Buchanan’s Bite
Not so long ago, Democrats just loved the idea of third-party candidates who came along and shaved points off the margins of major party nominees. The offices at the Democratic National Committee echoed with schadenfreude last fall when Pat Buchanan jumped ship for the Reform Party. But now, with Ralph Nader making a strong showing…
Ralph Nader: A Conversation
Robert Kuttner: I am sympathetic to much of your diagnosis of the dependence of both parties on corporations. But I am skeptical about what you can really accomplish tactically. Historically, what have American third parties accomplished in the past, and what do you hope to accomplish? Ralph Nader: Well, in the past, third parties have…
Swinging Long Island
Putting aside the question of whether Hillary Clinton’s chances were improved by Rudolph Giuliani’s withdrawal from the New York Senate race, Republican Representative Rick Lazio’s decision to parachute into the contest has a potential silver lining for Democrats: Lazio won’t be seeking another term in the lower chamber. That improves Democrats’ chances of retaking the…
Nader’s Raid
In late April, the forces of compassionate conservatism issued notice of yet another battle won over the evils of Clintonism. “Bush Shows Strength in Pacific Northwest,” proclaimed a press release from the Bush campaign in bold faux newspaperese. And indeed, according to two new polls, George W. Bush was edging Al Gore by one point…
A Clean Sweep
On Friday, April 7, I came upon one method of increasing the income of the working poor that, I confess, had never even occurred to me. The janitors of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1877, embroiled in a countywide strike, were marching down Wilshire Boulevard from downtown Los Angeles to tony Century City, roughly…
Guns and Money
More than a year after the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, Congress remains unwilling to pass even the most incremental legislation controlling access to lethal weapons. There is no better explanation for that than the role of money in politics. Take the current impasse over the waiting period for background checks on…
Scout’s Honor
Before the end of June, the Supreme Court will decide whether the Boy Scouts can be forced by antidiscrimination law to accept openly gay members and scoutmasters. The Scouts argue that “gay scoutmaster” is a contradiction in terms, going so far as to claim, in their petition asking the Court to hear the case, that…
Bigots’ Rights
Should evangelical Christian groups at colleges and universities be permitted to discriminate against gay and lesbian students? Do the Boy Scouts have a constitutional right to exclude openly gay males? The first question is at the center of efforts by liberal colleges and universities to punish evangelical student groups for their illiberal views. The second…
Embarrassment of Riches
When Vice President Al Gore promised to retire the national debt by 2013 and even to run surpluses in the case of a recession, I assumed that he was merely trying to score a political point by contrasting his own fiscal conservatism with the recklessness of rival George W. Bush’s proposed tax cuts. But after…
Finite Jest
The frenzy surrounding Dave Eggers and his debut memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, reached a certain kind of climax in late April. Eggers had already been beatified by critics, his book lovingly reviewed as a major breakthrough, and the journal he currently edits, McSweeney’s, enshrined as a must-read, when The New York Times’s…
The Character Issue
When Wendy Wasserstein’s play An American Daughter premiered in 1997, critics deemed it superficial, suggesting that Wasserstein had failed to do justice to the multitude of political issues she had raised. The criticism also holds true for the film version of An American Daughter, which was adapted by Wasserstein herself, and which airs this month…
The Prince Is Dead. Long Live the Prince.
