position too powerful for his ambitions. He's kind of Napoleonic. He's a fascinating person to watch. Like Ryan, anyone who's been around for a while is sort of scratching their head and becoming entertained by the idea that he could start all over again. We're so aware of his flaws as well as his strengths, and you wonder if he'll be able to sweep those flaws under the rug and start over." Since leaving Congress, Gingrich has written books, given speeches, and worked as a consultant for corporations including Freddie Mac. Wickenden asks, "Is he a lobbyist?" Mayer responds, "He does all of the things lobbyists do, but he calls it being a historian. As someone who comes from a family of historians, he's better paid than any historian that I know." Gingrich has been criticized, as Romney has, for changing his positions over the years, but Lizza points out they are not alone: "This is the great irony of the Obama years. The three biggest domestic policies of the Obama era--fiscal stimulus, cap and trade, and a mandate-centered health-care plan--were basically Republican orthodoxy in the last decade. That's why most of the Republican candidates have been on the other side of these issues." Whatever Gingrich's chances are in the primaries, Lizza says, "I can't imagine that [Obama] would be so lucky as to get Newt Gingrich as his opponent." | 12/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hendrik Hertzberg, John Cassidy, and Amy Davidson on where Occupy Wall Street goes from here | "It's hard to say how the hell they feel, isn't it?" Hendrik Hertzberg says of Occupy Wall Street. On this week's Political Scene podcast, John Cassidy, Amy Davidson, and Hertzberg join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss whats become of O.W.S. and how politicians are responding. In New York City, protesters have been evacuated from Zuccotti Park, and are facing increasingly forceful police. Hertzberg doesn't think that the evacuation has helped Mayor Bloomberg: "Even if you posit that at some point the occupiers had to be gotten out of Zuccotti Park, or at least the whole campsite thing had to be dismantled, this whole 'Mission: Impossible,' helicopter, Klieg-light approach to it was excessive and it showed a lack of P.R. sense." The evacuation is also a loss for the occupiers, he says: "What they had in place of a leader or leaders was a spot, a place. And they could have their General Assembly meeting. And they could kind of vaguely move in a direction together because they had this mechanism to make decisions.... What's the mechanism now? Where's the headquarters? How can it make decisions at all?" For Cassidy, though, "the great strength of the movement is that it's outside the political process to some extent and forces the politicians to react to it," he says. They all agree that O.W.S., as Davidson says, "has defused the strength of that accusation that the Democrats are engaging in class warfare and that Americans don't want to hear about class. It turns out that they actually are interested in that question about who has what power and what economics has to do with it." "If Obama can't make hay with that, you start to despair for a progressive politician," Cassidy says. | 11/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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David Remnick and Ryan Lizza discuss Mitt Romney and the Republican field | On this week's Political Scene podcast, David Remnick and Ryan Lizza look at the Republican candidates, who held their tenth debate on Wednesday night. Lizza says, "These people are the washed-up dregs of the Republican Party." Remnick, whose Comment this week discussed the G.O.P. field, adds, "These candidates, everybody but Romney, are, as Tolstoy might say, a joke in their own way." Who stands to benefit more from such unserious candidates? Lizza thinks it's Mitt Romney, while Remnick says it is President Obama. Host Dorothy Wickenden challenges Lizza and Remnick to look more closely at Romney, whose "great claim to fame has been that he is electable," she says, noting a shift in Republican voters. "There seems to be serious worry that he isn't electable." "I still believe that once Romney sews this up, assuming he does, and you have an enemy in Barack Obama that the electorate polarizes again and you start seeing a lot of conservatives making the case for why he's actually O.K.," Lizza says. The former Massachusetts governor's poll numbers have been much steadier than his policy stances on health-care reform and abortion rights. "It is so blatantly obvious that a combination of geography, circumstance, and convenience has been the motor behind nearly all of Romney's changes," Remnick says. "The lack of independent thinking on the notion that real economics matters anymore, as well as science, is just devastating. This party is in ideological crisis." | 11/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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John Cassidy and James Surowiecki on Europe's ongoing debt crisis. | "European politics are beginning to make all the scurrilous news about Republican Presidential candidates look tame," says Dorothy Wickenden on this week's Political Scene podcast. She's joined by John Cassidy and James Surowiecki to discuss the politics of Greece's economic troubles and how it may figure into politics and economics here in the States. "In the U.S., there is effectively a bailout for states that are less economically successful," says Wickenden. "If you look at the way that the federal government's transfers work, money is effectively transferred from states like, say, New York or Connecticut to states like Mississippi or Alabama." Surowiecki, who wrote about the paradox of federalism in 2009, says that European countries like Greece face similar economic pressures as smaller states without a "real political system set up to facilitate those type of transfers." Existing without that system and with greater interconnectedness among global banks does not bode well for the ramifications of Greece exiting the European Union. "You get contagion in the financial markets, some of the big banks collapse, and we go back to the nineteen-thirties," Cassidy says. In fact, this week's collapse of investment bank MF Global is emblematic of what could happen were Greece to default, he says. Calling it "Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns on a smaller scale," Cassidy notes one key difference: "MF Global is small scale. Last week they existed. This week they don't. It doesn't matter to anybody apart from Jon Corzine and a few guys who have lost some money." | 11/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Wendell Steavenson and Ryan Lizza discuss Qaddafi and the Arab Spring. | Wendell Steavenson and Ryan Lizza discuss Qaddafi and the Arab Spring. | 10/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ryan Lizza and John Cassidy discuss income inequality and Occupy Wall Street. | However the Occupy Wall Street movement may turn out, Dorothy Wickenden says, it's "succeeded in making income inequality a national political issue." What is the history of this income gap? What is the government's role? And how will O.W.S. affect the 2012 election? John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza join Wickenden on this week's Political Scene podcast to discuss those questions and more. "If you look from, say, 2011 all the way back to '73, there