Mama’s Delicate Condition
Female politicians have not fared particularly well in the Commonwealth ofMassachusetts. We have sent no women to Congress in recent years and have neverelected a female senator, governor, or attorney general; the state legislaturehas never been led by a female senate president or speaker of the house. So asRepublican Lieutenant Governor Jane Swift prepares to…
Liberal Loss or Progressive Mandate?
This was the winter of Democratic discontent. By stealing the presidential election last fall, Republicans gained control of all branches of the federal government–the presidency, both houses of Congress, and, of course, the Supreme Court. Their dominance in state legislatures means that reapportionment is likely to carve out more Republican seats. And though lacking a…
A Question of Power
Liberals may well wonder where we go from here. An ambiguous and questionable election, a president who ignores the fact that he lost the popular vote by more than half a million, a cabinet of corporate retreads and right-wing ideologues, a near statistical tie in Congress–all this creates a tricky terrain on which to maneuver.…
Liberal Loss or Progressive Mandate?
The postmortems on the Democrats’ 2000 election campaign have focused on Bill Clinton’s “moral drag” on the Democratic ticket and Al Gore’s shortcomings as a candidate. Both played a part in the unhappy outcome, but the fixation on personalities obscures a third and probably decisive factor: the campaign’s dominant themes and message. After all, Gore…
The Baucus Factor
If there was one Senate Democrat–besides Georgia’s Zell Miller, that is–who was thought to be an easy vote for George W. Bush’s megalithic tax scheme it was Max Baucus of Montana. In the presidential race last year, Montana went for W. by 24 points. It wasn’t always that way. Back when Baucus entered the Senate…
How the DLC Does It
Representative Gregory Meeks, an African-American lawyer and assistant district attorney elected to Congress in 1998 to represent a middle-class black neighborhood in Queens, New York, was undecided last year on the divisive issue of trade rights for China. Lobbyists for big business were battling the AFL-CIO and environmental groups on Capitol Hill for every vote,…
Discriminating Employers
Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America, by Phillip Moss and Chris Tilly. Russell Sage Foundation, 317 pages, $29.95. Should government–including the John Ashcroftled Justice Department–do more to enforce laws against discrimination in hiring? Until recently, there has been a paucity of rigorous social science research on employers’ attitudes about hiring low-skilled workers.…
Chiang Kai-shek Is Dead
President George W. Bush’s first major foreign-policy decision will come at the end of April when he will have to decide what kind of military hardware to sell Taiwan. The debate will be somewhat technical, but very important: It involves America’s stance toward a region of the world where the fate of democracy is at…
The Taxonomist
During the House debate in early March on the first round of the Bush tax cuts, Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas stood up on the House floor and tried to revise history. “Mr. Speaker,” said DeLay, “I have to say, that the Democrat leadership has no credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility. They…
Gerrymandering for Position in 2002
When Indiana Democrat Tim Roemer announced recently that he would retire from the House of Representatives at the end of this session of Congress, the officially cited reason was that he wanted to spend more time with his family. That’s no doubt true. But it is surely also the case that Roemer didn’t want to…
Comment: The McCain Mutiny
On most issues, Republican legislators have presented a solid phalanx to give the Bush administration whatever it wants. The exception is campaign finance reform–and the chink in the Republican armor is Arizona Senator John McCain. Should Democrats be cheered? The answer is a qualified yes. For starters, the reform coalition is mostly McCain plus Democrats.…
Marketwatch
Prompted by a plunge in the Consumer Confidence Index, which hit a near-five-year low in February, The New York Times dubbed confidence the “X factor that can save the day or push the economy over the brink into recession.” Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan warned Congress that “changes in consumer confidence will require close scrutiny in…
Southern Exposures
The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South, by Charles Marsh. Basic Books, 294 pages, $25.00. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama/The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter. Simon and Schuster, 701 pages, $35.00. The white resistance to the civil rights movement has…
Oops, She Did It Again
A year and a half after the headline-making Sensation exhibit, the Brooklyn Museum of Art has sparked yet another controversy involving art, religion, freedom of expression, the role of the museum, and, not least of all, the nature of art criticism–which the philosopher Arthur Danto not long ago characterized as “a form of zealous howling.”…
Class Clowns
The Oblongs, the WB network’s new animated series that premiered on April Fools’ Day, opens with the sound of a flushing toilet. Chipper voices, who could be singing about the Flintstones or Scooby Doo, sing the show’s setup: As cartoon waste flows from a fancy mansion down into a valley filled with decrepit houses and…
Schools That Develop Children
American schools are said to be failing. Like nineteenth-century medicine men, everybody is promoting everything, whether there is any evidence that it works or not. Over here we have vouchers, charters, privatization, longer school days, summer school, and merit pay. Over there we have the frequent testing of students, the testing of teachers, smaller class…
Going Holistic
University of California President Richard C. Atkinson’s loud call in February for abolishing the use of the SAT I test in undergraduate admissions is likely to have a lot more significance outside the UC system than within. Atkinson’s university has already spent the last four years quietly butsystematically de-emphasizing the test (originally called the Scholastic…
Academic Love
Academic Instincts, by Marjorie Garber. Princeton University Press, 187 pages, $19.95. Why do the French hate the Belgians and vice versa? For the same reason that Yale students emblazon shirts with “Harvard Sucks”: We define ourselves by the distance from near relations. Freud calls this the narcissism of minor differences. In Academic Instincts, a collection…
Bowling Together
Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture, by Andrew Hurley. Basic Books, 409 pages, $27.50. The lunch counter in my college town is called the Yankee Doodle, and its best moments come just after the 6:00 a.m. opening. Late-night partiers straggle in before bed, thesis writers on…
An Editor’s Diagnosis
Severed Trust: Why American Medicine Hasn’t Been Fixed, by Dr. George D. Lundberg, M.D., with James Stacey. Basic Books, 371 pages, $26.00. “Remember, the job of a medical journal editor is to shed light, … to be the conscience of the profession.” Dr. George Lundberg got this kind of advice from fellow medical editors and…
Taxing Motherhood
The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued, by Ann Crittenden. Metropolitan Books, 323 pages, $25.00. The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, by Nancy Folbre. The New Press, 267 pages, $24.95. In The Price of Motherhood, economics journalist Ann Crittenden draws on…
Free to Choose
Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice, by Alan Wolfe. W.W. Norton 224 pages, $24.95. As every parent knows, sometimes the only answer to “Why?” is “Because I say so.” For a long time that was, at least in form, the most common answer to society’s ultimate why question: “Why be…
The Essential Tip O’Neill
Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, by John A. Farrell. Little, Brown and Company, 776 pages, $29.95. Jimmy Breslin called Tip O’Neill “a lovely spring rain of a man” and John A. Farrell proves Breslin right in Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. Farrell, a prizewinning veteran reporter for The Boston Globe, has written a…
The Case (once again) for Universal Health Insurance
Forget a tax cut, other than an immediate one-year stimulus that puts money into the hands of people earning less than $50,000 a year. Forget paying down the debt. Use the federal surplus for universal health insurance. Working families won’t get much out of any tax cut, and debt elimination is foolish. But working families…
