Swing State

It will be Trump or Biden, with everything that choice means. In Covid time, with many millions out of work and so much uncertainty around basic questions of health, housing, money for food, the future of businesses and jobs, we wanted to look straight at the US economy in the midst of pandemic and political instability.   The great economic journalist and analyst David Wessel, long of the Wall Street Journal news pages, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, now at the Brookings Institution joins us.   In our final Swing State episode, as we arrive as promised to November 3, Tom and Heidi share what's next!

Voters are already out in record-setting millions, many in line for hours to have their say. We've tried to be a point of honest clarity in this election run-up, but we all know it's an information war zone out there. We have two leading lights from the news business for their take on the battlefront. Margaret Sullivan is media columnist for the Washington Post, former public editor at the New York Times, and author of "Ghosting the News." Bina Venkataraman is editorial page editor at the Boston Globe, a science policy maven out of Harvard and MIT, author of "The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age." who's now taking on the whole world of policy, politics, and our information Wild West. We pulled them out of the news torrent to talk 2020, the loss of local news, and how to fix our information ecosystem.

The 2020 election campaign season is fraught with unrelenting drama – who's infected now, hate-spewing, and the president's latest Tweetstorm – we lose track of the scale of what's really upon us. Beyond masks and death rates, the pandemic, the high court, the economy, democracy, fear of fascism, and all the rest there looms the Big One, our climate, and how the hammer of climate change will dramatically change our lives. Half of the American population will see a decline in their environment conditional.   People are already on the move, fleeing fires, rising seas, too many hurricanes, too much heat. In the decades in front of us, climate migration - vast movements of people driven by painful climate change - is on track to explode. Abrahm Lustgarten does soften the blow. His New York Times and ProPublica piece over the summer reveals a world already on the move and forecast what's ahead for the United States...

Is there a better way to do journalism than Americans are seeing, hearing, and reading right now? Heidi and Tom dive in with John Gable who set out almost a decade ago to help news consumers get out of their information bubbles and see the world afresh with his website . But is there a way to cover these times with a straight face when the President doesn't tell the truth? How do journalists cover this moment in a time of social media disinformation and deep polarization? 

Republican super-strategist Stuart Stevens knows the home stretch to presidential elections like very few others. He’s been at the heart of Republican campaigns for decades – for big-name governors, senators, Republican presidents, and contenders: George W. Bush, John McCain, Bob Dole, and most recently as the top strategist for Mitt Romney in 2012.   In his new book, “It Was All a Lie”, Stevens is tough on himself and he’s brutal on the Republican Party. The GOP has embraced its own dark side, he says. Forget decency. Forget ideals. It’s just a power cartel, says Stevens, wound around race, racism, and institutionalized hate. Stevens is on the team at the Lincoln Project, the squad of ex-GOP campaign hotshots now looking to take Trump down in November. And the party itself? Stuart Stevens doesn’t believe it can be rehabilitated. But he’s sure Trump and his Attorney General William Bar will try anything to hang on to power. The next 50 days, he told us, will be the most dangerous for this country since the Civil War. 

It's been quite an August, for the country and host Tom Ashbrook who lost his beloved dad. They promised they'd be back and take us to November 3 and Election Day. The big issues have put our whole country in a "Swing State" – life and death with Covid-19, the life and death of democracy on the table. Our very first Swing State guest was the great American historian and chronicler of our fraught times, Heather Cox Richardson. From her home up in Maine, she's been following and interpreting every twist and turn of this country's election-year journey. We asked her back to kick off what we're calling Season Two. Don't miss this frank look at what you should know before you vote.

Bob Dylan was the protest icon of a generation. “The times they are a-changing,” sang Bob Dylan and “a hard rains’ gonna fall.” Now, those 1960s protests are deep in the rearview mirror. A new generation is in the streets, with demands for a racial, cultural, gender, economic and structural accounting that might make Dylan look tame.   At 79, with a new studio album, his first in years, we explore Dylan’s music, tenderness and anti-establishment voice with UMass Lowell's American Cultural Historian, Professor Michael Millner, and Yale’s American Religious Studies Professor Kathryn Lofton. Is much more to demand from this Nobel laureate for Literature when change is desperately upon us? 

Know Your Price, Dr. Andre Perry's dynamic new book, offers concrete policy solutions that lift up Black communities and asks us to invest in Black people as he defines six Black-majority cities whose assets and strengths are undervalued. A fellow at the non-partisan Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., Dr. Perry has long studied economic models around housing devaluation which leads to substandard education and substandard infrastructure in Black communities. In this incredibly useful interview, he offers ideas that stop blaming Black people and instead asks Americans to use this watershed moment as an opportunity to change the racial structures that feed and reproduce the inequality in America. A young child brought up in Wilkinsburg, a small city east of Pittsburgh, raised by his adopted mother, Andre Perry's knowledge is deep. 

At the same time as protests erupted across American cities and the world demanding racial equity, the cities have become dystopian scenes of military hold. Gen. James Mattis now warns of division from the very top as a threat to American democracy. Many protests began peacefully until the nefarious, often violent, opportunists arrived. Who are they and who is inciting the violence? Are they opportunists, provocateurs of different ideologies, white supremacists, anarchists?   University of Chicago Professor Kathleen Belew has tracked the contemporary rise of the White Power Movement from the 1970s in her book "Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America and describes the people she studies as people interested in exploiting these moments to damage democracy and overthrow the country. Sowing discontent, attracting followers on Facebook and in the darker halls of 4chan and 8chan, haunting statehouses and showing up at George Floyd protests, she says it's time to be hyper-alert and aware of this threat: highly organized cadres made up of white supremacy, virulent anticommunism, and apocalyptic faith. 

The country is in crisis. Riots, protest, police brutality, pandemic. What do we tell our kids to help them understand? And how do we get them educated in our time of Covid-19? When and how do they go back to school?   We reached out to leading educator Dr. Jennifer Price. She knows the public school world, the private school world, and how children's lives and educations are being pummeled by pandemic and upheaval. Don't duck the issues, she says. Talk about everything. And be ready for almost anything when it comes to the new face of education in Covid time. Jen Price walks us through the dramatic range of options K-12 schools are juggling as they plan for the coming school year with the pandemic unvanquished.   Dr. Price is head of school at Buckingham, Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a prominent private school. She was formerly principal of Newton North High School, a large public high school, and Superintendent of North Andover Public Schools.