are some staggering statistics," Cassidy notes. "People in the middle of the income distribution basically haven't seen any increase in wages at all." Why should we worry about income inequality, Wickenden asks, from a strictly economic perspective? "If you get rising income inequality, that's usually associated with a fall in social mobility," Cassidy responds. Moreover, he says, "that is contrary to America's view of itself as a very fluid nation...where you can start at the bottom and end up at the top." Lizza recognizes the Obama Administration's response to income inequality as a "cross-your-fingers strategy," in hopes that the bank bailout would ease the other economic pressures of the recession like unemployment and the housing crisis. Wickenden and Lizza also discuss Al Gore, who called O.W.S. the "primal scream" of democracy, and his efforts to re-energize the left. He sees the political imperative, they say, but Cassidy is unsure if President Obama does. Obama should have taken a tougher stance on Wall Street, Cassidy says, to politically align himself with liberals. Things he would have done, "if Obama had been a better politician." | 10/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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John Cassidy and James Surowiecki on Democratic efforts to blame the economy on Republicans. | On this week's Political Scene podcast, John Cassidy and James Surowiecki discuss President Obama's jobs bill, Harry Reid's finger-pointing, Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan, and the growing Occupy Wall Street movement. "What else would you expect in a campaign season?" Cassidy tells guest host Curtis fox. That the President's American Jobs Act failed in the Senate on Tuesday night offers some weight to the claim that Republicans are using the dismal economy to their advantage. "I think there really is a real political incentive for them to drag their feet as much as possible, while still seeming as if they care," Surowiecki explains. Cassidy, who picked apart Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan today, says that the tax-cutting elements of the plan poise Cain to become "George Bush squared." As Surowiecki explains, less money for a smaller federal government is "for some Republicans a feature, not a bug." Outside Washington, many Americans want the government to offer some immediate relief. Sixty-three per cent support the essence of the American Jobs Act, and the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to spread and to draw both media and political attention. Cassidy says: "Politicians, they react to incentives. When they see a popular movement, they'll move towards it. And that's what's happening on the left now." "The weather's been pretty great" in New York, Surowiecki adds. "It's not clear to me what happens when it's twenty-five degrees out." | 10/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Nicholas Lemann, Jill Lepore, and Hendrik Hertzberg assess Occupy Wall Street. | Nicholas Lemann, Jill Lepore, and Hendrik Hertzberg assess Occupy Wall Street. | 10/6/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Dexter Filkins and Steve Coll discuss our shaken alliance with Pakistan. | Dexter Filkins and Steve Coll discuss our shaken alliance with Pakistan. | 9/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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James Surowiecki and Ryan Lizza on the millionaire tax and class warfare. | On this week's Political Scene podcast, Dorothy Wickenden calls President Obama's speech on Monday, in which he laid out his new jobs plan and called for a tax on million-dollar earners, "a much more pugnacious approach," one that suggested his willingness to take on the Republicans in Congress. But Ryan Lizza, the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, is a bit more cautious about the President's intentions. "One view is that he doesnt care about a deal, that this is just a campaign tactic," Lizza says. But Lizza isn't sold on that explanation: "I view this as a change in tactic to respond to Republican intransigence." The President now has a new starting point for negotiations, Lizza says, and "we've got to wait to see how this plays out." James Surowiecki, who wrote about the G.O.P.'s response to Obama's jobs bill in this week's magazine, turns the discussion to the other side of the aisle, saying, "Republicans don't actually seem to be paying much of a price for being seen as obstructionists or anti-stimulus. And I think there's good reason to think that that will actually continue." (That may become clear at the Republican candidates' debate Thursday night.) Wickenden asked about a "viral" video of a campaign appearance by Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the U.S. Senate. In it, Warren forcefully disputes the Republican charge that the President, by calling for taxes on the very wealthy, has engaged in "class warfare." "This is the argument that Democrats have been demanding that the President make for years," Lizza says. | 9/22/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Steve Coll and Wendell Steavenson discuss Israel's deepening isolation in the wake of the Arab Spring. | On this week's Political Scene podcast, Steve Coll and Wendell Steavenson join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss Israel in the wake of the Arab Spring and the upcoming United Nations vote on Palestinian statehood. If the Security Council votes on statehood, the United States is expected to veto it; in the event of a General Assembly vote, which would confer a lesser status, the U.S. would be in a "lonely minority," says Coll. He adds that Israel's isolation (and America's with it) is largely its own doing, including its estrangement from Turkey: "Five years ago, Turkey was Israel's most important ally in the Muslim world. This breach is unnecessary. Even after the event last year where the Israelis boarded a flotilla headed to Gaza and killed nine Turkish citizens in the process, Turkey worked hard to construct a face-saving compromise in international mediation. And one was reached that Netanyahu signed off on, apparently. The only reason that deal fell apart was because right-wingers in Netanyahu's cabinet overruled him. That's a symptom of paralysis in Israeli politics that is, I'm afraid, really worrying." Steavenson, who reported on last week's violence at the Israeli embassy in Cairo, raises concerns about the fate of the Camp David accords in a post-Mubarak Egypt. "Part of the complaint against the Mubarak regime is that it had kowtowed to the American-Israeli bloc. And part of the fears in tumult and correction that the revolution and a lot of people in Egypt would like to see would be a recalibration, a renegotiation, of that relationship that does not put Egypt in a position of acquiescing, agreeing, and subverting its own national interests to those of Israel and America." As stability erodes in the Middle East, the Obama Administration would prefer to focus on the American economy and the 2012 campaign. "You have to get ahead of change if you want to manage your interests in the midst of tumult," Coll says--advice that he intends for Israel, but is applicable to any of the nations discussed in this week's episode, including ours. | 9/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hendrik Hertzberg, John Cassidy, and Ryan Lizza review Obama's jobs speech. | On this