Listen to the entire program<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/p>\n![\"Eric](\"http:\/\/t3.gstatic.com\/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcREgqxDVHzLf7wljtZ7SQ7UohB-Vkavi3shqCIcdB8Et__GpSLZ&t=1\")
President Barack Obama is hosting Republican leaders for lunch at the White House today in an attempt to reach out to the party that has created the worst atmosphere of political hostility in recent memory. It’s part of the President’s plan to reach out to the GOP after it gave Democrats a thrashing in the last election. But, according to journalist Eric Alterman, that type outreach is not only ineffective, it reveals a perpetual political blindness by Obama to the fact that his opposition party has any interest whatsoever in actually governing. In his new book Kabuki Democracy: The System Vs. Barack Obama, Alterman posits that the American political system is structured to work against progressive change, from Senators’ power of secret holds on legislation, to the overwhelming and legalized system of corporate political bribery, to the dominance of Rupert Murdoch’s extremist media machine shifting the debate further and further to the right. Despite numerous strategic missteps by President Obama, he faces a right-wing juggernaut so powerful that it should come as no surprise that Candidate Obama’s promises have not panned out. Furthermore, according to Alterman, “[President] Roosevelt was pushed from the left by a genuine mass movement [while advocating for the New Deal] whereas Barack Obama is facing the opposite.”<\/p>\n
GUEST: Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a columnist for The Nation, Moment, and the Daily Beast, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Fellow at the Nation Institute, and the author of several books including the national bestseller “What Liberal Media?” His latest book is Kabuki Democracy: The System Vs. Barack Obama<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Barack Obama is hosting Republican leaders for lunch at the White House today in an attempt to reach out to the party that has created the worst atmosphere of political hostility in recent memory. It’s part of the President’s plan to reach out to the GOP after it gave Democrats a thrashing in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program","category-featured-book"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}