They are calling it the Gore Score. Former Vice President Al Gore threw his weight behind Howard Dean, giving the former Vermont governor the kind of establishment credibility his campaign can use. It’s a blow to the other candidates, especially Senator Joseph Lieberman, Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000.

While the Dean campaign says this endorsement could “change the face of the campaign.” its still not clear if this will enable Dean to lock down the nomination. When it comes to voters, do endorsements really make a difference? We’ll ask two of the best reporters on the campaign trail. USA Today’s Walter Shapiro and The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza on Doctor Dean’s drive toward the ultimate house call.

Guests:

Walter Shapiro, political columnist for USA Today, and author of “One-Car Caravan: On The Road with the 2004 Cemocrats Before America Tunes In”

Ryan Lizza, Associate editor of The New Republic

Lisa Wangsness, political reporter for The Concord Monitor

Doug Hataway, former national spokesman for the Gore Campaign (1999-2000)

Whither the Kyoto Protocol? That’s the big question at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, now into its second week in Milan. Russia is waffling about whether it will sign the treaty, leaving the protocol’s fate dangling in the balance.

Meanwhile, as many people consider climate change an issue for other countries, essays in a new issue of Granta magazine bring the heat home. As editor Bill McKibben writes, “People talk about global warming in the way they think about violence on television, or growing trade deficits.” From the Mongolian plateau and the Peruvian Andes, to Vermont’s declining winter, global warming isn’t just changing the weather. It’s changing the character of home.

Guests:

Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature” and “Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Naure.” He is also scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College

Mark Lynas is a journalist and author of the forthcoming, “High Tide: News from a Warming World”

Philip Marsden, author of “The Main Cages.” All three writers have pieces on climate change in the most recent issue of Granta.

The Geneva Accord likely won’t end the Israeli – Palestinian conflict, but it has people talking. Since it was signed last week, angry responses have flowed from both sides. In Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon denounced its Israeli initiator as a ‘traitor.’ In the West Bank and Gaza, militant Palestinian demonstrated against it.

Meanwhile, in Washington, the architects of the Geneva Accord met with Colin Powell, prompting some to declare the initiative already a success. Supporters say the accord challenges the main players to reconsider their positions, and respond. Critics call it the brainchild of irrelevant, has-been politicians dabbling in freelance diplomacy.

Guests:

Ari Shavit, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz

Robert Malley, Middle East program director, International Crisis Group

Yossi Beilin, former Israeli Justice Minister

Yasser Abed Rabbo, former Palestinian Information Minister.

Not since the days of Richard Nixon have liberals been so angry, so anxious about regaining power. Look at today’s bestseller list; Titles like Dude, Where’s My Country, and Bushwhacked… are all in the top ten. But it’s not just the President they’re mad at. Many Democrats blame their own party for its lack of a clear or inspiring message. Its a challenge former Clintonite John Podesta has taken to heart. He’s created a new liberal think tank that aims to reinvigorate the party with what many say is missing — the next big idea. This hour, the former Governor of New York state Mario Cuomo and John Podesta on how Democrats can persuade America that the people who invented the Great Society and the New Deal can still come up with new ideas.

Guests:

Mario Cuomo, former Governor of New York

John Podesta, former Chief of Staff for the Clinton Administration.

Shanghai is swelling. News reports today say that the population of China’s biggest city has now topped 20 million. More than three million residents have been added to the city register in the last year alone. It’s not a baby boom. It’s a job search on a giant scale. In a country that boasts a growth rate of eight percent annually, Shanghai’s tops that.

And what’s happening there is happening in cities across China, as rural dwellers leave their farms to search for factory work. The migrants are just one chapter in a story about China’s century-long rise from isolation to economic force. And as the U.S. worries about its war on terrorism in the Middle East, China is wielding new influence, and economic might.

Guests:

Merle Goldman, professor emerta of history, Boston University, and scholar, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard

Bonnie Glaser, senior associate, Center for Strategic Studies, and consultant to the State and Defense Departments

Matthew Forney, Time magazine’s Beijing Bureau Chief

All of us become mall rats this time of year. Weaving and dodging with the masses, searching to find just the right gift for family, friends, and admit it, ourselves. But despite the fact that Americans are filling their stockings more than ever before, the evidence shows that having more stuff under the tree, or anywhere else in the home, isn’t making people any happier, in fact, they’re more depressed.

In his new book, “The Progress Paradox” Gregg Easterbrook says Americans are better off than they’ve ever been before, but they just don’t know it. The solution he says if for people to wake up and smell the prosperity.

Guests:

Gregg Easterbrook, author of “The Progress Parodox”

Juliet Schor, professor of Sociology at Boston College and author of “The Overspent American”

Iraq’s embassy in Washington has been empty for thirteen long years, but Rend al-Rahim, just named as the new ambassador, is about to move in. Rahim left Iraq almost thirty years ago. For much of the time she has lived the U.S., where she helped found a pro-democracy think tank, and spent time advocating for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Since the departure of the Iraqi President, Rahim has been back home, several times. And while she praises the US effort to oust Saddam Hussein, she has tough words for America’s post-war planning — she says it was full of security failures and misinformation. When asked what should come next in her homeland Rahim says, “Iraqis want everything summed up in the single word democracy.”

Guests:

Rend al-Rahim, Iraq Ambassador to the United States

If you think about it, its the voices that stay with you…the voices of Iraqi University students debating their future, former Senior officers in the Iraqi Army demanding the chance to serve their country again….the engineers
the doctors, the artists trying to make this the moment when Iraqis can take charge of their own lives.

The voices are those that you heard here on The Connection as we broadcast live from Baghdad. The other voices that stick in my mind are those of our callers, people from Cambridge and Waltham and Providence and Gloucester who decided they wanted more than headlines, they wanted the chance to talk directly with people in Iraq. This hour, a chance to remember our best from Bagdad, and ask you to support this kind of journalism.

Guests:

Dick Gordon

Like a dysfunctional family with too many credit cards, Democrats and Republicans in Washington, have a spending problem. The math is straightforward: 87 billion to rebuild Iraq, a new Medicare prescription drug bill, and trillions in tax cuts; it all adds up to what could be a 500 billion dollar deficit this year. The bill for all this spending will be paid by those Americans who are still in diapers, but who, if anyone, pays the political price?

Some say deficits have come and gone, and no one really cares anymore. Others claim that the wild spending might actually cause political problems for the President as he pitches for a second term.

Guests:

Congressman Jim Nussle (R – IA)., chairman of the House Budget Committee

Alan Murray, Washington bureau chief and anchor, CNBC

Stephen Moore, President of the Club for Growth

If you daydream about love poetry chances are Philip Larkin is probably not the poet who comes to mind. The bespectacled, balding, miserly Englishman who worked in libraries and lived in attics was no Lord Byron. In the second of our two-part series on the poetry of love, we shift from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the more sombre stanzas of Philip Larkin. The poet was known for his caustic wit, an appetite for pornography, and for having more than one girlfriend at a time. Not exactly a formula for notable words of romance. It was in fact his inability to embrace love that caused him to write some of the most tender lines of the modern age.

Philip Larkin and a different kind of love poetry.

Guests:

Michael Gearin Tosh, fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford Univeristy, and author of “Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny.”