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Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Recent Articles

This '70s Show

Garance Franke-RutaApr 30, 2004

My first political memory, from sometime in the early to mid-1970s, was of the big painted signs the Partido Revolucionario Institucional splashed across boulders and cliffs along Mexican roadways. My second political memory dates to 1977, when I was watching a Mexican TV show and realized that women were treated differently than men.

Separated at Birth

Garance Franke-RutaApr 23, 2004

When I met with George W. Bush's campaign spokesman, Terry Holt, in January, he couldn't stop talking about the importance of grass-roots organizing and running a person-to-person campaign that focused on getting people talking to people in their neighborhoods. I thought this sounded a lot like the sort of thing that Howard Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, was wont to say, and I told Holt this. Replied Holt, “He's right.”

Tangled Web

Garance Franke-RutaApr 16, 2004

After Richard Clarke spoke under oath before the September 11 commission, the single most powerful person in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, had no qualms about slicing into him and virtually accusing him of perjury. On two occasions in a late March speech on the Senate floor, Frist accused Clarke of lying, saying that he did, “by his own admission, lie to the press” and that he “has told two entirely different stories under oath.” Such lies would not go unpunished, warned Frist: “The intelligence committee is seeking to have Mr. Clarke's previous testimony declassified so as to permit an examination of Mr. Clarke's two different accounts. Loyalty to an administration will be no defense if it is found that he has lied before Congress.”

Big Think

Garance Franke-RutaApr 09, 2004

At her testimony before the 9-11 commission Thursday, Condoleezza Rice gave the same impression that has, in the past, suited her so well, and made her the subject of an endless series of fawning profiles: that of a highly competent, self-satisfied bureaucrat with an orderly, methodical cast of mind, which she uses to pursue big thoughts and her sweeping vision of long-term institutional and geopolitical changes.

Family Affair

Garance Franke-RutaMar 26, 2004

Inside the sleek wooden walls of a Hart Senate Office Building hearing room, where the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States held two days of hearings, GOP commissioners subjected former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke to sharp questioning during a charged and emotional hearing Wednesday. But while Clarke deftly parried charges about potential partisanship -- asserting, under oath, that he has no interest in ever joining a John Kerry administration, "should there be one" -- the pointed questions highlighted another fault line that may widen as the political season progresses: a divide between the GOP commissioners and the family members of victims of September 11.

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