Fathers in Court
I t’s often difficult for a feminist to garner much sympathy for the fathers’ rights movement. At first glance it seems, at best, redundant. Fathers monopolized familial rights and power for much of our history. Nineteenth-century common law gave men the right to control and the duty to support children born in marriage, while women…
Inequality and Social Security
S ocial Security is center stage in the presidential campaign, as it should be. The stakes are enormous. George W. Bush and some Democrats want to divert part of the program to individual retirement accounts. Al Gore would maintain the present system, but supplement it with government-subsidized personal accounts to help low- and middle-income families…
In Praise of Hypocrisy
T he 2000 presidential campaign may well turn out to be the most hypocritical in modern American history. But that’s okay. Hypocrisy in the cause of progressive ideals is no vice. It may even be a harbinger of reform. The hypocritical roundup: George W. is wrapping himself in the mantle of compassion and tolerance even…
Lost Causes
B ack in his day, Tom Downey was the proverbial good liberal congressman. Elected to the House in 1974 as the youngest representative in U.S. history, Downey was one of the Watergate Babies–that cohort of reform-minded idealists swept into Congress on a wave of anti-Nixon public disgust. During the 1980s, Downey fought against cuts in…
Comment: How Would Gore Govern?
W hat a pleasant surprise that Al Gore, having tried just about everything else, stumbled on the idea of running as a progressive. Maybe this shift was inevitable. Despite the appeal of centrism to elites, voters just do not elect Democrats to kiss up to business or dismantle government. They can get that, full strength,…
Leveling Politics in the Green Mountain State
In June 1997, Vermont passed one of the most comprehensive campaign finance reform laws in the country, and the signing of the “clean election” bill was a generally festive occasion. Democratic Governor Howard Dean was on hand for congratulations and photos with the bill’s main architect, Anthony Pollina, whom he enthusiastically dubbed Mr. Campaign Finance…
Treasure Island
What would happen in a political system where there are no votes, but only money to influence decision making? In such a dystopia, one might expect the well-heeled to have power and the poor to be disenfranchised. But now suppose further that even those with money find themselves bitterly divided on the central political issue…
Why I’m Not a Populist
I t was just about 100 years ago, after the defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, that the original, agrarian Populist movement collapsed and gave way to the more broadly based Progressivism of the early 1900s that permanently altered American government and society. But Populism, despite its short and checkered history, survives in our…
It’s the EPA and OSHA, Stupid!
T he Bush campaign would like you to think this election is about taxes and character; the Gore campaign is focusing on the dangers of debt and the promise of expanded health insurance; and the various interest groups in Washington are pushing their own favorites–from abortion to gun control. But who wins might not make…
Senatorial Privilege
In the early 1990s, a furor erupted over attempts to carve out two or possibly three “majority-black” congressional districts in the state of Georgia. As the controversy mounted, all the usual charges and countercharges filled the air. When liberals argued that racial redistricting was necessary to make up for a long train of abuses, conservatives…
Mothers of Invention
As the political season heated up, the mass media delightedly revived a favorite clash-of the-titans saga from the mid-1980s: the supposed battle between outspoken rock star Frank Zappa and Tipper Gore over nasty lyrics peddled by the music industry. With Tipper Gore much in the news, and then with the selection of the high-minded Joe…
Strategic Neglect
W hen José Imperatori, a secretary of the Cuban mission in Washington, D.C., was ordered out of the country last February for his alleged role in a Cuban spy ring, he went on a hunger strike and hired a lawyer. It took four burly FBI agents to get him out of his apartment and into…
Declaring War on the Drug War
T here are few issues on which Americans are as much out of sync with their elected leaders as they are on the so-called war on drugs: suppression of crops and traffickers abroad, interdiction at the border, criminal sanctions for users at home. If it’s hard to find voters who believe U.S. drug policies are…
Vermont v. Buckley
I t would have taken Solomon to decide the court case challenging Vermont’s campaign finance reform bill. The most radical effort in the nation, Act 64 capped both contributions and spending for statewide offices. But this summer, a ménage à trois of plaintiffs–the Republican Party, the Vermont Right to Life Committee, and the ACLU–challenged the…
The Rise and Reform of Stealth PACs
D uring the last week of June, as Congress was rushing toward its annual Fourth of July recess, the House and Senate abruptly acted to close the newest loophole in the federal election laws. Under an obscure provision of the Internal Revenue Code, Section 527, largely unregulated organizations get all the tax benefits provided to…
The High Cost of Speech
Sometime in the next few years, it is likely that the Supreme Court will be asked, “Are elections in the United States so distorted by the influence of money that they have ceased to be democratic?” It’s not hard to imagine the average attentive American answering that question along the lines of “Hell yes!” But…
Will Pseudo-Scandals Decide the Election?