week's Political Scene podcast, Dorothy Wickenden talks with Hendrik Hertzberg, John Cassidy, and Ryan Lizza about President Obama's jobs speech, which seems to have disrupted the prevailing narrative about the White House and Congress. Hertzberg puts it this way: "It was a challenge. He was laying down a challenge. And the very thing that liberals, like me, had worried about, which was 'Oh, he's just going to ask for a bunch of Republican ideas,' he somehow turned that around and put those ideas in the service of a progressive liberal vision." Cassidy, who criticized the President throughout the debt-ceiling summer, also notices a shift: "I think it was a big step forward, anyway, because basically for the last eighteen months Obama has been impaling himself on this sort of deficit-reduction stick. Now he's back to recognizably Democratic, recognizably Keynesian principles, which clearly are called for." But will the President's proposal pass? Republicans "are also looking at terrible poll numbers," Lizza says. "So, if you notice the responses last night, it wasn't only an attack on Obama's ideas. It was, 'We will consider these.' So, there's some pressure that they need to pass something." In more than one way, it seems, President Obama has returned to fundamentals. Lizza says, "There's a lot more emphasis at the White House and the D.N.C. about connecting with voters, trying to reenergize the new voters from 2008." | 9/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Jane Mayer and Ryan Lizza discuss Dick Cheney's legacy, ten years after 9/11. | Jane Mayer and Ryan Lizza discuss former Vice-President Dick Cheney, his new book, and his political legacy in this week's Political Scene podcast. "There are gonna be heads exploding all over Washington," Dick Cheney predicted as his memoir was released earlier this week. To the contrary, Mayer found "frustration at the tedium" of "In My Time." The book does more than reveal Cheney's methodology, though: Repeat endlessly. Never apologize. Be seen with kids and dogs--a lot. Mayer also talks about the use of executive power in the Bush-Cheney years and how much of that carries on into the Obama Administration: "One area that I just can't imagine the Bush White House putting up with is ... where to try detainees in the so-called war on terror. The Obama White House wanted to put them on trial in regular civilian courthouses, particularly trying to use the courthouse in New York. And, Congress put its foot down and said, 'No, we don't want to have these terrorists in our country. We want to keep them down in Guantanamo.' The Bush White House, I think, would have raised the roof about Congress interfering in an executive decision like that.... But Obama folded on it." Amelia Lester, filling in for host Dorothy Wickenden, asks Lizza whether Obama could learn anything from Cheney. Lizza says, "Obama's basic diagnosis of American politics, as he articulated it in 2008, was wrong.... From someone like Cheney, I think he could learn that it's better to pursue what you actually believe in, rather than constantly trying to find the center." | 9/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Wendell Steavenson and Steve Coll discuss Libya, Syria, and Obama's response to the Arab Spring. | Wendell Steavenson and Steve Coll discuss Libya, Syria, and Obama's response to the Arab Spring. | 8/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Lawrence Wright and Ryan Lizza on Rick Perry's candidacy. | Lawrence Wright and Ryan Lizza on Rick Perry's candidacy. | 8/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza on the new financial crisis and the 2012 campaign | John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza on the new financial crisis and the 2012 campaign. | 8/11/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hendrik Hertzberg and James Surowiecki on the debt-ceiling deal and the 2012 election | The debt ceiling may be raised, but the stock market has plummeted. The market closed today with the biggest drop since the financial crisis: a 512.76 point, or 4.31 per cent, drop for the Dow Jones industrial average, and even bigger percentage dips for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index (4.78) and the Nasdaq (5.08). But fear not. Hendrik Hertzberg, looking back at the debt-ceiling compromise, has encouraging words on this week's Political Scene podcast: "This kind of thing keeps happening again and again. It's as if our system is getting hardening of the arteries. We get a stent once in a while or we take nitroglycerine, but to me it's getting scarier and scarier over the long haul." Oh, wait. Not encouraging. But then there's this, from Hertzberg: "There are a lot of ways you could build something from scratch that would look roughly like the society we have now but would work better, would be smoother, would be fairer, and all that. And of course these things are proposed in politics." Yes, this sounds better. He continues: "And then they cannot be done. Then our system prevents them from happening or garbles them in such a way that they look supremely ugly once they're created, such as our health-care system. And this is a machine for creating disillusionment with government, cynicism, Tea Partyism, and, over time, this is our country, our democracy, eating itself alive and bringing itself down and being helpless to do anything about it." James Surowiecki, who joins Hertzberg on the podcast, has this to say, which could almost, sort of pass as not wholly depressing: "I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that the stock market has fallen steeply during all this debt-ceiling crisis and even after the resolution, because people are starting to see that the economy is in really bad shape, and we're not going to get any help at all from Washington. That may be what the House Republicans want, but I don't think it's what businesspeople want." | 8/4/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Elaine Kamarck, George Packer, and John Cassidy on the debt-ceiling debacle | Lyndon Johnson wouldn't have let things come to this. "I keep thinking back to the fifties and sixties and how a crisis like this would have been dealt with," George Packer says on this week's Political Scene podcast, where he is joined by John Cassidy and Elaine Kamarck to discuss the debt-ceiling negotiations. Back then, "it would have been dealt with in the hideaway of the Senate Majority Leader or the Speaker of the House with drinks and conversation and a lot of toughness and arm twisting, but also a sense that they can't allow the worst to happen, that it would be on all of them, that it would be unworthy of Congress." Since then, Packer continues, "It's a forty-year trend toward extreme polarization, toward parties that have no ideological variation & and leadership that isn't respected, that can't command the institution. It's an institutional failure." Kamarck, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard, also pines for the Eisenhower era: "This hold that the Tea Party caucus seems to have on the Republican leadership strikes me as something that's quite unusual and something that I don't think Lyndon Johnson would let happen, or any of the great Speakers of the House or Majority Leaders of the Senate from past history. I just can't see them being jerked around by a portion of their caucus the way Boehner seems to be being jerked around by the Tea Party." "Maybe we can just ignore