February 28 – Super Tuesday as a Critical Turning Point; The Contours of Hillary Clinton’s National Campaign; Russia’s Useful Role in Syria

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with an analysis of the upcoming watershed primary vote on Super Tuesday that is expected to clarify the presidential field on both sides with Hillary Clinton declaring her campaign is going national while Donald Trump predicts “huuuge” results for himself. Julian Zelizer, a professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University joins us to discuss his article at CNN “Why Tuesday is still super” and what appears to be a critical turning point in the 2016 presidential campaigns with Super Tuesday’s 595 delegates up for grabs on the Republican side and 1,004 on the Democratic side.  

Part 2

Then we speak with Richard Parker, who teaches economics and public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and is the former managing editor of Ramparts, was a co-founder of Mother Jones and serves on the editorial board of The Nation. We discuss the contours of Hillary Clinton’s campaign outlined in her victory speech in South Carolina and the influence that Bernie Sanders has had in pushing the Democratic narrative to the left, as well as the possibility that the nasty and divisive Trump campaign will reverse itself in a general election with Trump sounding like a liberal Democrat.

Part 3

The finally, we look into the two week ceasefire in Syria that is largely holding even though it only applies to the so-called moderate rebels and not al Nusra and ISIS.Graham Fuller, the former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA and author of “Breaking Faith: A novel of espionage and an American’s crisis of conscience in Pakistan” joins us to discuss why he thinks the U.S. is going along with the Russian initiative which is not a zero sum game or some Cold War plot to outdo America but is the only hope to end Syria’s civil war.