The pageantry is over; the wheel has turned; politics has finally turned up on the main stage in Philadelphia, mostly personal.

Ex-President Bush, George Sr., says he never belonged in the slanging contest with President Clinton. But Dick Cheney warmed to the attack-dog part last night, and he will keep Bill Clinton and the “character and decency” lines until the last hour of the last day of the campaign against… Al Gore. “Let us see them off together,” Cheney said, leading the chant “It’s time for them to go,” which was Al Gore’s line about Bush and Quayle 8 years ago.

The Republican tactics of triangulation, rising above the principles they used to fight over, come out of the Bill Clinton playbook. The substance of George W.’s promise may come clearer in his acceptance tonight. Until then he’s the Republican Party’s blind date, as the New York Times cracked this morning. Is he about something more than winning?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Fund, reporter for The Wall Street Journal

Dick Morris, former Clinton advisor

Jim Morris, presidential impersonator.

The best-kept media secret of our time is not who’ll win a million dollars on Survivor, but the identity (28 years later) of the shadowy Watergate tattle tale known as Deep Throat.

The unnamed source — whispering to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in a dark garage — became an icon in the investigative journalism and crooked politics that toppled the Nixon presidency. Was Deep Throat a traitor, or a savior? And who among the President’s Men was he?

In a gabby city with no long-term secrets, this one’s lasted for almost 30 years. Woodward, Bernstein, their editor Ben Bradlee and Deep Throat himself are all water-tight. Woodward never told his wife, Nora Ephron. Was it Chuck Colson? John Dean, perhaps? Al Haig? Henry Kissinger?

Some said it was Leonard Garment, the jazz saxophonist and Nixon lawyer. No, Garment says, but he’ll tell you who it was. Deep Throat is unmasked.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Leonard Garment

“I think, therefore I am” is the neat bit of logic with which Descartes rescued the Self from philosophical skepticism. If I think, he means, then there must be an I, a conscious self that’s thinking. Descartes went on to say “this I — the soul by which I am what I am — is entirely distinct from the body.”

That’s the classical statement of Cartesian Dualism, commonly known as the mind-body problem, and philosophers are still grappling with the question. Is there a ghost in the machine, a mind, a consciousness that is separate from the body, or is human thought no more than the sum of neurons and synapses doing their electro-chemical, mechanical work?

That’s also the question that excites the new field of Cognitive Science, which combines modern brain-sciences with philosophy. Scientists are opening up the mysterious world of human, and animal thought, and philosophers still argue the location of the True Self.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Patricia Churchland, Chair of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego
Antonio Damasio, Neuroscientist and Head of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. But dandelions don’t. Neither do topminnows, or the tiny bdelloid rotifer.

There are better ways to reproduce, it turns out, than by doing it. Microscopic animals split in two. Willow trees grow from cuttings. The Virginal greenfly gives birth to virgin young that are already pregnant with more pre-embryonic virgins. Some plants and animals have abandoned sex, some have it only occasionally. Water fleas reproduce sexually only every few generations.

Sex is the queen of evolutionary problems, an accident, a luxury that should not exist. Stephen Jay Gould says sex may be an evolutionary relic of a time when it actually served a purpose. Like chins or little toes or appendixes, sex may no longer have a function in many species, it’s just not easily got rid of. Biologists can’t agree just why sex is necessary, only that it is.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Matthew Meselson, Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University

James Crow, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Wisconsin.

This Republican National Convention in Philadelphia nominating George W. Bush of Texas may look and sound more like a Republican governors’ conference: there will be nothing nasty or exotic on that podium, no cultural crusading by the celebrity likes of Pat Buchanan, and not much of the old Republican ideological fire… in sight anyway.

Republican governors held the strategic alliance that nominated George W. as one of their own who could win. Pataki of New York, Ryan of Illinois, Engler of Michigan: they are conservative men with the moderate mission of grinding out government that works, more or less.

Newt Gingrich is the name of what is missing in Philadelphia. George W. may be Newt without the scowl; running mate Dick Cheney was Newt without the charisma in his House years. But Newt defines what’s over now.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Alan Simpson, former U.S. Senator from Wyoming

R. Emmet Tyrell, Jr. of The American Spectator

Whit Ayre, Republican pollster

Arianna Huffington, political maven and host of Shadow Convention 2000.