Five Essential Podcasts for the Political Podcast Junkie
Good evening, my name is Lisa and I’m addicted to political podcasts. I would rather listen to a podcast than consume any other type of media. I listen in my car, on the treadmill, on the beach, while washing dishes, while folding clothes and cooking, while straightening my hair and making up my face. I listen at every opportunity and during every activity that I possibly can.
The truth is I’ve been fairly intrigued by American politics for almost two decades. It began with the fascinating electoral college tie of the 2000 election. Then, after the fateful Supreme Court decision, when George Bush the son was the sitting President I watched the horror of 9/11, the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and his contest with John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential with increasing interest. I began to read articles about US policy, I would watch Bush speeches and some of the commentary about him on cable news networks, amused by his occasional gaffes and fascinated as the tide turned massively against the Iraq war both domestically and internationally. In those days (pre Facebook and Twitter) most of my world news came from the BBC World Service which is far from America centric, so I was interested in but not riveted by the American news stories.
When Obama became the POTUS I began to follow American politics a bit more closely. The unlikely rise of a freshman Senator from Illinois - not only black but with “Hussein” in his name - undoubtedly captured my attention. The backlash against him, the absurd birther movement, the rise of the Tea Party, his fight to pass the ACA, and particularly the way in which his worldview kept clashing with the realities on the ground, particularly in the Middle East where I reside, kept me keenly interested in his Presidency and on the peculiarities of the US political system. When the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell denied him his SCOTUS pick with 10 months left in his term, I was outraged, when Obama valiantly tried to put some type of sensible gun control on the agenda after witnessing more and more senseless gun tragedies, I was engaged. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the full-blown obsession that my American politics watching became in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election.
The spectacle of the battle between the two least popular candidates in US history began to consume me. The endless stomach-churning scandals, the outrage, the vilification, the smashing of norms and basic human decorum, Jerry Springer had come to Washington and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was at this stage that I discovered what came to be the fuel for my obsession: The political podcast. It began with Slate’s Political Gabfest and shortly afterterwards I discovered Five Thirty Eight’s Politics Podcast, and it just kept snowballing from there — Keeping it 1600, The Gist, The Weeds, Trumpcast, NPR Political Roundup, New Yorker Politics and More, on and on, so many to listen to with only so many hours in a day! You know how sports fans sit on the couch watching the game and shouting at the screen? So I found myself at the gym one day with the uncomfortable feeling that everyone was staring at me and I could be sure it wasn’t my chiseled triceps that had caught their attention. I suddenly realized that I had been shouting out loud at Nate Silver “tell them that 25% probability doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.” This had officially become an addiction.
Full disclosure: I lean decidedly left. If you know anything about political podcasts, you would probably have noticed that many of those listed above represent the more left leaning pods on offer. I do not pretend to be neutral, I am fascinated by and fully in support of the ‘resistance’ to Trump’s Presidency. So if you’re a Fox News 24 hours a day kind of person, my recommendations are probably not suited to your tastes. Having said that, if you want to know what is happening anywhere from the center to the more left leaning political world, you need to download at least a few of these five essential political podcasts immediately.
5. Vox’s Today Explained
The folks at Vox felt that the news cycle moves so rapidly that journalists and pundits rarely have enough time to go into any one story in any significant depth. They decided to rectify this by choosing one main story a day to focus on, to investigate and explain in a thorough, instructive and entertaining way. The show is hosted by Sean Rameswaram @rameswaram, who is informed, extremely pleasant and often surprises with his insight. He interviews various guests, experts on the particular topic of the day. This podcast is not all Trump, Trump and more Trump. The Today Explained team have chosen to iluminate subects ranging from the guy who filmed the car ramming in Charlotsville taking Alex Jones to court, the national crisis of student debt, Tillerson’s early retirement from political life and the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike, to the latest episode which is about the Flint water crisis. All the episodes are well researched and presented in a polished, informative and engaging format. A bonus is the creative way in which Sean dialogues with his co-hosts or producers around the show’s ads. If you want to go deeper into some less explored issues on a daily basis, instead of skating on the surface of the Trump dominated news cycle, subscribe immediately to Today Explained.
4. Stay Tuned With Preet
Preet Bharara’s story is in some ways emblematic of the story of the Trump presidency. In January 2017, he was serving as the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Before 45’s inauguration, Preet spoke with the President elect who assured Preet that he would keep his job after the inauguration. Of course a few months later Preet was fired along with 46 other Obama appointed US State Attorneys. So Preet, having been fired for the first time in his illustrious career, decided to start a podcast, and in September of 2017 Stay Tuned with Preet was born. As a US attorney, Preet was known as a fierce fighter against corruption, financial fraud and violent crime, and he similarly touts his podcast as being about justice and fairness. In the early days of the podcast he took on the issue of whether Jeff Sessions as AG could be trusted to represent the civil rights of all citizens in a fascinating conversation with his old friend Vanita Gupta, who led the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under President Obama. More recently he sat down with Floyd Abrams, America’s most prominent First Amendment attorney for a discussion about his long career as a defender of free speech and about how Trump differs from every other president when it comes to first amendment rights. More recently, in an episode entitled “Breakfast with Putin” Preet sits down with Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Moscow, for a frank expose of what it was like to live under surveillance in Putin’s Russia, as well as some questions regarding Trump’s current relationship with the Russian leader.
