Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

[THEME MUSIC] KERRI MILLER: Coming up on our first hour from the Democratic National Convention, the latest news. Hillary Clinton decides to release her delegates. Tension remains high between her supporters and Barack Obama's. And an early morning drenching from the sprinklers inside the Pepsi Center, where the convention opens this afternoon. Then analysis from Howard Fineman of Newsweek and John Nichols of The Nation, and our spotlight interview with Walter Mondale, who says the face of his party has changed dramatically.

WALTER MONDALE: So now, if you take a picture of the Democratic Convention, you'll see everybody there. I mean, we've really broken up the power structure.

KERRI MILLER: We'll also preview Michelle Obama's speech tonight and a tribute planned to the Kennedy family. Special convention coverage from Denver in a moment. First news.

NORA RAHM: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Nora Rahm. The Democratic National Convention opens today in Denver. Tonight, Michelle Obama will deliver a prime-time speech to explain why her husband should be the next president. Barack Obama is to close out the convention Thursday night when he accepts the nomination at a football stadium. NPR's Audie Cornish reports.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Tonight's the night we're going to make.

AUDIE CORNISH: The main stage of the Pepsi Center has been buzzing, with everybody from the house band to the Speaker of the House rehearsing for the convention's opening night. Even the floor seating was in flux, with the Delaware delegation bumped to the front in order to cheer on Obama's vice presidential pick, Senator Joe Biden.

While Florida and Michigan's delegations were awarded full voting rights on Sunday, those states were stripped of delegates earlier this summer as punishment for ignoring party rules over the primary season schedule. The opening night of the convention will highlight Barack Obama's biography. And his wife Michelle will give the keynote speech on unity. Audie Cornish, NPR News, Denver.

NORA RAHM: The Russian parliament voted unanimously today to recognize the independence of Babesia and South Ossetia, two Russian-backed separatist regions of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Russian forces continue to occupy positions inside Georgian territory after fighting a brief war with this American allied country. NPR's Ivan Watson reports from Istanbul.

IVAN WATSON: Two US Navy ships have steamed through Istanbul's narrow Bosphorus Straits in recent days as part of a US plan to deliver emergency humanitarian aid to Georgia's Black Sea coast. A top Russian general has indicated the presence of American warships so close to Russia's own Black Sea fleet would increase tensions with Moscow.

Russian troops, meanwhile, continue to occupy positions around Georgia's nearby Black Sea Port of Poti. The Russian military says it plans to conduct regular inspections of cargo unloaded in Poti. So far, Russian forces appear not to have confronted the two American Navy vessels. Ivan Watson, NPR News, Istanbul.

NORA RAHM: The White House announced today that President Bush is sending Vice President Dick Cheney to the region next week. He is to visit Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, and Italy. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is on her way to the Middle East on a mission to secure a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians by the end of the year.

Israeli and Palestinian officials had agreed to the year-end goal at a peace conference last November, hosted by the US. This is Rice's seventh visit to the region since then. Hours before her arrival, Israel began releasing nearly 200 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli prisons.

On Wall Street at this hour, the Dow Jones Industrial average is down 105 points at 11,522. The NASDAQ is down 24 at 2390. The S&P is down 10 points. You're listening to NPR News.

- Support for news comes from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at macfound.org.

PERRY FINELLI: From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Perry Finelli. The demolition of the Highway 23 bridge in Saint Cloud begins today. NPR's Amber Espinoza reports.

AMBER ESPINOZA: The bridge carried 35,000 vehicles a day before it was closed in March for safety reasons. Bridge inspectors found bent gusset plates under the bridge. Failed gusset plates are thought to be one of the causes of the I-35W Bridge collapse. MnDOT officials say, it will take two months to remove the existing bridge deck by sections.

Crews will continue to tear down the bridge even through the winter months. In the spring, the bridge's support piers will be in place. Then the crews will place the bridge's steel trusses. The $250 million bridge will be open with four lanes of traffic by November 2009. Traffic will be redirected to other bridges over the Mississippi until the bridge is complete. Amber Espinoza, Minnesota Public Radio News, Collegeville.

PERRY FINELLI: Crews today are starting to repair the pedestrian walkways in the Highway 43 bridge in Winona. MnDOT says the project will also include bridge joint cleaning and painting. Pedestrians and bicyclists are still restricted from crossing the bridge until repairs are completed. The project is expected to be finished by mid-October, weather permitting.

The bridge across the Mississippi River was closed for about a week in early June. It reopened to vehicle traffic about a month later after corroded gusset plates were repaired or replaced. During the latest project, there will be single-lane closures from 7:00 AM until 5:00 PM. Crews will work six days a week.

Although it's August, it felt more like fall in Northern Minnesota earlier this morning, the National Weather Service says, Embarrass reported an overnight low of 27 degrees. Eveleth, Hibbing, and Cook all dropped to 32. Sunny for the state today. High temperatures, mid-70s to low 80s. Right now in the Twin Cities, sunny skies, temperature is 63. This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

[THEME MUSIC]

KERRI MILLER: I'm Kerry Miller. And this is special convention coverage from Minnesota Public Radio and distributed by American Public Media. We're in Denver, Colorado, and inside the Pepsi Center this morning, where the Democratic National Convention will be gaveled to order later today. Now, just to give you a sense of where we're broadcasting from in this huge arena, this is where the Denver Nuggets usually play. We're in an area called talk show row, dozens of radio stations lined up cheek by jowl, all going live as we are throughout the convention.

And incidentally, we're behind the futuristic stage that the DNC unveiled a couple of days ago. A Denver newspaper said it had to be seen to be believed. And that's absolutely true. There are three 100-inch plasma screens, the biggest plasmas that can be made today, and neon arches that rise to the ceiling of the arena and will flash different colors throughout the evening. So that's where we are.

Now, here's what you're going to hear this week from our special convention coverage. We'll talk with campaign insiders and party elders and some of the brightest rising stars in the Democratic Party. We'll also talk to national journalists who have been covering this campaign from the beginning for our call-in segments.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek and John Nichols of The Nation are with me this morning. And a special feature this week, what we're calling our Spotlight Interviews, special guests who bring a historic perspective and a unique view to the convention, civil rights leaders, journalists who covered the most tumultuous conventions of the past. And our first spotlight today, Vice President Walter Mondale, who reflected on the arc of the party's history with race, that's a bit later.

