Episode #122: The American President (Real and Fake)

As we work to make the change to preparing the Political Junkie for its new home, we used this week’s program to offer three previously aired interviews that we think you’ll enjoy. The first is a conversation with Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, who has a new book out explaining why our presidential nominating system came to be.  New rules adopted after the 1968 election moved the decision-making process from the party bosses to the voters, in increased number of primaries.  Is it better today?  You decide. With President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland in limbo, we talk to author Kevin McMahon about President Nixon’s ill-fated Supreme Court nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell in 1969 and 1970 — both rejected by the Senate. And with a presidential race that seems to veer into entertainment, playwright and lyricist Murray Horwitz is here with an amusing conversation about the role of presidents in movies. Photo from the film “The American President” This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License