Hinderaker-Ward Experience #26: The Amateur

 

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Another Saturday night special edition of The Hinderaker-Ward Experience is ready for your listening pleasure.  It’s John Hinderaker of Power Line and Brian Ward of Fraters Libertas breaking down the big stories of the week.  These include President Obama’s straight-faced claims of leading the most fiscally responsible administration in the last 60 years and Obama’s perhaps not unrelated difficulties in cracking 60% of the vote running against convicted felons and “none of the above” in Democratic primaries around the country.

Special guest this week is New York Times best selling author Edward Klein.  His latest book is THE hot buzz story on the Internet this week, it’s The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House.   Via hundreds of personal interviews with political and Obama insiders Ed provides previously undocumented details on the President’s background and performance in office over his first term.   Lots of juicy tidbits as well, including Bill Clinton’s real opinion of Obama, Valerie Jarrett’s undue influence in the White House, and the acrimonious rivalry between Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.

Later, Loon of the Week (top Democrat official claims of unnatural relations between Romney and a corporate entity) and This Week in Gate Keeping (how changing one word can REALLY affect the accuracy of a story).

We hope you enjoy, and comments and feedback are always most welcome.

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  1. Profile Photo Inactive
    @AlKennedy

    Thanks very much for an always informative and enjoyable HWX podcast.  I second The Amateur as a “must read”.  I started it one evening and had to stay up late to finish it.  Just a reminder: Ronald Reagan took Gerald Ford to the Republican Convention in 1976 with a very strong primary challenge.  Ford subsequently lost to Carter.

    • #1
  2. Profile Photo Inactive
    @elprez

    Someone needed to turn down his microphone while Klein was talking. Otherwise, an interesting interview.

    • #2
  3. Profile Photo Inactive
    @elprez

    Brian Ward—can you turn down your microphone when you’re not talking? The heavy breathing every 3 seconds or so is annoying.

    • #3
  4. Profile Photo Member
    @BrianWard
    elprez: Brian Ward—can you turn down your microphone when you’re not talking? The heavy breathing every 3 seconds or so is annoying. · May 27 at 11:32pm

    Got it, less respiration.  Breathing is over rated.

    Or I can remember to NOT engage in my deep knee bend regimen during the taping.   Good tips.  

    • #4
  5. Profile Photo Member
    @PaulStinchfield

    Here is a passage from The Amateur documenting what Ed Klein said in the interview:

    During his dinner with the historians, Obama indicated that he had a preference for a corporatist political system in which the economy would be collectively managed by big employers, big unions, and government officials through a formal mechanism at the national level. Also known as state capitalism, it is a system in which the government picks winners and promotes economic growth.  This corporatist approach was hardly a new idea. It had been around for more than one hundred and fifty years. It had been tried in the 1930s and 1940s by Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists, and in Europe after World War II by democratic-socialist governments in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, among others. In America during the1970s and 1980s, left wing Democratic presidential candidates Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis revived the idea, arguing that America should replace free-market capitalism with what they called “a neo-corporatist state.”
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  6. Profile Photo Member
    @PaulStinchfield

    The passage continues:

    Though the corporatist idea had an unbroken record of failure both in Europe and America, where voters had decisively rejected Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis, Obama was determined to embrace this discredited economic, political, and social philosophy. He planned to achieve his “transformational” presidency by vastly expanding the reach of Washington into the everyday life of American citizens. In that regard, the American president whom Obama most closely resembled was not JFK, Reagan, Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. It was Woodrow Wilson, whose conception of himself was aptly described by the noted conservative historian Forrest McDonald (also missing at the White House dinner) as “little short of messianic.”
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  7. Profile Photo Member
    @PaulStinchfield

    In 1969 Cornell University was taken over by radical students, some of them armed. Political science professor Walter Berns conducted an experiment that revealed the true soul of the American Left:

    I proved this when, to an American Government class at the height of the Cornell crisis, I read some speeches analyzing the situation and calling for what ought to be done. The radicals in the class were enthusiastic until I revealed that the speeches were by Mussolini.

    (from Democracy and the Constitution, 2006)

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