First, some convention news. Senator Hillary Clinton has announced that she'll release her delegates in an effort to unify the party and show her support for the presumptive nominee, Barack Obama. Tornadoes struck an area South of Denver yesterday, uprooting trees but doing little damage. One witness said the tornado funnel was so huge that it was, quote, "like the Wizard of Oz when it hit the ground."

And no tornadoes inside the Pepsi Center, but a mini flood, an overheated television light set off the sprinklers and poured a couple of inches of water into a television skybox. Hopefully, everything will be dried out by the time the convention is gaveled to order at 4:00 PM Central Time.

By the way, it's been 100 years since Denver hosted a convention. And that's a lot of pent-up political partying. The delegates were wined and dined last night at Denver's Red Rocks Amphitheater, at bars and clubs in downtown, and at a special blue dog Democrats party at Mile High Stadium.

SPEAKER 1: All right, folks, welcome to the carousel.

KERRI MILLER: On Saturday night, the host committee threw a bash at an amusement park for the 15,000 reporters who have descended on Denver. And a few of them gave up covering the political merry-go-round for a few minutes to catch a ride on the real thing, including our producer, Chris Dall. You can see pictures of Chris astride a Black Beauty on our website. This convention will, of course, make history as Democratic delegates nominate the first ever African-American major party candidate for president.

And there are events scheduled throughout the week to pay homage to that. Last night, some of the brightest lights of the civil rights movement gathered to celebrate the life and career of John Conyers, who helped register voters in Selma, Alabama, for the Freedom Day registration drive. We'll hear from Congressman Conyers in just a moment. And we'll talk about the balancing act that this party is trying to reach between its civil rights history and its new race politics.

But first, to our spotlight or interview, former Vice President Walter Mondale has been coming to Democratic Party conventions for more than four decades, and he's been closely involved in efforts to make the party more racially diverse. He told us, it's been an extraordinary journey from the battle over race on the 1964 convention floor to today.

WALTER MONDALE: It's the march from a nation that was truly segregated. If you look at pictures of American conventions in 1948, you'll see one thing, white males sitting there, very few women, and even fewer Blacks or other minorities. It was a white stag party.

And these delegates were selected at the state level, often by one or two people, often in ways the National Convention didn't know. They just picked them, sometimes two years earlier, and so on. And it all came to a head in 1964. And I ended up chairing the subcommittee hearing the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: It's the symbol of separate but equal that we've lived for years within Mississippi, the symbol of the back of the bus kind of thing that we came to Atlantic City not expecting to find. We can sit in the gallery in Mississippi and observe the convention.

WALTER MONDALE: Mississippi had set up an all-white male delegation of the kind I've described, none of them intended to support Lyndon Johnson or Hubert Humphrey. They were going to go for Goldwater. They didn't believe in civil rights. And so we held these hearings. Great people like Fannie Lou Hamer, famous in American history, demanded that the rules change.

FANNIE LOU HAMER: The Freedom Democratic Party is not seated. Now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave?

KERRI MILLER: It's got to have occurred to you, this arc of history--

WALTER MONDALE: Oh, yes.

KERRI MILLER: --from 1964, all of these racial issues you were dealing with there to 2008, when the party is about to nominate the first African-American candidate.

BARACK OBAMA: Generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people, yes, we can.

WALTER MONDALE: I find myself, how did this happen? And having lived so long and been through this stuff, I wonder how many people around remember what it was like and what we had to go through with all the Civil Rights Acts and these changes in convention rules. And we keep changing those rules to make them better. So now if you take a picture of the Democratic Convention, you'll see everybody there. I mean, we've really broken up the power structure.

KERRI MILLER: What do you think, given your involvement in this history, that you will think as you watch either at Invesco Field that night or here as Barack Obama steps up to make that nomination speech?

WALTER MONDALE: Well, it is a stunning change.

BARACK OBAMA: That's what the American people demand. That's what change is.

WALTER MONDALE: I sometimes think this will be like another Jack Kennedy race in 1960.

JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

WALTER MONDALE: All over Minnesota, people said, well, you can't have a Catholic president. You just can't do that. Well, Minnesota, we had a fight here. But Minnesota, by a small margin, put Jack Kennedy over the top, became president. The public liked it. You never hear about that issue again. And my hope is at this time, with all of Obama's brilliance and decency and strength, that the same thing will happen here. We'll elect him. We'll see it's just fine. And we'll stop worrying about that stuff in the future.

KERRI MILLER: I want to ask you a little bit about the experience that you've had, that very few Americans have ever had, very few politicians have ever had, and that's the nominee of your party, standing at a convention making a speech. Put me in the point of view of the nominee, what it's like.

WALTER MONDALE: I was on the ticket three times, so I did it three times, once as the presidential nominee, twice as the vice president. And it's a tremendous challenge. And I was always very anxious when I went up there because you're all alone. There's a huge crowd there, but there are millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people watching that speech. And if you blow it, you'll live with that the rest of your life. Even your mother will be mad at you.

And you really work hard on those speeches. It's the one chance you've got for, say, 30 minutes with the whole world listening. And there's no questions and answers. It's your time. And if you do it well, it's going to help a lot. And so I worked hard on all of them.

My experience was, when you first get out there, and you're all alone at that lectern, and even though you've worked on your speech, and you know that you've got it the way you want to, you look at that crowd, and you go, wow, am I going to be able to keep them with me or not? But once it starts, the crowd has a way of carrying you, making you feel good about it.

My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, I accept your nomination.

KERRI MILLER: You famously said--

WALTER MONDALE: Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.

I've had a lot of close friends tell me, that's the stupidest sentence I ever-- but it was true.

KERRI MILLER: Do you think he gave the public too much credit?

WALTER MONDALE: A lot of people say that was pretty stupid. And I noticed no one has followed my example.

KERRI MILLER: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. So do you think there's a tradition that these speeches have to really be about hope and glory in some ways, and Americans don't want to hear the tough medicine?

