Episode #78: The Debate Stage and an Iowa Sage

Fox News thinks it has the right solution for how to handle the unprecedented number of Republican presidential candidates for their debate in Cleveland this summer:  pick the top ten who average highest in five national polls.  That's good for Fox, which is handling the Aug. 6 debate, but not for the six or seven or ten Republicans who will get left out.  Republican strategist Vin Weber is not a fan of this approach, but he acknowledges that Fox and the RNC have a difficult task ahead of them.  He shares his thoughts on what should be done on this week's program. In addition to the size of the GOP field, one of the surprises this election cycle is that the Iowa Straw Poll may lose some of the attention it's been getting over the past few years.  Michelle Bachmann winning it in 2011 didn't help -- after all, she finished at the bottom of the pack several months later during the caucuses.  Steffen Schmidt of Iowa State University talks about how the Iowa caucuses came about, why it matters and should matter, and what the Hawkeye State offers that other states do not. After Schmidt gives us an Iowa history lesson, he is followed by author and journalist Max Holland.  It was ten years ago this week that Mark Felt, a former top FBI official, unveiled what was one of the biggest political secrets in history -- that he was Deep Throat, the secretive source that gave information to the Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein that helped bring down President Nixon during the Watergate scandal.  But if Felt's confession in 2005 answered the "who," it didn't exactly address the "why."  That's what Holland, the author of "Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat," tries to answer. Finally, with the memory of Loretta Sanchez's Indian war-cry gaffe still fresh, author Rick Robinson joins us to talk about famous embarrassments and goof ups of the past -- everything from Rick Perry's "oops" and George Allen's "Macaca" moments to John Kerry's "I voted for the $87 billion before voting against it" and Hillary Clinton's run from sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 that never happened. Image via knowyourmeme.com This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.