Category: Briefings

A Review of Last Night’s Democratic National Convention and a Preview of Tonight’s 

We begin with an update on last night’s speeches at the Democratic convention in Chicago and a preview of tonight’s lineup which features Kamala Harris’s Vice Presidential running mate Tim Walz who is already getting attacked by 50 House Republicans who are distorting his military record in their attempt at “Swift-boating” him. Joining us from the DNC is Bill Scher, the politics editor of the Washington Monthly. He is the host of the history podcast When America Worked and the cohost of the bipartisan online show and podcast The DMZ. We discuss his article at The Washington Monthly, “Convention Night 2: Barack Obama Is Still Showing Us How We Can Depolarize America.”

The Generational Change Underway in the Harris/Walz Democratic Party

Then we examine the generational change underway at the DNC with a diverse array of young faces calling out their state’s delegate counts in last night’s role call. Joining us is Lincoln Mitchell, who teaches in the School of International and Public Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books on the former Soviet states, baseball, and democracy, the latest of which is The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 and he is the author of the popular Substack Kibitzing with Lincoln where his latest article is “Kamala Harris and Generational Change.”

China Sues Stanford For Mao’s Secretary’s Diaries With an Inside Look at the CCP From 1935 to 2018

Then finally we look into the trial underway in San Francisco at which the Chinese government is suing Stanford University to retrieve the diaries of Mao’s secretary that provide an inside look at the Chinese Communist Party’s leadership from 1935 until 2018. Joining us is Orville Schell, who was formerly the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and is currently the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. His books include Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders and Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century. He has an article at Foreign Affairs, “The Dictator’s Enabler: Searching for the Real Zhou Enlai.”