American Politics

With Mitt Romney out and John McCain looking like the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, the GOP's conservative base is rethinking its options. The New York Times' David Kirkpatrick analyzes reaction on the right.

Slate columnist Fred Kaplan offers a scathing critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy initiatives in his new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power.

Can there be a middle ground in the debate about the separation of church and state? John DiIulio, Jr, a Democrat who spent seven months as the White House "faith czar" under George W. Bush, believes so.

Delegates, superdelegates, penalized states with half their delegates — or none. This year's political primaries are putting renewed focus on the delegate system, but what does it all mean? Political scientist David Rohde clarifies.

In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy asked the nation to disregard his religion; in 2000, George W. Bush stated Jesus was his favorite philosopher. How did faith become such an important criterion for the presidency? Religion professor and evangelical newspaper columnist Randall Balmer explains.

Slate magazine editor Jacob Weisberg has a few things to say about the presidency of George W. Bush. He's assembled his thoughts in a book called The Bush Tragedy, which Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein calls a "scorching, powerful and entirely plausible account" of an administration whose "epic collapse" Klein has lately been writing about.

David Kirkpatrick is a correspondent in the Washington bureau for The New York Times. He covered the politics of the conservative Christian movement in the 2004 election, and has been following the presidential campaign of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

Julia Preston, national immigration correspondent for The New York Times, discusses the unintended consequences of the U.S. border crackdown — and how the battle over immigration is affecting communities across the country.

Clive Stafford Smith is one of just a few people who've had independent access to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. He's a human rights lawyer representing dozens of the prisoners held there, and he says countless innocent men have been held at Gitmo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them. Many of them, he says, have suffered terrible abuse.

In Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay, Smith details the abuses and absurdities of life inside the legal black hole of the prison camp.

Earlier on today's Fresh Air, we heard from Clive Stafford Smith. He's a defense attorney who charges in a new book that numerous innocent men have been held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them.

For a different perspective, we're speaking with Capt. Pat McCarthy, the U.S. government's lead counsel in Guantanamo.