by Tom Ashbrook.

Bigfoot political columnist Joe Klein is pining for Harry Truman. For an American politician, any American politician, who will stand up and tell it like it is, straight from the heart, un-spun, unpolished, un-polled.

After eight presidential campaigns and his briefly-anonymous send-up of Bill Clinton in “Primary Colors”, the Time Magazine pundit is now putting his name front and center on a great lament for politics in the USA – taken hostage by slick consultants, he says, who have beaten us all into a box of polls and pablum.

America’s democracy, says Klein, has been taken hostage and trivialized by people who think we’re stupid. This hour On Point: Joe Klein on politics lost in America.

Guests:

Joe Klein, Time magazine columnist, author of “Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid”

Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst, senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly