EU Got That Thing
The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T.R. Reid (Penguin Books, 305 pages, $25.95) It is easy to scoff at the trappings of the European Union. Its flag of 12 gold stars on blue is bland. Its national holiday — Europe Day, commemorating the Schuman…
Dossier: Red-State Values
In red states in 2001, there were 572,000 divorces … Blue states recorded 340,000 … In the same year, 11 red states had higher rates of divorce than any blue state … In each of the red states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico, 46.3 percent of all births were to unwed mothers … In…
A Few Good States
When it comes to election systems, the United States isn’t all Floridas and Ohios. There are, in fact, a number of states that tend to run their elections well, through trusted systems and voter-friendly procedures. They don’t grab the attention of journalists and reformers precisely because they rarely produce newsworthy controversies and snafus. Reform experts…
Don’t Count on It
For election officials in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, November 2 had passed with merciful ease. The balloting was deemed an administrative success — until two days later, that is, when election workers noticed a mathematical oddity: As they canvassed more votes, the tallies in certain races had decreased. After some hand-wringing, election officials discovered that the…
Vanishing Bipartisanship
Warren Rudman has spent years perfecting the art of bipartisanship. Called a “consensus-forging leader” by Senator Olympia Snowe, Rudman, who served two terms as a U.S. senator from New Hampshire (1980– 92), is well-known for his role in bipartisan deficit reduction and, more recently, for his work on the United States Commission on National Security,…
Courting Trouble
Judging from the views of my respected co-authors in this report, American democracy stands indicted for its performance in November’s election. Yet in several important respects, the system performed better in 2004 than it has in years. That’s not easy for me to say after such a disheartening election day. But you cannot measure the…
Color It Wrong
The tactics are more subtle than in the old days, but suppression of votes in minority neighborhoods is very much alive and well.
Whither the Ward Heelers?
Shortly after the McCain-Feingold bill passed Congress in 2002, the smart money was all on the big money: Mega-wealthy donors to the new “527s” would dominate the new political era just as they had dominated the last. Sure enough, such progressive donors as George Soros did make huge contributions to the 527s. But the smart…
The Democracy We Deserve
There’s reason to be optimistic about the prospects for reform. Here’s why.
2004: A Report Card
Americans know the 2000 election was a fiasco. What they don’t know is that the 2004 election, in many ways, might have been even worse. The purported margin of victory in November has led many to believe that the process went relatively smoothly. But the appearance of a smooth election obscured troubling developments, from simple…
America Observed
Few noticed, but in the year 2000, Mexico and the United States traded places. After nearly two centuries of election fraud, Mexico’s presidential election was praised universally by its political parties and international observers as free, fair, and professional. Four months later, after two centuries as a model democracy, the U.S. election was panned as…
Action Liberalism
Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism by Dominic Sandbrook (Knopf, 416 pages, $25.95) The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ by Michael Janeway (Columbia University Press, 284 pages, $27.50) The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment…
North Malice Forty
January brings the annual rituals of the National Football League (NFL) playoffs and the major college bowl games, and if any more evidence were needed about how football-obsessed a nation ours has become, consider the following: Of the top 10 television programs for 2003, three were football games, and a fourth was the Super Bowl…
The Democrats’ Da Vinci Code
As the Democratic Party goes through its quadrennial self-flagellation process, the same tired old consultants and insiders are once again complaining that Democratic elected officials have no national agenda and no message. Yet encrypted within the 2004 election map is a clear national economic platform to build a lasting majority. You don’t need Fibonacci’s sequence,…
Movement Interruptus
There were certainly reasons to despair after the 2004 election — chiefly, the awful thought that George W. Bush and a Republican Congress could find the means to exceed the egregious irresponsibility, the xenophobia, the sheer partisan pettiness, and the callous disregard for life and law of Bush’s first term. But the election itself, and…
Mapquest.Dem
Is the Democratic Party becoming the New England party? In 2004, the candidates who dominated the Democratic presidential primaries, beginning with the one in New Hampshire, were Howard Dean of Vermont and John Kerry of Massachusetts. In 2004, as in 1988, the Democrats nominated a liberal Massachusetts politician to run against a conservative member of…
The Enemy of Comfort
A week after the presidential elections, Iris Chang, the much-acclaimed author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, was found dead in her car on a highway just south of Los Gatos, California. Before shooting herself, Chang left a carefully written suicide note at her home in San Jose and…
New Year’s Resolutions
Over the next few years, we’re going to face monumental tax and budget decisions. President Bush wants to privatize part of Social Security, make the tax code far less progressive, borrow many more trillions of dollars, and probably slash domestic programs. It’s crucial that people understand what’s at stake as these issues unfold — and…
Security Flaws
Republican plans to privatize social security raise two different security questions. One is the impact on the retirement security of workers if they become dependent on the stock market for their basic livelihood in old age. The other concerns the nation’s security if, as news reports indicate, the Republicans decide that rather than raise taxes,…
A Farewell to Armitage
When Colin Powell announced his resignation as secretary of state on November 15, he didn’t just take away the remaining vestiges of foreign-policy centrism from the Bush administration. He also eclipsed the departure of his deputy and best friend, Richard Armitage. With Powell out, hard-liners inside and outside of the administration found themselves victorious, wrote…
The Battle Begins
For decades, Social Security was called the “third rail” of American politics. Suddenly, privatization sounds like a done deal. Not so fast.
The God Squad
Leaders of the religious right are demanding a hard-line conservative Supreme Court as payback for their contribution to the re-election of President George W. Bush. Liberals, meanwhile, are seeking consolation in a roll call of justices, past and present, who have demonstrated the annoying independence fostered by elevation to a job with lifetime tenure. The…