A big bonus of this podcast is its unique format which invaribly offers an engaging listening experience. Preet starts off by answering listeners’ questions, posed to him during the course of the week via voicemail and Twitter. His responses are always well thought out and informative. He then airs an interview with his chosen weekly guest. He ends every episode with a brief oped on something that he feels has been neglected or little noticed in the news cycle of the week. Stay Tuned with Preet usually runs for about an hour and it is unfailingly an hour well spent.
3. Trumpcast
Back in March of 2016 when Trump was merely a twinkle in the GOP’s eye, Slate’s Chairman, Jacob Weisberg started this podcast aiming to explain how Donald Trump had happened to America. He intended to interview psychiatrists, journalists and historians about the Trump phenomenon and to offer advice on how to deal with it. More than two years and thousands of subscribers later, Jacob and his co-hosts Virginia Heffernan and Jamelle Bouie are still helping us to make sense of this bizarre and at times frightening moment.
Every few days the Trumpcast team comes out with some fascinating interview on everything from the Trump kleptocracy, foreign policy, rhetoric, legal battles — really everything and anything Trump. In February, for example, Jamelle Bouille conducted a fascinating interview with Jacob Levy, a professor of political theory at McGill University, about why we should be taking Trump’s rhetoric seriously, while Virginia Heffernan artfully grilled David Frum about the strange alliance between Trump and the right-wing Evangelical movement and on why he thinks this moment in history is more serious for America than Watergate. By contrast, a week ago, Weisberg had a compelling conversation with the Executive Editor of Bloomberg View, Tim O’Brien, who cautions against excessive exuberance with regard to the FBI probe of Michael Cohen. All three of the co-hosts are expert interviewers who manage to elicit unique perspectives from their guests in a clear and concise way. Download and listen to Trumpcast today, there is no better way to spend half an hour.
2. Radio Atlantic
From the moment I hear the opening bars of Jon Batiste’s version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” the podcast’s signature tune, I know I’m in for a treat. This podcast was founded by three journalists from the Atlantic Magazine: Jeffrey Goldberg Editor in Chief, Matt Thompson Executive Editor, and Alex Wagner Contributing Editor. The three of them are all skillful interviewers, but what makes this podcast exceptional is the high level of the conversations that take place between the co-hosts. The latest, brilliant example of this is the episode from two weeks ago where Alex Wagner disucsses her new book Futureface. The regulars are joined by the deputy politics editor AdamSerwer, in a conversation about race, history and identity in America that kept me riveted throughout.
There have been so many notable discussions on this pod it is difficult to decide which ones to mention here. The conversation between three second generation immigrants entitled “Who Gets to be An American” is another riveting one, along with an episode called the “Presidential Fitness Challenge” one of the few discussions of the ubiquitous Michael Wolf book Fire and Fury that I actually found interesting. In that episode the hosts were joined by an incredible veteran writer for the Atlantic James Fallows. I think the beauty of this pod is that they have such a wealth of writing talent and experience to draw on that every discussion becomes a work of art in their dextrous hands.
And the winner is…
- Pod Save America
Once upon a time there were four ex Obama aides who loved words and policy and left leaning American politics. They found themselves in shock after an unexpected win in an unprecedented presidential election and they just knew that they had to do something about it. So they founded a little media company called Crooked Media. I think inadvertantly, these four guys - former Obama Speech writers Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett, former Obama Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer and former Obama NSC Spokesman Tommy Vietor, have created a new and unique genre of podcast journalism. They are neither journalists nor politicians, comedians nor actors, talk show hosts nor authors, activists nor community organizers. Yet somehow by being none of these, by being impossible to define and compartmentalize, they have become all of the above. It is this elusive, indefinable quality that turns every episode of Pod Save America into a rollicking, enlightening, humorous and compelling ride of biting critique, astute policy wonkiness, hilarious banter and serious political activism. A mere description in words of this podcast experience cannot do it justice. Do yourselves a favor download it and listen. I particularly recommend their live shows, they are always my favorite episodes since the energy that these guys have managed to generate amongst their listeners is so palpable in the live versions of the pod. The “Pod Save” brand has become a shared language amongst like minded people who want to act to effect change at this critical historical juncture. Become as they say a “friend of the pod” you will be enriched by the experience, I guarantee it.