the Tea Party and ignore Boehner and go ahead and come up with some compromise in the Senate now," Cassidy suggests. Cassidy is less concerned about the debt ceiling than about the news from this morning, which he also writes about on his blog, that the economy is on the verge of a double-dip recession. "The traditional remedy for that would be to have more stimulus programs: the government would step in and spend more, borrow money to do it." But given the size of the national debt, and the fact that Republicans, "in a brilliant feat of jujitsu," have shifted the blame for the state of the economy from financial markets to "big government spending" and a failed stimulus, "that's not even on the table now, it seems." | 7/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Nicholas Lemann and Hendrik Hertzberg discuss Rupert Murdoch | What will happen to News Corporation in the United States? "You could see the company morphing into a less aggressive political force, for essentially business reasons, and that would change the tone of American politics," Nicholas Lemann says on this week's Political Scene podcast. Lemann predicts that "either the company would suffer the fate of other publicly held family media empires, like the one at the Wall Street Journal that Murdoch recently took over, or it would become more bland and corporate, like the Walt Disney Company or the Hearst Company, and be less swaggering and less ideological." A less ideological Fox News or Weekly Standard? "We will always have conservatives in this country," Lemann continues, "but this is a particular alignment of the conservative planets that may be something only Murdoch could pull off." Hendrik Hertzberg isn't so sure: "Anybody who's hoping that somehow the troubles of the Murdoch family are going to result in Fox News becoming less of a right-wing propaganda operation may be deluded, because this is a form of entertainment that is highly profitable." In a story of profit, power, and politics, the latter took center stage yesterday, with Prime Minister David Cameron taking heat from members of Parliament for his cozy relationship with the media mogul. Lemann explains why British politicians must make peace with Murdoch: "British tabloids are kind of like the nuclear option. That is, the reason they have the attention of politicians is they can swoop in three days before the election with some huge, huge thing that changes the vote by five per cent, and every politician just lives in utter terror of that." By comparison, he says, "Fox News is more like a medium-sized standing army, where it keeps a part of the conservative base active and mobilized and ready." Lemann, who is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, also discusses an inconsistency in his profession's approach to phone hacking. The News of the World's foray into phone hacking has been widely and understandably criticized, but, Lemann points out, two of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes went to stories based on hacked phone records: those of Eliot Spitzer and a madam, for the New York Times, and of Kwame Kilpatrick and his mistress, for the Detroit Free Press. "Journalists have to figure out what their defense is of why it's O.K. when somebody else phone-hacks and gives it to us, but it's not O.K. for us to phone-hack." | 7/21/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Murdoch's Phone-Hacking Scandal, with Ken Auletta, John Cassidy, and Lauren Collins | Ken Auletta, John Cassidy, and Lauren Collins on Rupert Murdoch's phone-hacking scandal. | 7/14/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Gay Marriage and the Culture Wars, with Margaret Talbot, Jeffrey Toobin, and Ryan Lizza | Margaret Talbot, Jeffrey Toobin, and Ryan Lizza discuss gay marriage and the culture wars. | 6/30/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The drawdown in Afghanistan, with Dexter Filkins and Steve Coll | Are we any better off in Afghanistan and Pakistan now than when President Obama took office? "I dont think so, no," Steve Coll says on this week's Political Scene podcast. He joins Dexter Filkins and guest host Curtis Fox to talk about what President Obama's plan for troop withdrawal will mean at home and abroad. Was the surge a success? Coll's view: "Certainly if the Afghan security forces were going to have an opportunity to defend sections of the Afghan population from the Taliban, they needed the time that Obama bought them. Whether they will use that time to actually cohere into a force that can defend Kabul and large sections of the Afghan population, I don't know. It's up to the Afghans to finally sort through the factionalism, corruption, and other impediments to their own national unity." Things are better in Afghanistan, Filkins says, "but not by much." Meanwhile: In Pakistan, it's worse. It's hard to convey what it feels like to land at the airport here. It's more a gut feeling than anything of how troubled and uncertain and unstable this place is, but everything that I've seen since then tends to confirm that. Still, Coll doesn't think that the trouble in Afghanistan will plague Obama in the upcoming election. "American people have their minds on other subjects," he says--primarily the economy and jobs. Furthermore, "the Republican party is not in a position to run against President Obama on the war in 2012....This is too much a Republican project, it's just too complicated for the Republicans to successfully use this as a wedge in the 2012 campaign, and the fact that the President has announced a relatively robust drawdown, given the options that were presented to him, makes it even harder." | 6/23/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The economy, with Elaine Kamarck, John Cassidy, and Ryan Lizza | Elaine Kamarck joins John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza to discuss the economy and Obama's reelection chances. | 6/16/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Political sex scandals, with Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, and Ariel Levy | "Everybody loves a good scandal," Dorothy Wickenden notes on this week's Political Scene podcast, "except the perpetrators and the victims, of course." Hendrik Hertzberg, who joins Wickenden on the podcast along with Ariel Levy and Ryan Lizza, says that Weinergate proves a pet theory of his, what he calls the "Clinton Rule." "That's the rule that when a politician starts mindlessly babbling a bunch of lies about some sexual subject, that the person hes really trying to lie to is his wife." But don't politicians lie all the time, Wickenden wondersisn't that what they're trained to do? "I disagree with that view of politicians," Hertzberg says. "I think one of the sad things, or one of the unfortunate things about this scandal, and all these scandals, is that they contribute to this hatred, this contempt for politicians, as some lower form of life..." Lizza doesn't give Weiner much of a shot at political survival, at least in terms of holding on to his Congressional seat. "The moral outrage at a certain point ends, and the press does allow some of these people to be rehabilitated," he says, noting the example of Elliot Spitzer. Levy notes that, in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi also seems to be in real trouble, and that Italians may also have had enough of the portrayal of women as "blowup dolls." As for whether powerful politicians can get away with