The Salient Majority
Even as American voters have entertained the prospect of electing a “compassionate conservative” as president, there is little evidence the public is in a conservative mood. In fact, an unusual poll conducted this summer suggests that Americans hold liberal views on important taxing-and-spending issues. The nonprofit Center on Policy Attitudes joined with the Internet company…
The Dead Heat
T he election of 2000 will go down as one of the closest and most boring in American history. The conventional Washington explanation: no big issues. Peace and prosperity lured Americans into a smug torpor. So the candidates’ styles, smiles, sighs, smirks, and quirks became determinative. And by these trifling criteria, it was a toss-up.…
Cleaning House
If Democrats win back the House of Representatives, their slim majority won’t adequately reflect the magnitude of the change. The list of ranking Democrats in line to chair key committees reads like a who’s who of progressive congressional leadership: Henry Waxman (Government Reform), George Miller (Education and the Workforce), John Conyers (Judiciary), and Charles Rangel…
Comment: The Stakes
One of the many depressing things about the 2000 election has been the tactical blurring of principled differences. Al Gore is for patients’ rights? So is George W. Bush. Gore has a plan for prescription drug coverage. Bush does, too. Gore would allocate trillions to Social Security. Likewise Bush. Never mind that Gore’s plans are…
Contenders for the High Court
If It’s Bush Send in the Scalia-Thomas Clones Emilio Garza, Fifth Circuit: This former marine captain has clear conservative stands on all the important issues (like the purported error of Roe v. Wade). But he’s shrewd enough not to wear them on his sleeve. Appointed by President Bush in 1991 after…
Antigovernment, Texas Style
Now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own. –Joel and Ethan Coen, Blood Simple (1984) P ressed as to why his state had been so slow to take advantage of…
The Nader Perplex
A small minority of Americans–maybe two million people, maybe as many as five million–will vote for Ralph Nader for president this year. Most have gotten into arguments about the decision or have had someone try to talk them out of “throwing away” their vote. Many have been told they are doing something harmful or, at…
Saving Private Abraham
L ast spring, Spencer Abraham of Michigan was widely considered to be the most vulnerable incumbent in the U.S. Senate–“a guy,” says one veteran politico, “who could only have been elected in 1994.” Like many Gingrichians, Abraham was known less as a politician than as an ideological enthusiast, with few legislative accomplishments and spectacularly low…
Gore’s Tenuous Bond with Working Voters
A s the election goes down to the wire, it’s easy to forget how dramatically the dynamics changed in August. Before the Democratic convention, most polls showed George W. Bush with a double-digit lead over Al Gore. Media discourse was dominated by a conventional wisdom about a complacent electorate that Democrats seemingly couldn’t crack. Economically…
Does the Center Hold?
A decade ago, if someone had told the president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Al From, that Al Gore would be heading up the Democratic ticket in the year 2000, he would have thought the DLC millennium had truly arrived. Today, though, it’s not so clear. Gore’s support for free trade, welfare reform, and…
Gone South
Samuel Gompers, the storied leader of the American Federation of Labor, worried about “globalization” almost 100 years ago. Concerned about how “free trade” created “slave labor” conditions in the colonial world, he helped create the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1919 in order to establish world labor standards. The ILO was conceived by “responsible labor…
Speaking of
T hree years ago, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley was abducted, sexually assaulted, and murdered by two men, one of whom was allegedly a member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), founded in 1978. Both of his assailants, Charles Jaynes and Salvatore Sicari, are now serving life sentences for murder. They have…
Why Pay Down the Public Debt?
Y our taxonomist and my friend, Robert McIntyre, has offered us a lesson on the merits of paying down public debt [“In Praise of Debt Reduction,” September 11, 2000]. Everyone knows Bob’s work on tax policy is invaluable, but his class on fiscal policy is one I’d rather cut. Bob begins with the reasonable point…
Why Pay Down the Debt?
I f I understand Max correctly, our main points of disagreement seem to be the following: A couple of times, he challenges the truism that paying off debt now will make it easier for future taxpayers to maintain or enhance public programs–just as Reagan’s big debt buildup in the 1980s made it harder to maintain…
War, Peace, and the Election
T he presidential debates this year were a failure by the standard we use to measure our public entertainments: their ratings were abysmally low. It was not really the candidates’ fault. Boredom with elections is one of the luxuries of our time. Not only have long prosperity and a seemingly unthreatened peace lulled us into…
The Bidness of Voting
Colin Goldman is trying very hard to break the law. But it hasn’t been easy. In the months leading up to the election, Goldman, a libertarian candidate for the California assembly, has been running an election sweepstakes. He promises a $1,000-cash prize to one lucky winner to be chosen from those who sign up on…
The Return of States’ Rights
What are the powers of the national government? When is the nation allowed to act? When must the states act instead? These are not trivial issues. The answers will determine the ultimate fate of measures safeguarding the environment, protecting consumers, upholding civil rights, preventing violence against women, protecting endangered species, and defining criminal conduct in…
A Load of Bull
When the stock market started tanking in September, there was no shortage of good reasons offered. Most analysts cited high oil prices, the slumping euro, weak corporate earnings, and fear that the Fed would leave money too tight or not tight enough, triggering inflation or slower growth. A lot of observers thought the high price-to-earnings…
The Law According to Levy
In 1957 the Fund for the Republic asked a young historian to write a brief memorandum on the original understanding of the First Amendment. Leonard Levy, who was teaching at Brandeis University, examined the sources and concluded that, at the time the amendment was framed, American courts recognized the crime of “seditious libel”–criticism of the…
The Common Interest in Property
The Jewish legal concept of pe’ah requires landowners to leave a meaningful portion of their field unharvested so that the poor can gather food for themselves. The basis for the concept comes from the Book of Leviticus, which states, “And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners…
Let’s Make a Difference
P ay It Forward is the kind of film I approach with dread. Hollywood strikes many discordant notes, but self-satisfied celebrations of communal uplift land with an especially abrasive clang. Frame a public injustice as a mystery and let a flawed crusader clean things up–an Erin Brockovich, a Lowell Bergman, or even that violin teacher…
Lost in Translation
P ast summer the George family traveled to the nation’s capital from their northern California reservation with a clear agenda: to raise awareness of the Hupas’ battle to protect their land and culture from environmental threats. “America has been educated from a colonial, oppressive perspective, and then Disney has come along and colored who we…
The TV Campaign
T he morning after the first televised debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush, I awoke to the voice of an earnestly boyish reporter on National Public Radio proclaiming that at long last America has been allowed to hear its candidates “without the filter of the news media.” At which, in wearied frustration, I…
Planet Bush, Planet Gore
In 1997 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) undertook a routine reassessment of its national air pollution standards. After reviewing new public-health studies, EPA Director Carol Browner proposed strengthening limits on two major pollutants–ozone, the source of smog; and particulates, tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause respiratory illness. Her proposal promised to anger…
Earth Tones
This summer’s melting of the nine-foot-deep ice cap at the North Pole into a mile-wide lake shocked the public out of its long-standing denial about the reality of global warming. According to new findings released in September by researchers at the National Climatic Data Center, the pace of climate change is accelerating. The world can…
Hail to the Chief
ACROSS: 1 STROVE (anag.); 4 BALL + OT (to rev.); 8 OVERL + AP (lover anag.); 10 TAC + KY (cat rev.); 11 AT SEA (anag.); 12 EXCE(R)PT; 13 CAN + DID + ATE; 17 FAR GONE (anag.); 19 PLANE (plain hom.); 21 I’M + AGE; 22 T(H)ICKET; 23 ERE + CTS; 24 A(S)IDES DOWN:…