WALTER MONDALE: I hope that's not true. I think that people have to feel optimistic and hopeful. And they want their leaders to be optimistic and have a vision.

BARACK OBAMA: Do we participate in a politics of cynicism? Or do we participate in a politics of hope?

CROWD: Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

KERRI MILLER: Mr. Vice President, I thank you very much.

WALTER MONDALE: Thank you. See you in Denver.

[CHANTING]

KERRI MILLER: Walter Mondale with us for our spotlight or interview. You can find each of our spotlight interviews this week online at minnesotapublicradio.org. Now to our guests this hour. Howard Fineman is a political writer for Newsweek magazine. He's author of the book The Thirteen American Arguments, around which we have based an election season series. You can find a special link for that on the Mid-morning page. Good to have you here.

HOWARD FINEMAN: It's great to be here. It's exciting. It's exciting.

KERRI MILLER: And John Nichols is with us. He's a writer for The Nation magazine right here in Denver with us. John, thanks very much for coming in. Howard, you've been doing this a long time. And I wonder if you were in the audience that night when Walter Mondale spoke those prophetic words, "I will raise your taxes. He won't. I just told you. He won't."

HOWARD FINEMAN: I was there for Newsweek. It was my first convention as chief political correspondent. And even I, a callow youth, knew that was a landmine that he had not only buried for himself, but then stepped on. And as he points out in the interview, he was telling the truth. Supposedly against his will, Reagan ended up signing tax bills that raised taxes in his second term. And it's interesting. I think, to some extent, we're facing a somewhat similar situation this time around.

KERRI MILLER: How so?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, because the debt is large, the national debt is even bigger. There's a sense that another round of four years of following exactly on the George Bush "tax cut" model is probably not the best thing to do, either in terms of economic stimulus or in terms of fairness. And I think that's going to be a lot of what the next four years is going to be about in Congress, arguing about the exact nature of the tax increases that will occur in one way or another.

KERRI MILLER: And yet, John Nichols, as Walter Mondale points out, few, if any, nominees have ever followed him in delivering a message like that. Why not?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, I think that losing 49 states is a rather influential development. Look.

KERRI MILLER: But why can't you tell the truth? And there seems to be--

JOHN NICHOLS: You can tell the truth in some places. Walter Mondale did poorly because he was a Minnesota archetype. He was an upper Midwest archetype. Check out the neighboring state. Russ Feingold, he voted against the Patriot Act. He put ads on television saying he wanted rapid withdrawal of the troops from Iraq when Kerry wouldn't talk about it.

There are regions of the country that have a political culture that allows you to say things differently, to do things differently. But a presidential candidate must speak to this whole complex, disunited States of America. And almost anything that goes beyond that low level, no tripwire space, you run into trouble someplace. Now, Barack Obama is going to have so much harder time. You just think of what all will be rolling through his head.

Mondale spoke of stepping to that podium. And he wants to beat Reagan. He had a whole bunch of other things. But Obama-- race, slavery, segregation, Hillary Clinton, the experience issue, what do you say about McCain and veteran, you've got to wrap that all in. And then imagine this, Barack Obama has set himself up the first politician in American history to give a better speech than Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington, because he's picked the 45th anniversary.

KERRI MILLER: Right. In front of 70,000 to 75,000 people at Invesco Field. What a job.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, he likes the big stage, unlike Walter Mondale, who I thought was very candid and admitting that he was scared out of his wits up there.

KERRI MILLER: All right.

HOWARD FINEMAN: And having been there and seen him, I believe him. He's a wonderful guy. Everybody loves Walter Mondale, I think, and values his service. But in certain ways, and he was a great backroom politician. He was a fabulous Senator who knew how to do deals, who was very well liked there, and who operated very effectively behind the scenes as Jimmy Carter's vice president, and actually began the tradition, the modern tradition, of Vice Presidents having a lot of clout, really. Dick Cheney is, in many ways, a descendant of that.

But Mondale was not a great public person. He didn't like it. And so it was tough for him. But Barack is totally different. He's a guy who can be a little cool in person but who seems to really like the stage. And that might be the product of his upbringing, being plopped down in all those different places around the world and having to make friends right away. Whatever the reason is, he's very comfortable on the public stage. And I have no doubt that he will invest and inhabit that moment at Invesco Field. It's going to be very memorable. This is a piece of stagecraft.

KERRI MILLER: Howard Fineman of Newsweek magazine is with us this morning. John Nichols of The Nation magazine is with us this morning as we look ahead to the convention. We talked a little bit about the history of conventions past. And if you'd like to join our conversation, 800-242-2828, if you're listening in the metro area. 651-227-6000. You can also join us online at minnesotapublicradio.org and click on Send a Question. 800-242-2828, metro, 651-227-6000. If you're listening online, you want to join in, minnesotapublicradio.org and click on Send A Question.

John, I want to talk about this event that we came to last night that The Nation and the Denver Public Library were hosting. And this was a tribute to John Conyers and his history in civil rights and some of the work that he's done in Congress. And when we sat down to talk to him-- we're going to play a soundbite here from Conyers. But what was so interesting is he talked about registering those voters in Alabama, having that history that he has, and finding himself in this very different place in the party. So let's listen. And we'll talk a little bit about that.

JOHN CONYERS: It makes it the most important event in the history of the lives of every American that's here. And this is the way history evolves, isn't it? You don't get an advanced notice of something historical that's going to happen. It happens, frequently taking people by surprise.

KERRI MILLER: He almost sounds surprised that he finds himself here with Barack Obama about to be nominated.

JOHN NICHOLS: Later in the day, we had an interview in front of about 1,000 people who had shown up, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement. And in the course of the conversation, we got to Jesse Jackson's campaign from the 1980s, which Conyers had been one of the chief architects of. And somehow in the middle of that, he suddenly talked about when Barack Obama came to visit him in his office the first time to say he was thinking of running for president, and he kind of interlinked it with the Jackson campaign.

And I thought, well, where is this guy going? And then Conyers said, and of course, as with Jackson, I thought this was another building block, another young Black guy who was going to go out there and run a brilliant campaign, get maybe 1,500 to 1,800 delegates. And then we would have gotten that far, and then someone else would take us the next step. And he said, at some point during the course of this campaign, I realized, oh my god, we're going all the way. And Conyers is 78 years old, but he was like a kid. He was excited by this.

