Military Surplus
Given the robust economy of recent years and President Clinton’s avowed commitment to defense conversion and worker retraining, you might assume that displaced defense workers did rather well in the 1990s. They didn’t. A majority of the nearly one million workers displaced over the past decade now work at jobs that pay less than their…
The Poll Story
Poll Results That Tell Us We Should… 15% of Americans associate “compassionate conservatism” with George W. Bush. 47% say they have “never heard” of Bill Bradley being a professional basketball player. 31% associate “health insurance for the uninsured” with Al Gore. 39% “recall a news story about [the] campaign.” 15% have “talked about [the] campaign.”…
Gay Rites
While civil libertarians celebrated the recent decision by the Vermont Supreme Court recognizing the rights of gay and lesbian couples to wed or enter domestic partnerships, Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer suggested that gay marriages were more immoral than murder. “I think what the Vermont Supreme Court did last week was in some ways worse…
Wedding March
Marriage is between one man and one woman: 30 states and the federal government have passed laws insisting that it’s so–and on March 7, Californians will vote whether to join them. As a result–or, more accurately, because of the money, rhetoric, and time the American right wing has spent ringing alarums about same-sex marriage and…
Eliminating the Debt
One party claims that the budget surplus will be small and that the most important goal is to eliminate the debt. The other says the surplus will be big and we can do ambitious things with it. You’d be forgiven if you thought that the first party was the Democrats and the second the Republicans.…
The Longest Ballot
March 7 is primary day in California, Ohio, New York, and most of New England; it could all but decide who will be the major party presidential candidates this fall. But of all the states, as one campaign consultant said, California “is the killer.” And California this year will conduct one of the more extraordinary…
Is It All Over?
It was a later night than Al Gore wanted, but in the end, he got the result in New Hampshire that he needed–a slim but measurable victory over former Senator Bill Bradley in the state where Bradley arguably had the best shot of beating the vice president. But by making Gore’s margin of victory so…
A Paler Shade of Gray
In the beginning was the money. Gray Davis isn’t running for anything in 2000; he is just now beginning the second year of his initial four-year term. Yet in his first 13 months as governor, he’s managed to collect about $1 million a month for his campaign treasury. That’s about five times as much as…
Democracy in Motion
Focus groups, aux armes! The revolution will be won at last: not in the mechanisms of the state, but in consumer showrooms nationwide. This spring, when DaimlerChrysler makes its new PT Cruiser available to customers, we’ll finally see an automobile produced to resemble the mind of the nation. Evidently, the national mind is pretty mixed…
Comment: Boom Box
This month, the economic boom enters its 107th month, making it the longest expansion in U.S. history. But there are now two small clouds on the economic horizon. With the economy having grown in the fourth quarter of 1999 not at the 3- or even 4-percent annual rate that most economists now consider sustainable, but…
No Fanfare for Learnfare
This school year, Governor George Pataki of New York expanded Learnfare–a program making family-assistance grants contingent upon children’s attendance at school–to include all elementary schools in the state. After three unexcused absences, students on welfare must seek counseling. After four unexcused absences, their families lose $60 in monthly assistance, which they can earn back with…
Weak Week
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol was fired from ABC’s This Week at the behest of the liberal media conspiracy. That, at any rate, is the contention of conservative columnist Mona Charen, who writes that “most chat shows have ratios of liberals to conservatives in the neighborhood of 3 to 2” and “the number of liberal…
Comic Crusade
In January, Salon reported that drug czar Barry McCaffrey and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) had coerced television networks to include governmentapproved antidrug messages in prime-time shows. Under the arrangement, the major networks secretly submitted scripts to McCaffrey’s office in exchange for credit toward public-service advertising that Congress had required them to…
Mob Scene
Living in New Jersey is always strange, but it’s been getting stranger since HBO’s hit series The Sopranos debuted last year. Suddenly the whole state is rediscovering its Mafia roots. At my local mall, the hairdresser can’t even wait until the conditioner to tell me that he is related to one of the original five…
The Business of Art
One way or the other, everybody was up in arms about “Sensation,” the exhibition of “Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” that recently closed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Details of that show and the outraged objections to it were reported in the media with a relentlessness usually reserved for airline disasters. But…
Making White Elephants Fly
In the summer of 1998, after about a year of peddling its Oyster Creek nuclear plant and finding no takers, GPU Inc. appeared resigned to shutting the unit down. Aging, inefficient, and economically uncompetitive, Oyster Creek was a prime example of how nuclear power–the ultimate energy boondoggle–wouldn’t survive in the new world of deregulated energy…
Jazz’s Changing of the (Avant) Garde
Jazz rode the 1990s surprisingly well. It was a decade in which the recorded-music market was flat compared to other media; and traditionally, jazz–which has a perennial single-digit market share–is an early casualty of the budget cuts and corporate take-overs that market slumps spawn. But that didn’t happen in the 1990s. Moreover, jazz benefited from…
Monster and Man
Not long ago I saw a documentary film on Adolf Eichmann and was shocked by the sight of him: The smirk, the smile, seemed to yank his mouth nearly off his face. He looked like a boxer undergoing the impact of a right hook, or like a portrait by, of all people, Soutine, in which…
A Man For This Season
Bill Clinton has presided over the longest period of economic expansion in American history–whether by design or default, whether by strategic appointments to critical government agencies or by caving in to the private sector, whether by fine-tuning fiscal policy or by getting out of the way. During the years of the Clinton administration, the U.S.…
What Would Bobby Do?
Six months before Robert F. Kennedy was killed, I had occasion to inventory the theories of what made him tick. Here is my list: that he was a ruthless calculator (Ralph De Toledano, Gore Vidal, Victor Lasky); that he was a market researcher (Nicholas Thimmesch, William Johnson); that he was his father’s son (Richard Whelan);…
Gore in the Balance
For years infamous as the world’s biggest garbage dump (and quite possibly the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa), New Jersey’s Meadowlands is once again home to burgeoning populations of wildlife. Eco-tourists now flock to this 32-square-mile tidal and freshwater estuary, located just five miles west of New York City. But the fate of the…
Solutions to “Primary Colors” (Feb 14, 2000)
ACROSS: 1 D(UP)ON + T; 4 CA + U(CU)S; 8 A + BET + TED; 10 DONNA (anag.) ; 11 ELDER (2 defs.) ; 12 M(A + NH)OOD; 13 RELOCATED (anag.); 17 A + LAB + AMA; 19 O + R + BIT; 21 RUIN + G; 22 SE(G-MEN)T; 23 LYNDON (hidden); 24 A(S)IDES DOWN:…
