April Issue PDF
To download the April 2007 issue in PDF format, click here.
The Great Divider
A Divider, Not a Uniter: George W. Bush and the American People, the 2006 Election, and Beyond by Gary C. Jacobson (Longman, 192 pages, $14.60) The American Power Struggle: The Transformation of American Politics by Earl Black & Merle Black (Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $26.00) With George W. Bush and the Iraq War currently…
The European Dilemma
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Free Press, 368 pages, $26.00) Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 288 pages, $24.95) The world came to know Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a result of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, with whom she had…
Hollywood Reclaimed
The title of Gayle Pemberton’s essay “Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey?” comes from an offscreen line in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The speaker was a babysitter, but the character’s infantile drawl — the old stereotype of black people as dawdling, servile simpletons — makes her sound as if she could use a babysitter…
Why Liberalism Works
Liberalism is deeply rooted in American soil, so much so that in the years after World War II, many historians and social scientists regarded the liberal project and the American civic creed as more or less the same. The proposition that each of us has a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”…
Who You Gonna Call?
Stuart P. Slotnick does not look like a rebellious lawyer. Photos of him alongside prominent Republicans including Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg decorate his office on the 35th floor of One Chase Manhattan Plaza, and a World War II-era “Pledge of Allegiance” poster hangs behind his desk. He dresses in a crisp white shirt with…
Wal-Mart Comes North
Wal-Mart, as everybody knows, began in the backwaters of the rural South — though not everybody knows just how rural, how southern, how backwater. Wal-Mart’s southernness, however, is precisely what sets the chain apart from the handful of other companies that once dominated the American economy: Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, General Motors, IBM. None imposed…
Why Economists Can’t See the Economy
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists.” — Joan Robinson, Cambridge University On page one of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith illustrates the central principle of his economics with an example taken from, in his words,…
Hillary Clinton for President? An American Prospect Debate
PRO by Garance Franke-Ruta “Hillary Clinton is too ambitious to be our first female president,” an editorial in The Onion joked last year. “What’s more, nobody asked her to run. … Shouldn’t the first woman to break the gender barrier of the American presidency be the type of woman who listens to those who…
Friendly Takeover
In April 2004, AFL-CIO president John Sweeney grew concerned that John Kerry was getting too much of his economic advice from the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. Kerry had just completed his primary sweep. In the general election, he would need the unions. Sweeney proposed a private meeting to discuss living standards as…
Don’t Count on Shareholders
An acquaintance of mine sits on the board of a major company that just agreed to pay its CEO close to $10 million this year, including deferred compensation and stock options. I asked him how he and his board colleagues could possibly justify that kind of money. “No choice,” he said. “That’s what our com-petition…
Paulson’s Deregulation Mission
Last May, when Henry Paulson was nominated by President Bush to be treasury secretary, the Goldman Sachs chairman declared, “We must take steps to maintain our competitive edge in the world.” Five months later, Paulson warmly embraced a private-sector Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, ostensibly to preserve America’s role as the world’s largest international capital…
Freakopolitics
If you start to read the policy proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates and the mainstream Democratic think tanks, you will quickly get the impression that, while Democrats see lots of problems, there’s always just one solution: a tax credit. John Edwards proposes an “American Dream Tax Credit” — up to $1,000 a year for…
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 1917-2007
When Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich and Paul Starr first conceived the idea for a liberal magazine that was to become The American Prospect, one of the first people they consulted was Arthur Schlesinger. It was an obvious choice. As a historian, activist and writer on current affairs, Schlesinger had been an intellectual beacon for American…