And he spoke about one of this remarkable notion 100 years ago when Democrats met in Denver, the Black community of Denver petitioned William Jennings Bryan, who was the nominee that year, to include in the platform a simple line denouncing lynching, not a civil rights plank, but denouncing lynching, because they said that will tell the Black community and Blacks across America that the Democrats are open to them. Bryan refused because he might lose the Southern vote. And as Conyers, 78, lived a lot of that period, said, it is amazing in 100 years if this party will nominate a Black man for president.

KERRI MILLER: Isn't that a dynamic though, the kind of calculation that the party not as stark as that, but that this party has constantly had to make about the issue of race? If we put this into the platform, then we're going to lose these people, that they've had to balance that.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, both parties have had to do that. All parties have had to do that. If I can give a shameless plug for my book, The Thirteen American Arguments.

KERRI MILLER: I thought I already did that.

HOWARD FINEMAN: I'm doing it again.

JOHN NICHOLS: Makes a fine holiday gift.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yeah, fine-- it's no longer beach reading, but we're now into the fall season. But the point is, the first chapter is about who is a person. And race has always been a central thread, a dark, bloody thread in our life. And it remains so. And the hope here is that Barack Obama will, once and for all, as a standard bearer of a major party, begin the process of ending that as the special obsession of American life. It's tricky because he's going to be speaking on the anniversary of the Martin Luther King "I Have a Dream" speech,

KERRI MILLER: 45th anniversary.

HOWARD FINEMAN: 45th anniversary. There are echoes of this. The very historic nature of this campaign is based on race. And yet, paradoxically, what Barack is saying is, yes, I understand this history, yes, I glory in this history, but let's move beyond this history. It's a very tricky thing to do. And it's a delicate balance and a fine line for him to walk.

KERRI MILLER: It's also, I mean, it's delicate too, isn't it, John? Because we've got some of these civil rights leaders here who are attending these events this time around who say, let's pay attention to the history of this.

JOHN NICHOLS: This is the great complexity of it because the Obama campaign begins building its 51%, 58%, whatever percent they get to, their beginning building block is a 100% African-American turnout. They want massive turnout. And so they want to touch all of these historic and emotional places at the same time.

Look, the fact of the matter is under the backstory of this convention, whether we like it or not, is bringing white working class voters, many of whom voted for Hillary Clinton, into that Obama camp as well. And there are polls here. There's people who want to celebrate. Oh, my, gosh, we're in the Mile High City, and we can see the mountaintop.

And there's also other folks who say, look, as a delegate, a strong Obama supporter who backed him from last year told me-- he's from rural northern Wisconsin-- he said, I have heard people, good Democrats, say things about Barack Obama that horrify me. This is going to be a much harder campaign than people think in some of these rural and even urban white working class areas.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, with some of those people, he's going to be graded on a curve. In other words, the very dynamic of race that has helped him in some ways within the Democratic Party, because of the added glamour and luster of being a history maker, also poses problems for him. It's not race primarily in those rural areas. It's that they'll grade him on a curve.

KERRI MILLER: Meaning what?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, on issues of taxes, for example. Barack Obama has been very careful to say that he only wants to raise taxes on people making, at minimum, $250,000 a year and up. That's about, I don't know, 3% or 4% maximum, of all of America. But yet the USA Today poll that's out this morning on the front page says that a majority of Americans think that Obama is going to raise their taxes. In fact, Obama's program says the opposite.

KERRI MILLER: Is that the result of good McCain opposition advertising and rhetoric?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yes.

KERRI MILLER: Or is it just this question, we don't know who he is, and we don't think he thinks like we do?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, I think it's three things. I think it's the two that you mentioned, the Obama, I mean, the McCain attack ads, which have been about taxes to a large extent. It's about a certain fuzziness to some extent on Obama's part. He tries hard but isn't as crystal clear as he should be.

But my point is, with some Democratic voters, some of those traditional voters John was talking about, they're going to look at all that, and they're going to also have race in the back of their mind. And so they judge him a little. But Obama has to be even more specific and more programmatic for those people. So they're not looking at him, they're looking at what he's proposing.

JOHN NICHOLS: If I can try and add to it, my wife's favorite political commentator just said--

KERRI MILLER: Has she read his book, though?

JOHN NICHOLS: I think it's my Christmas gift. It's my Christmas gift.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Free copy is on the way.

JOHN NICHOLS: It's my Christmas gift. No, let's be as blunt as we can be. They're looking for a reason not to vote for Barack Obama.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Right. I think that's right.

JOHN NICHOLS: That's the bottom line. And so Richard Trumka, the former head of the Mineworkers Union, now a very big guy in the AFL-CIO, gave a wonderful speech at a Steelworkers Convention about a month ago. It was the most important speech outside of the candidates of the campaign, very undercovered. Trumka got up there, and he talked about walking down the street in his hometown, running into a woman who'd been Democrat Labor person all her life.

And she said, I can't vote for Obama. And he said, why? And she said, well, I don't think he's got foreign policy experience. And he said, you've never cared about foreign policy. I've known you all your life. She said, well, I don't like him on taxes. Taxes, you know who they're good for.

And finally he said, look, let's be honest. They're going to keep finding something. But at the bottom line is this race issue. And Trumka kept talking to trade unionists saying, if we want to elect our ally Barack Obama, we're going to have to talk about the race issue too. We're going to have to have conversations that we haven't had before.

KERRI MILLER: John Nichols, Howard Fineman with us this morning. We're going to take a brief break. And when we come back, continue our conversation. This is special convention coverage from Minnesota Public Radio News and distributed by American Public Media. I'm Kerri Miller.

PERRY FINELLI: And here are some news headlines. I'm Perry Finelli. Vice President Cheney is going to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. He will visit Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Italy as well. Cheney leaves next Tuesday. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's party is quitting Pakistan's ruling coalition. The move likely concentrates power in the hands of the Pakistan People's Party, which wants to maintain the country's close ties with the US.

Groups planning to protest during the Republican National Convention are in Ramsey County court this morning. They're trying to overturn restrictions on where demonstrators can assemble. The RNC opens a week from today at Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul.

