The DLC Flunks Politics 101
Democrats have a penchant for circular firing squads, particularly in the wake of electoral defeat. Once more, a first salvo has come from the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which has made its name sniping at other Democrats. In a confidential memorandum on the “Road Ahead,” the DLC’s Al From and Bruce Reed surveyed the 2002…
Books in Review
Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism By Roger Wilkins. Beacon Press, 176 pages, $14.00 Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North By Melinda Lawson. University Press of Kansas, 272 pages, $29.95 The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration By Carol M. Swain.…
Better Living Through Fudbol
When I arrived in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, last August, everyone was buzzing about the upcoming soccer match between local club Zeljeznicar and the British team Newcastle United. No one really expected the Bosnians to win, but people in Sarajevo were doing a lot of shrugging and head shaking and making, “It…
And the Winner Is …
One leaf fibrillating on an otherwise naked bough, and a wind that seems to stain the lungs with ice: It’s that time of year, so let’s start rounding it up, let’s start making our lists. Best films of 2002? Surveying the movie landscape of the past 12 months, it’s hard to see the peaks and…
Westward Ho!
Pat Williams was happy to get back to Montana. “It was like going to an island of victory to be in Helena,” says the former nine-term member of Congress. A Democratic progressive, Williams witnessed the election-day desperation of his party in the nation’s capital. But in Montana, Democrats gained ground in the state legislature, re-elected…
Alien Nation
In the midst of the Washington-area sniper attacks last fall, Montgomery County (Md.) Police Chief Charles Moose was forced to make an unusual televised appeal to immigrants. “Perhaps some of our immigrant community members feel like there would be some problem for them because of their status … if they come forward,” Moose said. “We…
States of Decline
“Eight years ago, Connecticut’s economy was in decline,” the campaign ad flashed across television screens last spring. “Thousands of jobs lost. Taxes going up. Education failing. Governor John Rowland set out to change all that and today the positive results are everywhere. … Now some Democrats want to reverse our progress and raise the income…
House Rules
It was hardly a surprise that Republicans didn’t waste any time calling Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) names once Democrats elected her House minority leader. Wesley Pruden, the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, named her the Democrats’ “new prom queen.” Conservative columnist Cal Thomas referred to the Pelosi liberals as the “Fidel Castro wing of the…
The Taxonomist: New Gang, Old Myths
When George W. Bush hired a new economic team in early December, the press speculated that the change might bring a glimmer of fiscal sanity to the administration’s economic policies. Don’t bet on it. As Stephen Moore of the anti-tax, big-deficit Club for Growth cult put it, whatever their past records, the new boys will…
Some Mideast Realism, Please
As George Kennan observed 50 years ago in American Diplomacy, American foreign policy has been periodically affected by bouts of evangelical idealism, which date from the country’s Puritan founding and which have led Americans to seek to transform the world in our image — and to demonize any country or regime that stands in the…
The High and the Mighty
Every nation sees itself as being in some way exceptional. Only the United States, though, has tried to develop foreign policies that reflect its exceptionalism. While other countries are content — or obliged — to practice a balance-of-power politics in the world, from the beginning most American leaders have argued that the United States, by…
Corporate Control of North America
The business interests that promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have gotten their money’s worth. Since the agreement went into effect in January 1994, American and Canadian corporations have moved production and jobs south to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor. Subsidized agribusinesses in both northern countries have blown small-scale Mexican farmers out…
Post-Gore Democrats
Gore is gone, and the race for the Democratic nomination in 2004 is so wide open, says one Democratic pollster, “The plausibility of why-not-me? candidacies has just exploded.” This isn’t 1992, when Mario Cuomo’s decision not to run failed to prompt any prominent national Democrats who’d been holding back to hop into the race. Running…
Comment: Having It Both Ways on Race
The Trent Lott affair reminds us of the American capacity for mass denial, particularly where race is concerned. Republican racism, certainly, is an open secret. It isn’t limited to good-old-boy senators from Mississippi or South Carolina who are relics from a broadly discredited past. Ever since Lyndon Johnson declared, “We shall overcome,” and Richard Nixon…
Gored by the Media Bull
We may never know the real reason Al Gore opted to bow out of the presidential race. In his interview announcing this decision on 60 Minutes, the former vice president said he wanted the 2004 race to be about the future, not the past. While he had the “energy and the drive and the ambition”…