things that normal people can't, Hertzberg thinks the opposite is true. "But Rick," Wickenden says, "the difference is that these people have chosen to become public figures, who are supposed to present themselves and be role models in many ways to the public." "All I'm saying is not really in defense of a behavior," Hertzberg replies. "I'm disputing the idea that these are these powerful people who think that they have immunity, and that they can get away with things that everybody else can't get away with. On the contrary, it looks like they can't get away with things that a whole lot of other people can get away with." | 6/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The politics of climate change, with Robert Stavins, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Ryan Lizza | "What is the matter with this country," Dorothy Wickenden asked on this week's Political Scene podcast, "when other countries around the world, including China, are moving forward quite aggressively to curb CO2 emissions and have no problem acknowledging that this is a problem thats already upon us," and yet America cannot? Robert Stavins, the director of the environmental economics program at Harvard, said that he attributed "the lack of action in the United States" to "a set of factors which are vastly broader than environment." Specifically, he blames the "ascendancy of the primary system," which favors far-right or far-left candidates, leading to a divided Congress that no longer views the environment as a bipartisan issue. "The other big contributing factor," added Ryan Lizza, is the economy. "The history of the passage of strong environmental laws is that they don't usually get done during a weak economy," given the fear that any meaningful policy change will increase energy prices. Which factor explains New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's backing out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative--referred to as R.G.G.I., or "Reggie"--a pact among ten states to cut gas emissions from power plants by ten per cent by 2018? Lizza's take: "Beyond cap-and-trade, conservatives love this guy so much, and are hyping [him] up as a future Presidential candidate, that he's just basically given up on his political future in New Jersey." Elizabeth Kolbert added that Christie, who said, last November, that he was "skeptical" that mankind was responsible for global warming, now says that he has "been convinced" that it's real, and that humans are part of the problem. "You can argue that's vaguely hilarious," she said, "but he did say that. Apparently a scientist from New Jersey convinced him." She noted that Christie also said that Reggie " 'hasn't really had an impact on emissions.' But he then said we're not building any more coal plants in this state. The whole thing was filled with myriad contradictions." Whether New Jersey is in or out doesn't really matter, according to Stavins: "The Reggie program, unless the states together decide to render it more stringent, essentially does not have an effect. All it does is at this point is that it raises some funds for the governors and legislatures of each state." | 6/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Republicans' Medicare problem, with John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza | Just last month, Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity had the overwhelming support of G.O.P. congressmen, and Ryan looked, as Dorothy Wickenden put it on this week's Political Scene podcast, "like the future of the Republican party." Now? "It's looking at this stage like Ryan's plan, which was a very long one, might turn into the longest suicide note in history," said John Cassidy, who joins Wickenden and Ryan Lizza on the podcast. Our Medicare system is "essentially going broke" and that is "a serious problem," Cassidy continued, "but Ryan came up with probably the most radical way to deal with it possible, and, in doing so, he's terrified everybody who's over the age of fifty, I think, and it's turned into a political nightmare for the Republicans." Health care is a particular nightmare for Mitt Romney, who is currently in an awkward position regarding universal health, Lizza said: he is "trying to define the mandate in Massachusetts as perfectly acceptable and yet the mandate at a national level as an affront to liberty." The mandate is what conservatives most vehemently reject to about ObamaCare, which means, Lizza said, that "Romney has a major political problem on his hands, that the thing that Republicans hate the most about Barack Obama--that idea Barack Obama got from Mitt Romney." | 5/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama, Israel, and the Arab Spring, with Steve Coll, Wendell Steavenson, and Hendrik Hertzberg | "Disappointing." That was the general consensus on President Obama's speech on the Middle East yesterday, which Steve Coll, Wendell Steavenson, and Hendrik Hertzberg discuss on this week's Political Scene podcast. Steavenson, who is based in Cairo and called in from Jerusalem, said that Egyptians and Israelis "were looking for something stronger, more solid, perhaps even more emotional." Coll called it "lawyerly," and said, "It was responsive to the true complexity of the Middle East, but not inspiring for being so. In some sense I imagine he thought, in a professorial way, he was providing a thorough, deep, sophisticated, nuanced explanation of why the United States tolerates the King of Bahrain when he cracks down on his majority population but celebrates the overthrow of Mubarak--and he did so. It was a sophisticated, nuanced, measured explanation of an inconsistency that is really indefensible, if youre the President of the United States." Hertzberg's disappointment with the speech stemmed mostly from Obama's failure to put forward a plan of action, he said--"something like appointing Hillary Clinton to lead the negotiations" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Steavenson said that some people in Jerusalem echoed Benjamin Netanyahu's anger with Obama's suggestion of creating a Palestinian state using the 1967 borders, but that others "were pleased that he had recognized explicitly the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland." She also noted that the "the language and the spirit of the revolutions that came off Tahrir, in Egypt, and Tunisia and elsewhere, the idea of peaceful protests," may be leading to a "different paradigm" in the Israel-Palestine fight. "Instead of leaving it up to the leaders to argue about and to redraw maps, it feels like to some extent there might be a shift from the Palestinian people into a more kind of democratic process," she said. "It's been clear, at least to me, for decades," Hertzberg said, "that if the Palestinians were to discover nonviolence, if they had discovered it a few decades ago, they'd have long had a state by now. A nonviolent Palestinian movement is--if I were Netanyahu, that's what I would fear the most." | 5/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Republican Presidential Candidates, with Hendrik Hertzberg and Ryan Lizza | "There's no predicting this race," Ryan Lizza says on this week's Political Scene podcast, a conversation with Hendrik Hertzberg and Dorothy Wickenden about the large, unsettled field of Republican Presidential hopefuls. Lizza says that the potential candidates with the best chance could all be described as fairly moderate