For sale, the light tower next to Duluth's aerial lift bridge. But there is a catch. The potential buyer has to agree to maintain the structure's historic designation and to allow unrestricted government access. The tower goes on the auction block on September 16.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

KERRI MILLER: I'm Kerri Miller. And you're listening to special convention coverage from Minnesota Public Radio and distributed by American Public Media. We are in Denver, Colorado. We're on talk show row at the Pepsi Center, where the convention will be gaveled to order at 4:00 Central Time, 3:00 PM Mountain Time.

Some of the big news happening here this afternoon. Hillary Clinton has said that she's going to release her delegates. We'll talk about that in just a moment. We had a tornado touch down a little bit south of Denver. And the sprinklers went off inside the Pepsi Center this morning, flooding out a television skybox. So hopefully, they'll get that dried out by the time the convention starts.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek magazine here with us, author of the book The Thirteen American Arguments, and John Nichols with us, a writer for the Nation magazine. If you'd like to join the conversation, we're talking about how the Democratic Party at this convention, particularly, is balancing these issues of race, the history that the activists have on the issue, and the attempt by Barack Obama and some of his supporters to say, but this is a new era and a new time, and we've moved past that.

How do you think they ought to try to balance this? What do you want to hear specifically from Barack Obama on that issue? 800-242-2828 And if you're listening online minnesotapublicradio.org and click on Send a Question. 800-242-2828, online at minnesotapublicradio.org and click on Send a Question.

Matt Bai wrote a piece about this for The New York Times earlier this month. And he has an interesting quote from a young, Black pollster who's been working for Barack Obama. And he says, Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle-- talking about the civil rights activists who have come before him-- he's the sum of their tears, their fights, their marching, their pain, this opportunity is the sum of that.

Is he ahead of the curve on this? Or is there that feeling among some of the younger people who are supporting Obama that, yes, we've given them their due, but we're the future of Black politics?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, I'm guessing that's Cornell Belcher.

KERRI MILLER: You're right.

HOWARD FINEMAN: And I'm going to see him later today. And I think he summarizes one strand of what Obama has to weave into a very powerful, strong cable here. The notion of him as the sum of the history of civil rights in America and the struggle for civil rights is a very powerful one.

And that moves both African-Americans and a lot of other Americans. But it's only one strand. And if that's the only one, he's not going to get elected. It's got to be a whole lot of other strands besides that. And the way I view Obama is as part of the unbelievably powerful, continuous digestive process of American culture.

KERRI MILLER: Digestive process.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, because we take all these different things and we chew them over. And we sustain ourselves with them. And we are really watching African-Americans become like other immigrant groups and ethnic groups that have woven their way into the fabric of American life. If we were doing National Public Radio and Minnesota Public Radio in 1920, I guess, and Al Smith was the-- was it 24th?

JOHN NICHOLS: 28th.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Excuse me, 28th. Al Smith was the candidate, the first Catholic candidate, Irish Catholic candidate. We would be saying a lot of the same things. And it took from then until Kennedy to get a Catholic president. We never had one. We never had an Irish American who were demonized when they first came to America.

And this is the fruition of that. As I look around the hotel lobby in the hotel I'm staying at, I see a lot of power brokers. And those power brokers are not Irish, and they're not Jewish, and they're not Italian, and they're not WASPs They're African-Americans. They know the civil rights history. But they're ready to move beyond it to take their place, fully take their place, at the table of power in America. It's an exciting story.

KERRI MILLER: Let's take some calls. John, hold that thought. We'll take some calls here. We'll come back to it. We also want to talk about how Hillary Clinton fits into that. To Riley in Saint Paul, hi. You're on our special convention coverage from Denver.

AUDIENCE: Hi, thanks. Longtime listener, first-time caller here. Thanks for taking my call. The concern that I have is actually coming from my wife. I am a longtime Democrat supporting Obama here. And her concern actually stems from-- I don't know if it's white guilt or whatever we're going to call it here, is, she doesn't want to contribute to his death, feels that America is not ready for it. And if she votes for him, she's going to put him in the ground.

KERRI MILLER: John, I hear this too. And it's a very sensitive thing for people to bring up. But get into a conversation, and at some point, sometime, someone will say this is the thing I worry most about.

JOHN NICHOLS: Do you want to hear something interesting in that regard? I've covered this campaign for four years as all of US political reporters do. And I went down, I was in South Carolina talking to folks, older African-American women. And this was a year ago. They were not going to vote for Barack Obama.

And I had one older woman say to me, she said that beautiful young man, his beautiful wife, his beautiful kids, I'm not putting him up there. I saw what they did to Bobby Kennedy and to Martin. And she was talking exactly about this. And then I went back, and a fascinating thing, after Iowa, after white farmers in Iowa, as it was seen, voted for Barack Obama, I asked her again.

And she said, if those folks in Iowa are going to do it, I'm going to trust in it. I'm going to go with it. But, yes, there are these concerns. Let us not focus it in just on Barack Obama. Let us understand that Matt Bai's article was wrong. It was a silly article.

KERRI MILLER: Really?

JOHN NICHOLS: Yes, it was silly.

KERRI MILLER: He's going to be on later.

JOHN NICHOLS: I love Matt, and he's a wonderful writer.

HOWARD FINEMAN: He's a former Newsweek colleague.

JOHN NICHOLS: No. He's a brilliant-- and I'm sorry-- he's a fabulous man.

KERRI MILLER: What did he get wrong, John? Why?

JOHN NICHOLS: It was because it was like, yeah, post-racial politics. I'm sorry. I wish it was. I really do. But the fact of the matter is, I think that what we're really into now is something that is very racialized politics. I think we're going to have a very racialized fall. And it's going to be complex. And it's going to be about much of the violence associated with race and a lot of the ugliness and a lot of the difficulty. And we will sort it out. And maybe we will get through it.

