April 26 - Similarities Between the Campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Bernie Sanders; Our Rotten, Corrupt and Deliberately Complicated Election System

We begin with the possibility that the current divisions between the Sanders and Clinton campaigns will continue and could become more strained at the primary process heads towards its likely conclusion in California on June 7. Matt Lindstrom, a Professor of Political Science at St. John’s University where he is the Director of the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement, joins us. We discuss similarities shaping up between the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and this year’s Democratic convention, in terms of how the young flocked to Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 campaign in huge numbers that resulted in a rift between the insurgent McCarthy and the establishment candidate Vice President Humphrey who was narrowly beaten by Nixon, leaving a bitter residue in the Democratic Party which effectively lost the executive branch for decades after.

Part 2

Then we are joined in the studio by award-winning investigative reporter, political columnist and foreign correspondent Andrew Gumbel whose latest book, just out is “Down for the Count: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America”. On the eve of tonight’s primary election results in five states, we examine the truth in Donald Trump’s charges that the system is rigged and look into why it is that the United States is alone among advanced democracies in having a deliberately complicated and easily-gamed election system whose manifest flaws were exposed in Florida in 2000 but essential remain as broken as ever today, a condition which appears to be the way the two major parties, the Democrats and especially the Republicans want it.