A Podcast You Should Try

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/24/opinion/campaign-stops/a-podcast-you-should-try.html

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Long before he became known as Barack Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod was a journalist — a political storyteller at The Chicago Tribune. His storytelling instincts are obvious on his podcast, “The Axe Files.” It’s become my favorite new podcast over the past year.

Each episode consists of Axelrod talking with a single guest, usually a politician, a political aide or a writer. He starts by asking guests to tell their life story — how they ended up doing what they do — and the conversation eventually comes around to current events, which these days means the 2016 campaign. In the best episodes, you emerge feeling as if you’ve heard a human story and also become smarter about the world.

One place to start is a recent episode featuring Ron Brownstein, of The Atlantic. The conversation builds to a succinct diagnosis of our political landscape. Brownstein notes that Democrats appear on the verge of winning the popular vote for the sixth time in seven presidential elections — which no party has done before in the United States.

How? By winning over two growing groups: non-white voters, who will make up about 30 percent of the electorate this year, up from 13 percent in 1992; and college-educated whites. The latter were once strongly Republican, but they have been turned off by a party that seems to reject modern America as it really is.

“Republicans have to find a way to talk to a changing America,” says Brownstein, who was a data-friendly political journalist before it was cool. “The key word in the Trump lexicon is ‘again.’ If you’re a 32-year-old Hispanic lawyer or a 27-year-old African-American architect or a 40-year-old white professional woman or a gay couple in Charlotte, North Carolina, you may not think things are perfect now, but there is no mythical ‘again’ you are trying to get back to.”

Other past episodes to consider: Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni, Al Franken, Erick Erickson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Caroline Kennedy, Eric Holder, Amy Klobuchar, Jon Stewart or the very first episode, featuring a friendly debate between Axelrod and Bernie Sanders about the nature of political change.