former governors: Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty, and Mitch Daniels. Hertzberg agrees. "By process of elimination, it's hard to see how it's not one of these grown-up governor types. Because if it's not one of them, who is it? It's certainly not the clown show of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann," he says. And Newt Gingrich, who entered the race this week, "is even nuttier than the two ladies." "I like the dichotomy: the clown show and the apologetic governors," Lizza says. "This is an 'I'm sorry' season. All the governors we're talking about are having to apologize for something they were once proud of in their records." Hertzberg says that Romney, who gave a speech yesterday about the health-care plan that he passed as governor of Massachusetts, isn't indulging in apologies. "He decided its better to stand up for what he did, even though that puts him in the absurd position of saying that an individual mandate is a wonderful thing on the state level but it's an overwhelming threat to our way of life at the federal level," Hertzberg says. "So he's all bollixed up when it comes to the coherence of any sort of message." But there is a consistency to his incoherence. As Hertzberg points out, "it would be awkward" for Romney to apologize for the health-care mandate he enacted as governor "since he just published a book entitled 'No Apologies.' " | 5/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Osama bin Laden and Pakistan, with Steve Coll, Dexter Filkins, and Ryan Lizza | On this week's Political Scene podcast, Steve Coll, Dexter Filkins, and Ryan Lizza join the host, Dorothy Wickenden, to discuss the interplay among America, Pakistan, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban. Filkins describes the "very complex" relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, quoting a mid-level Taliban leader who told him that "the I.S.I., they're pimps, and we're the prostitutes. And when we want to do things like negotiate with the Karzai government, we have to get their permission first." Filkins continues, "Is it control? Is it protection? It's somewhere between the two." Coll says that he is surprised that "for all the time that the United States has spent in operational cooperation with the I.S.I.," the American government still has a sense that "we don't really know how the I.S.I. operates." "If there are units of the Pakistan military that are responsible for safe houses such as the one bin Laden was discovered in, if there are sub-sections of the I.S.I. that are very carefully monitoring Mullah Omar's activities, we don't have the eyesight about the way that works that you might think we would have after all these years," Coll says. "The Pakistanis have managed this relationship very carefully, to keep us away from their crown jewels, and we haven't, until recently, even tried to break that down." But despite John Brennan, the terrorism czar at the White House, apparently "seething under the surface about Pakistan," Lizza says America is authorizing "billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan." And Lizza expects that to continue. "Until there's a smoking gun about high-level Pakistani complicity in keeping bin Laden in that compound, it seems like, as far as our funding goes, as far as Congress authorizing that funding, thats not going to change," Lizza says. | 5/6/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Libya and the Arab Spring, with Jon Lee Anderson and Ryan Lizza | Is what some have called President Obama's failure to take a strong stand against Syrian President Bashar Assad a repeat of his silence during Iran's Green Revolution? Dorothy Wickenden introduces the comparison on this week's Political Scene podcast, where she is joined by Ryan Lizza, who writes this week about Obama's foreign policy, and Jon Lee Anderson. "I do think that the turning point was over the weekend, when things got really bad and the White House did put out a very strong statement. So, in that sense, it hasn't been the sort of bystander-like position that we saw during the Green Revolution," Lizza says. He suspects that the Administration is debating to what extent they should push Assad to cut Syria's ties with Iran. "But it seems like the effort to pull Assad into the West's orbit and break him away from Iran, and get him to restart peace negotiations with Israel--it seems like that moment has passed, as soon as he decided to start shooting his citizens," Lizza says. Anderson, who has recently returned from a month in Libya, where he wrote dispatches for News Desk, speaks about how the Arab Spring protests have changed the region. "What I sense, in having travelled through Libya now--I was also in Tunis and Cairo--is this is about people long emasculated finally finding their pride. And it's about very humiliated people finding courage, finally. So, I think, in our responses, we have to be very mindful of that--both of the need to feel courageous by people, and the fact that they have been terribly humiliated. And it's very important how we use our own power in their assistance from here on in, with that sensitivity in mind, and their ultimate freedom in mind." | 4/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Raffi Khatchadourian, Eric Konigsberg, and Elizabeth Kolbert on U.S. energy policy one year after the BP oil spill. | A year after the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed eleven workers and triggered a months-long spill in the Gulf of Mexico, how safe is offshore drilling? "It certainly can be safer and more responsible than it has been and than it is right now," Elizabeth Kolbert says on this week's Political Scene podcast. Raffi Khatchadourian, who wrote last month about the BP spill and discussed the cleanup efforts in a live chat this week, says that the disaster led officials to realizing some "very real problems and things that can be fixed." But he worries about losing momentum. Eric Konigsberg, who wrote for this week's magazine about drilling in North Dakota, explains hydrofracking, a method of releasing oil from rocks. The method has "inherent dangers," he says, but may get an unfair rap: "People worry about methane gas leaking into the water supply, somehow through the ground. And most of the cases where people have had gas in their water, it looks like it was because the wells were poorly cemented to the ground, they were leaky anyway, but it wasn't the pressure of the fracking that caused this to happen." Hydrofracking may help reduce dependency on foreign oil, but "there is no free lunch," Kolbert says. "You increase domestic production, you're going to increase domestic pollution. That's pretty much a given, no matter how well you try to do it." | 4/21/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hendrik Hertzberg, John Cassidy, and George Packer on the Republican budget | President Obamas speech on the budget yesterday was "one of the best he's given," Hendrik Hertzberg says on this week's Political Scene podcast. "It was kind of like one of Roosevelt's fireside chats. He told some stories. He gave a narrative frame to why liberalism, if I may use that poisonous term, is such a crucial part of the American story." George Packer, who joins Hertzberg and John Cassidy on the podcast, also deems Obama's speech a success. "Without much poetry, it was a strong statement of philosophy about the role of government, and I think it's