But I was reminded in those quotes from Matt's article of John Adams's great quote. He said, "Our fathers fought wars so that we could practice politics and diplomacy and our children could do music and poetry." Well, in fact, John Adams' son went into politics. And so where we think we're breaking things down, it's actually, as Howard said, part of a digestive process. And we're not nearly as far, I think, as we sometimes would like to believe we are.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, I think we've made enormous progress. And by the way, I should mention the fact that one of the reasons why Hillary Clinton's supporters, men and women but especially women, are so upset is that they see an African-American stepping up on this up escalator. And they're saying, wait a minute, throughout history, no group has been discriminated against in terms of access to decision making power than women.

KERRI MILLER: Do you really think that's it?

HOWARD FINEMAN: I think that's part of it.

JOHN NICHOLS: That's part of it.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Oh, yes. Especially with women, baby boomer women that I've talked to, who were there at the dawn of the beginning of the modern women's rights movement in the '60s and so forth, they see Hillary as their avatar, they see her as their representative. And yes, they feel that all the history that Barack Obama is making, they could make the same kind of parallel history if Hillary were the nominee.

KERRI MILLER: So he should have waited his turn. In some ways, it was their time?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, that's what they're thinking. Yeah, they wanted her to be the one who made the history here. He's the one who did it. So there's a certain amount of that, in addition to their personal loyalty to Hillary. And we shouldn't forget that as we talk about race. But I think there's been tremendous progress. I'm pretty optimistic.

But I will say this. Barack Obama has been reading Thurston Clarke's book on The Last Campaign about Robert Kennedy's campaign. And apparently, David Axelrod picked it up. His media guy picked it up, his closest advisor. Ax read it and gave it to Barack. And Barack's been reading it. And I find that both interesting and inspiring, but also gives one pause a little bit.

I think it's interesting and inspiring because Obama wants to pick up the Kennedy legacy. That's one thing he's going to try to do. He's giving the first outdoor acceptance speech since John F. Kennedy. So he's consciously trying to pick up the Kennedy legacy. And if I can also give a plug to my friend, Chris Matthews, who sometimes comes up with--

KERRI MILLER: --who really always needs that.

HOWARD FINEMAN: But he sometimes comes up with the most brilliant lines.

KERRI MILLER: Really?

HOWARD FINEMAN: I swear it's out of the mouth of babes. He said the other night on MS, he said, Joe Biden puts the apostrophe in the name Obama.

JOHN NICHOLS: O'Biden.

KERRI MILLER: Yeah, yeah, I get that.

HOWARD FINEMAN: I just love that. And also, Michael Veron wrote a great book about American politics in which he compared the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews to the Blacks, the Hispanics, and the Asians in terms of the way they're going to involve themselves in the next generations of American politics. And I think there's a lot to that.

KERRI MILLER: Let me get back to the phone. Go ahead, John.

JOHN NICHOLS: I just want to say one thing about the Hillary supporters. In compliment to the Hillary supporters, I think there's some of the few people that aren't seeing this in a racialized way. In fact, I think the Hillary supporters are seeing Barack Obama as a man and as a young man, as a young man. And I had a woman say something-- I thought it was, again, maybe not Chris Matthews line-- but pretty good.

She said, I worked in a bank. I'm 60 years old. I took some time off, raised a kid, then came back. And I knew everything about the bank. And for years, I'd have these young guys come in, and I'd train them to do it. And then they'd become president of the bank. Or they'd become the chief teller. And I think there are a lot of women who look at Barack Obama, and it's not that he's Black.

KERRI MILLER: What is this, their own experience writ large?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, here's this young guy, and he pushes aside the slightly older woman.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Key word, "guy."

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah. And I have heard women say that. And politics is where we play out ourselves on the national stage. Our experience comes to it. And so I think many of the women who are Hillary backers need to be understood in that context. And I will tell you, the McCain campaign just put an ad up today with a Hillary Clinton delegate who was tossed out of the convention. And she's looking in the camera, saying to Hillary backers, as a woman of a-- she's a relatively young woman, she's looking at that camera and saying, it's OK to vote for John McCain.

KERRI MILLER: To the phones, to Janelle in Minneapolis. Hi, Janelle. Hi, Janelle. Your question for us. Hi.

AUDIENCE: Sure. I just wanted to share some of my support in the sense that I'm not necessarily a baby boomer. I'm 29. And I have a lot of the same sentiments with feeling like it sort of was our turn as a woman. And now that that's going to need to be put on hold until the next opportunity comes. So yeah, I guess that's just my comment. And I guess I'll take my comments off air then.

KERRI MILLER: Howard, go ahead.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yeah, I think that's right. There's a bittersweet quality to this for a lot of women. And I don't pretend to understand it all. I'm just a political reporter trying to cover it.

KERRI MILLER: And a guy.

HOWARD FINEMAN: And a guy. So it's hard. It's hard. I know my mom, for example, was for Hillary all the way. And I know a lot of women who were. And by the way, John--

KERRI MILLER: John, your mother too?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yeah. John's story, reported story, about the woman bank official, ironically, that's Barack Obama's white grandmother's exact story. She rose to become the vice president of a bank in Honolulu, which is the connections that got him into the nice prep school there. But she spent a lifetime training young male executives to rise above her. And he recounts that story in sympathy to women.

And I do think that one of the things he has to do here-- and if you'll notice tonight at the first night of the convention, they've got Caroline Kennedy, they've got Nancy Pelosi, they've got Nancy Franklin, the mayor of Atlanta. They're trying to address this. They're trying to address this question tonight. And they really have to do it throughout the whole weekend.

KERRI MILLER: And then tomorrow, I think, is a day basically dedicated to the suffragist movement, to acknowledging the 19th Amendment. They're working it hard.

JOHN NICHOLS: They got to be a little careful with that.

KERRI MILLER: Why?

JOHN NICHOLS: Because, well, they might just get women so excited that they'll say, hey, maybe it's not too late.

KERRI MILLER: What, for Hillary Clinton? Is that--

JOHN NICHOLS: No, it's not going to happen. But what I'm going to tell you is--

KERRI MILLER: She's going to release her delegates.

JOHN NICHOLS: She's going to release them. But she's got 40 whips at this convention. And I've spoken to several of the whips. You know why they're here?

KERRI MILLER: --for our listeners.

JOHN NICHOLS: You know why they're here?

KERRI MILLER: Why?