In a pathbreaking study of the mass media and modern culture, The Image, first published in 1961, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event.” A pseudo-event, Boorstin wrote, is “not spontaneous … but planned, planted, or incited”–an event whose “occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media,” and whose…
Clean Money in Maine
T he first thing visitors to Maine’s statehouse in Augusta notice is that one-third of the historic building is boarded up, sealed off, and undergoing a late-summer renovation. It’s a fitting parallel to the historic transformation taking place within the legislature itself: Maine’s Clean Election Act, the first campaign finance reform of its kind, has…
Rescuing Politics from Money
T his special double issue of the Prospect focuses on money and politics. It is part of a continuing series on this set of topics, which is central to the project of reviving progressive politics. In this century, there have been successive waves of reform, beginning with the Progressive Era, which sought to constrain the…
The Dimming Down of America
Electricity became more valuable than gold this summer–or at least more valuable than finished aluminum ingots. At the beginning of June, 270 workers at Ormet Corporation aluminum plant in Hannibal, Ohio, were laid off for the summer when the company concluded that it was more profitable to sell the electric power normally used in its…
Pleasing Sallie Mae
Since 1980 the average tuition at four-year colleges (in inflation-adjusted dollars) has doubled. Median income for families, however, has not kept pace, increasing just 12 percent over the same period. Student loans help families fill the cash gap. And a powerful industry has grown up to handle the loan business. Taxpayers subsidize the private student…
Guise and Pols
Politicians Don’t Pander is one of those valuable books that force us to confront our compartmentalized thinking about politics. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, two prominent political scientists, point out that Americans simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs, each with firm conviction. One is that the growing influence of public-opinion polls has increased political…
Chinese Water Torture
M y fourth-grade research project on dams lacked data from the field until I got a lucky break: An uncle had connections at the Conowingo Dam. (He was in the concrete business; Conowingo is 435,000 cubic yards of concrete.) We drove down U.S. 1 to the Susquehanna River in Maryland and took an official tour.…
Boogie Nice
F or up-and-coming Hollywood directors, it’s a regular stop on the pay-your-respects express: a visit with Billy Wilder, the man generally considered to be the greatest living American film maker, the sardonic impresario who gave the world Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, and The Apartment. Cameron Crowe made the pilgrimage in 1995. He was…
Poison Ivy
N ovelists delight in retailing life and times in the academy. Write about what you know, the adage goes, and many authors stay solvent by teaching their craft to the next generation of literary hopefuls. Besides, what transpires in the intellectual padded cells of institutions of higher learning provides ample fodder for stories told out…
Shopping for the Cure
M illions of American women are now running, swimming, and climbing for breast cancer, raising extraordinary sums of money for charities whose workings they know almost nothing about. This odd throwback to the earliest breast cancer fundraising campaigns of the 1930s may go unnoticed because the outward appearances are so radically changed. But although spandex…
Money, Money, Money
ACROSS: 1 B + ARBIT(U)RATE; 8 NEEDLES(s); 9 TH(ER)E; 10 STY(L)E; 11 FIR(EAR)M; 12 HOARSE (horse hom.); 14 S + PILLS; 17 RE(GUL)AR (lug rev.); 19 NEARS (anag.); 22 INSET (anag.); 23 DECLARE (anag.); 24 AMP + HET + AMIN + E DOWN: 1 B-ONE + S; 2 (g)REEDY; 3 I + L.L. + NESS;…