something that his supporters, his party, had been wondering why he hadn't done until yesterday," he said. But Packer has concerns about how the President will proceed. Obama seems to have a habit of negotiating with himself first, giving up a few things before he's even entered into the bargaining at the table, and then giving up more, because the Republicans always seem prepared to go further and to take hostages, to take more extreme action. Cassidy gives the Administration credit for how it has handled the negotiations so far. "I'm almost convinced that the White House took a strategic decision a few months ago to let Paul Ryan come out with this detailed plan of his, which they could then attack from the sides," he says. "The White House was basically playing rope-a-dope for a while, I think. Now they're coming out fighting, and I think the real budget debate is only beginning." | 4/14/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Paul Ryan, James Surowiecki, and Ryan Lizza | "Who is Paul Ryan and how did he come to be the Republicans' go-to guy on fiscal policy?" That's the question Dorothy Wickenden poses on this week's Political Scene podcast to Ryan Lizza. Lizza, referring to Ryan's 2012 budget resolution that was released on Tuesday, offers two things that impress him about the young congressman from Wisconsin: 'One, he knows the details. He's smart, and can go head-to-head with any of the policy wonks on the left over these programs, and that's, frankly, rare among a lot of folks on the hill. And No. 2, he hasn't shied away from presenting a pretty aggressive plan, even though he must know that the politics are very dangerous." And what about the budget proposal? Wickenden points to a piece on Slate by Jacob Weisberg that applauds Ryan's plan for going "where Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich never did by terminating the entitlement status of Medicare and Medicaid." Under Ryan's proposal, those funds, which would be distributed through vouchers and block grants, respectively, would be capped at levels below the projected rate of health-care inflation. If the Republican party gets behind the proposal, Weisberg writes, "it will become for the first time in modern memory an intellectually serious party--one with a coherent vision to match its rhetoric of limited government." James Surowiecki doesn't give Ryan quite as much credit: "Politically, at least, Ryan seems to be showing, at least to my mind, a little bit of a tin ear. One of the things that may happen if the Democrats play this correctly is that the two things will become associated in the public mind. So on the one hand you have this budget that can be spun as ending Medicare or crippling Medicaid, blah blah blah, and at the same time you have this government shutdown, were it to happen. To the extent that those two things become linked, assuming that the government shutdown will be unpopular, as the one was in 1995, it seems like it's bad for Ryans budget, it seems like it's bad for the Republicans." | 4/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Libya, Egypt, Ryan Lizza, and Marwa Sharafeldin | Ryan Lizza and the activist Marwa Sharafeldin on the Libya intervention and Egypt's stalled revolution. | 3/31/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Libya, Steve Coll, and Philip Gourevitch | What is America's commitment in Libya? Accounts have varied about whether the allied forces will be there for "days, not weeks" or "months, not years," and to what extent Muammar Qaddafi is a "target." Philip Gourevitch says on this week's Political Scene podcast that President Obama, in framing our involvement as a humanitarian intervention, is downplaying America's role. "We took ownership of the civil war in Libya. We've taken sides in the civil war," he says. He continues, "The reality is this military action makes absolutely no sense unless it is seen through to the removal of Qaddafi. It is a defeat for America to leave him there. And the only way then is to defeat him, and at that point we have a tremendous responsibility for what happens next. You can even see, as the coalition frays, it's clear that it's ours to run." "I don't think we're going to run it," responds Steve Coll, who joins Gourevitch and the host, Dorothy Wickenden, on the podcast. For one thing, he argues, "the Libyan air force no longer exists, so managing the no-fly zone over the next six months is probably not going to be that onerous" and can be left in the hands of France and Britain. But Coll agrees with Gourevitch that progress will be measured by regime change: "Youll have essentially two governments in Libya, neither of them very impressive, one in Benghazi, one in Tripoli, and they're going to be in a stalemate for as long as Qaddafi hangs in there," he says. Coll also talks about the revolutions in Tunisia, which he writes about in next week's magazine. He was there when protesters took to the streets for a second time and succeeded in dissolving the old regime and winning the right to "write an entirely new constitution and rewrite all of the country's electoral and political law." He says that, "it was kind of breathtaking to see a revolution achieve its goals, not at no cost--two hundred and forty Tunisians died--but at relatively little cost, and primarily through the mechanisms of peaceful protest and civil disobedience." | 3/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: March 17, 2011 | In a Congressional hearing this week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu affirmed the Obama Administration's commitment to nuclear energy, despite the ongoing disaster in Japan. That's just what many of the members of the House wanted to hear, Elizabeth Kolbert says on this week's Political Scene podcastand that's "very, very frightening," she tells this week's host, Jeffrey Toobin: If you are not given pause by an incident like this at a plant that is, as many people have pointed out, virtually identical to about two dozen other plants in operation in the U.S., then I think that there's something wrong with you. As the Times reported today, spent fuel rods at the Fukushima Daiichi plant are proving more of a liability than the reactor cores. In the U.S., "many people have warned the spent fuel is not sitting in a very vigorous containment structure," she says, and there is often more of it laying around here than at the Japanese nuclear plant. "This is basically a disaster waiting to happen," she says, "and the idea that we would continue to rush headlong into building new nuclear plants seems crazy at this point." On the economic front, John Cassidy predicts that the nuclear disaster (assuming it does not escalate and require the evacuation of Tokyo) will not "have that much of a long-term impact," and that the tsunami could eventually be a boon for Japan. Acknowledging that the economic calculus "sounds sort of heartless," he tells Toobin: Japan has been in a period of economic stagnation for twenty years.... In fact, a couple of economists have written that maybe this is what they need to get them out of it. The political system there has been very sclerotic. They haven't really put together any policies to drag themselves out of the mire, and there's a feeling that maybe this terrible disaster will finally force some political change and, in the long run, be a good thing. | 3/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: March 10, 2011 | Jeffrey Toobin