JOHN NICHOLS: They're to whip Clinton delegates to go for Obama. You know what I mean? They're not here to keep people in the Clinton camp. They know, they've interviewed their delegates. They know they're going to have some work to do.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, there are probably a few cynical Obama people who wonder if they're somewhat akin to quote, "peacekeepers" that the Russians sent into Georgia.

JOHN NICHOLS: There you go.

HOWARD FINEMAN: But if you look at the USA Today poll, the survey taken Thursday through Saturday, 47% of Clinton supporters say they are solidly behind Obama, 23% say they support him but may change their minds before the election. 30% say they will vote for Republican John McCain, someone else, or none at all.

KERRI MILLER: Tell me how much credence, though, you give to polls like that as we sit here on August 25, and the ads about Senator McCain's record on abortion and everything else have not really yet run.

HOWARD FINEMAN: No. You have to look at all polls with a jaundiced eye, especially ones in August. But it's a rough measure of the challenge that the Obama campaign faces.

KERRI MILLER: You're listening to special convention coverage here from Denver, Colorado, from Minnesota Public Radio, distributed by American Public Media. We're talking today from talk show row with Howard Fineman of Newsweek and John Nichols of The Nation. To the phones, to Gina in Northfield. Hi, Gina.

AUDIENCE: Hi.

KERRI MILLER: Your comment or question for us. Yes, we can.

AUDIENCE: Well, my comment is that in no way does Hillary speak to me. There's no resonance there. And I'm in my mid-50s. I was marching against war when I was a teenager, a pioneer in the women's movement in the 1970s, involved in all of the critical issues, carrying the banner in Take Back the Night.

And I'm a career woman. Hillary doesn't even touch my heart in terms of her politics. Her gender is the only criteria, maybe, that comes close to speaking to me. But Barack Obama, as a mixed race person facing the kind of odds that he has faced and overcome, speaks much louder to me than anything that Hillary ever says.

KERRI MILLER: Gina.

AUDIENCE: That's my comment.

KERRI MILLER: Good to have your call. Good to have your call. John, I want ask you if you think that the Obama campaign has dropped the ball or screwed up this process of picking Biden and not really letting Hillary Clinton know soon enough, or personally? Or is this just too much being made of this because the media needs something to talk about?

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, we do need something to talk about until Thursday, let's be honest. But the fact of the matter is, I actually believe that. I believed until a few days before I got here and started-- I got here early. I talked to a lot of delegates and a lot of folks. I actually believed we were maybe overplaying it.

And boy, I got to be honest, I've talked to some of these Clinton delegates, people I have known for decades, not folks I just ran into on the street. And I am powerfully struck by the fact that, again and again, they keep saying-- and these are not talking points, I mean, these are folks that haven't been in touch with the Clinton campaign that I can tell-- saying, they never contacted us.

We keep talking about Obama reaching out to Hillary or to Bill, but what I hear from Clinton delegates and Clinton supporters is a real sense of, he didn't spend June making us feel good. He didn't. And this is the weird thing. Before he had the nomination secured, Barack Obama would go on the phone and talk for an hour to a super delegate, trying to get him to commit to him.

KERRI MILLER: I don't get this because this has been such a smart, disciplined campaign. If I read what you've been writing, Howard, about it, what's your take on this?

HOWARD FINEMAN: I think this is their one, big, strategic flaw.

KERRI MILLER: Do you?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yes, I do. And I put it down to pride, which is a dangerous thing in politics. It took Barack Obama a lot of pride and a lot of ambition and a lot of belief in himself to begin running for president even before he was sworn in to the Senate.

My friend Roger Simon has a piece on the front page of the Denver Post this morning. Roger is a great political reporter. And he says that Obama was beginning tentative phone calls about this even before he was sworn in 2004. So the pride that made him realize he could seize the moment and seize the day, that this was his time, that he was the change we were waiting for, all that stuff, that's on the good side.

The potential downside of it is, he has a desire to want to do it on his own. Now, he was forced to have to do it, quote, "on his own" because all the party establishment was with Hillary. But it happens to have played to his nature. And I think the one mistake he's made is not saying, OK, now that we've got the numbers, now that we've got this thing, we have to envelop the Clinton people with love. We just have to do it.

KERRI MILLER: And be gracious. I mean, what would that have cost?

HOWARD FINEMAN: --be gracious about it. Well, because they've been afraid that the Clintons will screw them. I mean, part of it is, they're afraid if they're nice to the Clintons, if they let their boot up off the Clintons neck,

JOHN NICHOLS: They will get--

HOWARD FINEMAN: --they'll get them.

JOHN NICHOLS: It's a wrestling match.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yeah. So they're afraid. They're a little afraid to do it.

JOHN NICHOLS: But can I just tell you that-- remember we were talking about that hour-long call to a super delegate?

KERRI MILLER: Yeah.

JOHN NICHOLS: In the month of June, Barack Obama could have made 50 calls, not to all 1,000 or so or 1,500, 50 calls to key Clinton State delegates. And the word would have gone out, and that didn't happen. And so we're going to spend a week here at this convention--

KERRI MILLER: Talking about it.

JOHN NICHOLS: Talking about it.

KERRI MILLER: Howard, I want to read something that you wrote for Newsweek on August 25 titled "Don't Call Me, I May Call You." You were speculating about the VP selection. But you also wrote about how the Clintons and the Obamas-- Michelle, Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton-- feel about each other. And you said, and yet a four-way alliance has proved difficult to construct. The two couples from opposite ends of the baby boom have behaved like reluctant participants at their first middle school dance.

HOWARD FINEMAN: I think it's true.

KERRI MILLER: Yeah, middle school.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, some examples of that, Barack Obama did call Bill Clinton at one point-- I forget exactly when-- and said, hey, Mr. President, let's have dinner. But it was apparently a brief and chilly call. And of course, the dinner has never materialized. And Bill Clinton's been metaphorically waiting by the phone for the call to--

KERRI MILLER: And grumbling about microphones every now and then.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yes. What restaurant to show up at. And it hasn't happened. And as John was saying, on the delicate level, it hasn't happened. And I think it's childish. And yes, the Clintons are annoying and, yes, they are self-referential. But their 1,800-- I forget exactly how many.

