Beyond Politics

The outstanding think tank The Concord Coalition has its own podcast and radio show called Facing the Future, and recently, they hosted Beyond Politics hosts Matt Robison and former Congressman Paul Hodes for a lively discussion about how screwed up things are, and what can be fixed (and what can't).  There's a little friendly dunking on Congress, plus some practical talk about how to make things work on the side. 

Matt joins legendary West Virginia radio broadcaster -- and expert Senator Joe Manchin analyst -- Howard Monroe to talk about Manchin's weekend stunner, what was really driving it, and whether it's the best thing that could have happened to Democrats.

The recently concluded COP 26 summit in Glasgow was supposed to shine an international spotlight on global warming and charge up the next stage of commitments from countries to reduce carbon emissions. There were only two problems. One: it’s unclear how much progress was actually made. The conference did end with a new consensus about the need for action, and some analysts called that a substantial achievement.  But the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg accused the conference of consisting of a lot of “blah, blah, blah.” Two: nowadays, it’s hard to focus on the fact that the world is on fire when global warming is competing for our attention with immediate problems like the worldwide pandemic, economic instability, and the fact that democracy is weakening around the world, and may not have long to go in the US. So we wanted to take a look at where we really are on climate, COP 26, and the US role in it, and to do that we have one of the very best environmental leaders in the United States. Elizabeth Gore is Senior Vice President for Political Affairs at Environmental Defense Fund. She served as a US Senate Legislative director and chief of staff for 18 years, and 6 years in the House of Representatives before that. We talk climate, progress, whether Congress really is a mess, and why she was invited to be the commencement speaker at UMASS.

More than five and a half million Americans out of work in January found jobs by November. In the same period, the jobless rate fell from 6.3 to 4.2 percent, a drop of one-third. Jobless claims in November hit a 52-year low. Real GDP growth for 2021 is expected to be 5.9 percent. (Between 2000 and 2019, real GDP growth stayed lower than 3 percent.) President Biden’s temporary child tax credit, which provides direct cash payments to poor families, cut child hunger rates from 30 percent to 21 percent. That’s 2 million fewer kids who went hungry. Yet Biden’s popularity, as measured by poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight, remains in the doldrums. At 43 percent approval, his numbers are worse  than any postwar president at this point in his term except for his  predecessor, Donald Trump. Author Noah Berlatsky has written an analysis for The Editorial Board in which he says that all this kind of...makes sense. In fact, it may be a sign of democracy working. On the show, Matt and Noah run through his argument, and talk about whether democracy truly can work in the process of so much media propaganda, misinformation, and voter confusion.

Chris Hill of Motley Fool Money takes stock of the biggest trends of 2021 for business, the economy, and investing, and the biggest questions ahead for 2022.  He awards CEO of the year (there were three), business story of the year, and a nice piece of good news for investors ahead. 

Av Harris of the national fiscal responsibility advocacy group The Concord Coalition joins the show to share insights from his experience working for some of the most colorful -- and colorfully named -- politicians in America, and to explain the new Concord Coalition report on why immigrants will be so vital to maintaining economic growth in the future. Also, what's up with the Congressional Budget Office saying that the Build Back Better bill won't add to the deficit, and then saying well, if you did a bunch of other stuff, it would? Is that actually a meaningful way to look at this (the Concord Coalition says yes, Matt says no), or just fodder for scoring political points? Photo by Kerwin Elias on Unsplash

On today's show, we highlight the complicated legacy of Bob Dole. For Americans of a certain age, basically age 35 and over, Bob Dole was an avatar of the Republican Party.  After his losing presidential campaign, he went through a transition from a taciturn, gruff politician known as Dr. Gridlock to a much more genial and vulnerable public image cultivated on late night TV, as a spokesperson for World War II veterans, and on behalf of sufferers of erectile dysfunction as a pitchman for Viagra.  In the wake of his death, analysts focused on that later image, and mourned the passing not only of the man, but of a seemingly different and better kind of American politics. But our guest today was one of the few to point out that Bob Dole's record was far more complex, and maybe the nostalgia about the way things used to be in politics isn't quite right. In fact, as much as we praise his military service and personal toughness, it can be argued that Bob Dole was ahead of his time on many of the things that we hate most about today's politics.  He may even have invented them.  Erik Loomis is Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island. His most recent book is A History of America in Ten Strikes, published by The New Press in 2018.  He also writes for the Editorial Board, and his most recent article is titled The Mean Old Man of the GOP is Dead.

Or Rush Limbaugh? Or the same media echo chamber that exists on the right.  Longtime West Virginia radio host Howard Monroe and Matt Robison dive into where the right wing dominance of slanted media comes from (and make no mistake, the right wing does dominate), and whether it is ultimately fixable. 

Today, we're thrilled to welcome back two friends of the show, Mario Broussard and Alex Ivey, who are Senior Vice President and Vice President of Research respectively at Global Strategy Group, one of the premier polling, research, and public affairs companies in America. They have been running an absolutely fascinating research project, Global Strategy Group’s bi-annual series, The Melting Pot: GSG’s Ongoing Look at Racial Politics in America, which is intended to take the temperature of Black America on political issues, social attitudes, and voting behavior.  As we observed in Mario and Alex’s last appearance on the show, Black Americans are the absolute core what the Democratic Party and turn out an engagement from these voters will be absolutely critical to determining the outcome of the elections in 2022 and beyond. Today, we tackle lessons learned from their research about Defund the Police and even more important, Critical Race Theory. How can Democrats talk about it when it is so politically dangerous?  Our guests have the answer. 

In the last few months American politics has become a little mysterious, if not downright confounding. By almost every measure, President Joe Biden and the Democratic party have had an extremely successful year. Remember we started this year with an insurrection in the very heart of our government, with armed vigilantes roaming the halls of Congress. We also had a brand new set of vaccines but almost no Americans vaccinated against a deadly pandemic. Unemployment was still six and a half percent.  Economic output was hundreds of billions of dollars lower than the start of the pandemic. Fast forward to the end of October: GDP had fully recovered and grown beyond pre-pandemic levels, employers were adding half a million jobs a month, unemployment was down to 4.6%, and people were leaving their jobs at a record rate because the job market was so good.  Wages were up 5.0% over the year. And Americans had accumulated $2.3 trillion more in savings, with the median household’s checking account balance 50 percent higher than before the pandemic. The US had also carried out the fastest vaccination campaign in our history, and after a painful, wrenching takeover by the Taliban that cost American lives, the US managed to end its longest war, successfully evacuating 124,000 people, including 6000 U.S. citizens, in the largest airlift in U.S. history. And yet, Democrats running on these successes, and contrasting with the disastrous leadership the country had suffered under Donald Trump, saw a massive swing of voter sentiment against them. President Biden’s approval rating has cratered, and Republican turnout surged so strongly in the New Jersey and Virginia elections that Democrats lost everything in Virginia, and nearly so in New Jersey. Some of the smartest minds in politics set out last month to find out why. Aliza Astrow is a political analyst at the think Tank Third Way, she helped organize this research effort, and she’s here to tell us what they found.