and Amy Davidson on Obama's Guantanamo problem. | 3/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: March 3, 2011 | Dexter Filkins, Wendell Steavenson, and Lawrence Wright on the uprisings in the Middle East. | 3/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: February 24, 2011 | George Packer, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Ryan Lizza on the budget battles in Washington and the Midwest. | 2/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: February 17, 2011 | John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza on the economic roots of the uprisings across the Arab world. | 2/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: February 11, 2011 | Lawrence Wright and Ryan Lizza on the uprising in Egypt. | 2/11/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: February 3, 2011 | Wendell Steavenson, Steve Coll, and David Remnick on the Egyptian uprising. | 2/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: January 27, 2011 | Hendrik Hertzberg and Ryan Lizza on Obama’s positioning for 2012. | 1/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: January 20, 2011 | Evan Osnos and John Cassidy on our troubled relationship with China. | 1/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: January 13, 2011 | Hendrik Hertzberg on the Arizona shooting, and Ryan Lizza on Darrell Issa. | 1/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: January 6, 2011 | Hendrik Hertzberg and Peter J. Boyer on Boehner's new majority. | 1/6/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: December 30, 2010 | Ryan Lizza, Jeffrey Toobin, and James Surowiecki on good news in 2010. | 12/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: December 16, 2010 | Steve Coll and Ryan Lizza on the prospects and politics of the war in Afghanistan. | 12/16/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: December 9, 2010 | Hendrik Hertzberg, Peter J. Boyer, and Ryan Lizza on Obama’s tax deal. | 12/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: December 2, 2010 | Evan Osnos, Barbara Demick, and Ryan Lizza on North Korea, China, and WikiLeaks. | 12/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: November 18, 2010 | John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza on the White House and Wall Street. | 11/18/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: November 11, 2010 | Elizabeth Kolbert and Ryan Lizza on Republicans and climate change. | 11/11/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: November 4, 2010 | Hendrik Hertzberg and Ryan Lizza discuss the midterm results. | 11/4/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: October 21, 2010 | Nicholas Lemann on why the Nevada Senate race matters. | 10/21/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: October 14, 2010 | Ryan Lizza and George Packer discuss why Democrats are going negative in their ads. | 10/14/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: October 8, 2010 | Ryan Lizza and Robert Stavins on climate change. | 10/8/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: September 30, 2010 | Steve Coll and George Packer on the Middle East peace process. | 9/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: September 23, 2010 | Ryan Lizza and the pollster Douglas Rivers on the outlook for the midterm elections. | 9/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: September 16, 2010 | Robert B. Reich and Ryan Lizza on Tea Party populism and what Obama should do about it. | 9/16/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: September 9, 2010 | John Cassidy and James Surowiecki on the politics behind Obama's new economic proposals. | 9/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: September 2, 2010 | Jane Mayer and Ryan Lizza discuss why Republicans are surging and Democrats are floundering. | 9/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: August 26, 2010 | Peter J. Boyer and Jeffrey Toobin decode the ruling against Obama's embryonic stem-cell policy. | 8/26/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: August 20, 2010 | George Packer and Jon Lee Anderson on the Obama Administration's approach to the Muslim world. | 8/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: August 12, 2010 | Peter J. Boyer, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Ryan Lizza discuss the resurgence of nativism in politics. | 8/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: August 5, 2010 | George Packer and Ryan Lizza on why Republican senators just say no. | 8/5/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: July 29, 2010 | Jeffrey Toobin hosts a discussion with Raffi Khatchadourian and Steve Coll on the WikiLeaks reports. | 7/29/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: July 22, 2010 | John Cassidy and James Surowiecki on why Obama can't boost the recovery. Hosted this week by Jeffrey Toobin. | 7/22/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: July 15, 2010 | Ryan Lizza and Robert Stavins on the Senate's surprising new push for climate-change legislation. | 7/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: July 1, 2010 | James Surowiecki and Ryan Lizza discuss the fate of Obama's domestic agenda. | 7/1/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Political Scene: June 24, 2010 | Steve Coll and George Packer on McChrystal, Petraeus, and Obama's Afghanistan strategy. | 6/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
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95 |
The Political Scene: June 17, 2010 | Ryan Lizza and Hendrik Hertzberg discuss Obama, BP, and the fate of energy reform. | 6/17/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
96 |
The Political Scene: June 10, 2010 | Peter Boyer, Hendrik Hertzberg, and host Ryan Lizza discuss this week's primaries, the Sarah Palin effect, and the Tea Party movement. | 6/10/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
97 |
The Political Scene: June 3, 2010 | David Remnick and Lawrence Wright on the Gaza flotilla and the BP oil catastrophe. | 6/3/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
98 |
The Political Scene: May 27, 2010 | John Lanchester and John Cassidy review the British election. | 5/27/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
99 |
The Political Scene: May 20, 2010 | Evan Osnos and Barbara Demick discuss North Korea and the school killings in China. | 5/20/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
100 |
The Political Scene: May 12, 2010 | Jeffrey Toobin and Ryan Lizza discuss Obama's Supreme Court pick, Elena Kagan. | 5/12/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 100 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
Must-have US political fix
Weekly discussion on current US politics with the depth and perspective you'd expect from the New Yorker. Moderated by Dorothy Wickenden, regulars Hendrik Hertzberg and other staffers provide the analysis of today's realpolitik.
Good Podcast!
Blah blah blah, it's a very good podcast!
Insightful and concise
While it's range of views is narrow--from centrist to establishment left, as you might expect from the New Yorker--I find this weekly commentary show to provide interesting insight to that week in (mostly) American politics. Best of all, it's brief, which makes it an easy addition to my playlist.
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- Category: News & Politics
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