JOHN NICHOLS: 1,800

HOWARD FINEMAN: --1,800 delegates who voted for Hillary Clinton here, if she wanted to turn this into a nightmare on the plat, she could do it. And it just doesn't make any sense, especially because Obama's big challenge here, in my view, is to say not only that he is the change, but that he's going to bring better economic circumstances to most Americans, to the quote, "middle class."

JOHN NICHOLS: And can I offer one--

HOWARD FINEMAN: And by the way, Bill's record, the Clinton's record, during the Clinton years is terrific in that regard. And Obama seems not to want-- he hasn't gotten over his primary season reluctance to tout the accomplishment of the Clinton years. Now, that he's won--

KERRI MILLER: Quickly, because I want to take a call.

JOHN NICHOLS: Very quickly, I would say, the Clinton record also includes NAFTA and some trade things that maybe aren't as terrific as Obama would like.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Good point.

JOHN NICHOLS: But one critical thing on this is that Hillary Clinton-- this is a complexity for the Obama campaign-- Hillary Clinton does have Hillary 2012, the website, secured. And so understand that. I think that was always an underpinning of the development in--

KERRI MILLER: Rendell was apparently opening the door.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well, however we want to talk about it, just keep that in mind.

KERRI MILLER: Let me grab this call real quick. Mark in Elk River. Hi, Mark, and I appreciate you waiting. I'm a little tight on time. Can you make it brief?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I'll make it brief. I was going back to what you guys were saying about women and folks of color. I see a lot of women in the corporate world making it up the ladder and doing very well. I find it interesting that some women now compare people of color with someone not of color. I think he will have some of the same challenges as they would face. Because if you're not a white male, you still have a lot of barriers you have to overcome.

KERRI MILLER: That there's a competition, you're surprised about that?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

HOWARD FINEMAN: If this circumstance was reversed, if Hillary had gotten the nomination, she would have to be doing massive outreach to Barack Obama and the African-American community to ease disappointment. So understand that this goes both ways.

KERRI MILLER: Do you think he might have been playing the role that the Clintons are playing, now that the Obamas would have stood off, and there would have been very cool relations between them?

HOWARD FINEMAN: It would have been very interesting. It would have been very, very interesting to see where the situation is reversed. It was darn close. Don't forget. It was darn close.

JOHN NICHOLS: And well, I also think that at the end of the day, the outreach to Hillary Clinton and her supporters is a metaphor for the outreach to people that weren't in the Obama camp, now, be they white, be they whatever, and remember, Asian-Americans, Latinos, other groupings that need some outreach because they voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. So all I'm saying is that Barack Obama, perhaps did stumble in this one metaphorical move. Because embracing the Clinton people says, I can embrace those who haven't always been with me. It's a very good model.

KERRI MILLER: So as you guys travel around and report on the convention, what's the story you're looking for, that isn't the standard story? Tell us first.

HOWARD FINEMAN: Well, it's the story of knitting together this new establishment, whether the party and the country can come to terms with change, and whether it really does represent change. And picking Joe Biden--

KERRI MILLER: So you're asking that question?

HOWARD FINEMAN: Yes. Because in picking Joe Biden, Obama was saying, don't worry, establishment, I'm actually part of the establishment. And I'm a new establishment, but I'm recognizable. And I think he had to do that to calm the fears of insiders. But I think it's potentially a problem if he doesn't come off as the real change on the economy that people want. It's got to be about the economy. If it isn't about the economy, if it isn't about restoring economic optimism here in the West, the home of economic optimism, then he will have failed here.

KERRI MILLER: I keep seeing James Carville on cable saying exactly that. Why doesn't he tighten his message on the economy and really be clear, as you're saying, not talking big themes about it?

JOHN NICHOLS: Yeah, I disagree with Howard a little bit in that I think that Barack Obama does need to run against the Clintons. I think he needs to run against, ultimately, not the Clintons themselves, but against the Clinton-Bush economic continuity, NAFTA, CAFTA, China free trade.

Because I'm going to tell you, you're going to go into Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, where Obama's got weakness, those are big issues. And Barack Obama still has not emerged as an economic populist. 100 years ago, they nominated William Jennings Bryan in this city, one of the great economic populists. Obama's got to get a little bit of that king rhetoric and all that, yes, but he also needs a little bit of that William Jennings Bryan.

HOWARD FINEMAN: I wouldn't go too far with the Jennings analogy because he got his clock cleaned by Howard Taft.

JOHN NICHOLS: I'm likely to think, I'm hoping, that the times of events-- but I'm telling you, you cannot go and generalize this message without a much stronger economic message. I'm watching for that.

HOWARD FINEMAN: And that means that it's a matter of theory and philosophy because, see, the Republicans still know who they are, by and large. They're going to ride this tax cut thing to their graves. That's what they're doing. And the Democrats are confused. I think John's right that Clinton bought into the Reagan critique of big government in certain ways. Clinton made his bet on free markets, well managed but let to be free. Obama doesn't quite know where to go with that now.

KERRI MILLER: Howard Fineman, John Nichols, thank you so much for inaugurating our special convention coverage from Denver. It's been great to have you here. We really appreciate it. We'll be back on the air tonight at 7:00. I hope you'll listen in. This is special convention coverage. I'm Kerri Miller.

[THEME MUSIC]

From American Public Media.

TIM RUSSELL: Hi. Tim Russell here to tell you that tickets are now on sale for the fall run of a Prairie Home Companion at the Fitzgerald Theater. The season kicks off on Saturday, October 4, followed by our annual street dance and supper. And we've added some Friday night shows this season, just to whet your whistle. Tickets are available now at ticketmaster.com or visit us at prairiehome.org for more details. We're raring to go and looking forward to seeing you at the Fitz this fall.

PERRY FINELLI: Well, I'm Perry Finelli, Minnesota Public Radio News. And coming up, the latest news headlines. Then an early start to Midday at 10:00. [INAUDIBLE] at the Empire State fair booth, at 10:00, the three independents party US Senate candidates, at noon, NPR sports analyst Howard Singer with his annual state fair sports show, at noon, a history theater radio drama called "All The Way with LBJ," about Hubert Humphrey's visit to the LBJ ranch before going to the 1968 Democratic National Convention.