On multiple video monitors at his Manhattan apartment in the Hotel Elsinore, the modern Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) mesmerizes himself with his own distressed image. At Blockbuster Video, he rents action films by the dozen, all the better to create his frightening movie-within-a-movie that is his version of the play wherein he’ll “catch the conscience of…
The Other Gender Gap
Hazel Dews is slightly embarrassed when you ask about her salary. She pauses and then confesses that after 25 years cleaning the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington five nights a week, she makes barely $22,000 a year. That’s not what really bothers her, though. What irks her is that men who do the same…
Martha Jernegons’s New Shoes
Last fall, Martha Jernegons got a raise. By the standards of the new dot-com economy, it wasn’t much–just $2.15 per hour. But for Jernegons, a 56-year-old home health care aide in Chicago, working for a private agency that is reimbursed by the city, it was a 40 percent increase, to $7.60 an hour. Though she…
China Fallout
Will the Democratic Party’s divisions over the China/ WTO vote prove fatal? For the sputtering Gore campaign, the timing could hardly be worse. The scenario recalls the 1994 NAFTA split prefiguring the party’s defeat in the 1994 midterm elections. In both cases, President Clinton depended heavily on Republican allies to win an agenda shaped by…
Welfare That Works
Through recent decades, America’s social welfare policies have oscillated between two contradictory impulses. The 1960s were marked by a campaign against poverty; in the 1980s, welfare policy was increasingly concerned with fighting dependency. By the early 1990s, when welfare rolls hit an all-time high, the fear of unintended consequences–that welfare was discouraging work and marriage,…
Ending Poverty As We Know It
Last year, when the editor of another magazine asked me to write about the progress of welfare reform in America, I called around to see which state was leading the way. I ended up in Wisconsin. Under the direction of Republican Governor Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin had begun cutting its rolls earlier than most…
Skills and the Wage Collapse
Despite the record economic expansion and near full employment, wages for the bottom fifth of the work force are still far below their 1979 levels. Well over one-fifth of the male work force earns poverty-level wages (22.5 percent in 1997), almost twice as high as in the early 1970s (12.8 percent in 1973). This wage…
Why Americans Hate Welfare
A curious paradox defines the politics of welfare in the United States. On the one hand, we are an extraordinarily generous and forgiving people. In 1998 Americans donated more than $170 billion to charity, and we have proven open to giving just about anyone (even, say, a philandering president) a second chance. Americans are willing,…
Black Workers Remember
It is one of the great ironies of American labor history that enslaved workers toiled at a wider variety of skilled tasks than did their descendants who were free. Slave owners had an economic incentive to exploit the multifaceted talents of blacks in the craft shop as well as in the kitchen and field. But…
Ladders to a Better Life
One promising strategy for rewarding work seeks to create career ladders to enable low-wage workers to advance through a progression of higher-skilled and better-paid jobs. This approach requires several elements. Employers need to become more explicit about how they structure jobs and routes to career advancement. Workers need access to job-specific training. Institutionally, this endeavor…
Is Scrooge a Democrat Now?
By the third week of July, at its so-called “midyear budget review,” the White House will unveil its new projected 10-year federal budget. Insiders tell me it’s likely to show a surplus that’s half a trillion dollars larger than the one now projected. Why? Because America’s wealthiest 5 percent are becoming far richer, far faster…
Working Principles
The Cabinet met with the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on a sultry day in the summer of 1996. Many of us recommended that he not sign the welfare bill that the Republican Congress had sent him (the third one it had sent, only slightly less punitive than the first two,…
A Darker Ribbon
I’ve always wondered where the money goes when I pay extra to the U.S. Post Office for a sheet of breast cancer stamps, when I buy daffodils from the American Cancer Society, or when I pledge a donation to someone running a race for the cure. Or, for that matter, when I give money to…
How Welfare Offices Undermine Welfare Reform
Welfare and related policy reforms adopted by Congress in the 1990s seemed to strike an implicit bargain with low-wage working families. Parents were expected to meet their “personal responsibility” for supporting themselves and their children by leaving welfare and going to work. If they did, government would help out by providing a package of income,…
Child’s Play
Tracey Hunt, a 28-year-old single mother living in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood, did not want to go back on welfare. She had been there before, about five years ago, while she was pregnant with her second child. Back then, the problem was not a lack of work; it was that the work (waiting tables at a…
Two Cheers for the EITC
I like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) a lot. I also really like brownies with gobs of vanilla ice cream and hot fudge. But I don’t have them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The EITC–a refundable tax credit that subsidizes the wages of low-income workers–is everyone’s darling. New Democrats love it. President Clinton expanded…
Job Lot
ACROSS: 1 JINGLED (hidden); 5 MA(CH)O; 8 N(IN + N)Y; 9 S + CUTTLE; 10 E + ERIE (Haiti anag.); 11 NO + YES; 13 (h)ARNESS; 15 DRAG ON; 18 DU(S)TY; 20 USA + GE(ts); 23 REIGNED (rained hom.); 24 S + US + HI; 25 NEEDS (kneads hom.); 26 ASPERSE (hidden) DOWN: 1 JUNK…
