The Republican Lock
The 2004 election is really only about one question: whether the Republican Party will enjoy thorough and unchecked power in all branches of the federal government. Despite the virtually even split in the American electorate, conservatives have every reason to expect that November will bring them total political control. Four years ago, America had what…
Aiming High
An undisclosed location, Va. — From the outside, the headquarters of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign is completely unremarkable — so unremarkable that passersby have no way of knowing it’s even there. Through the tinted windows of the Arlington office tower where the headquarters is lodged, people shuffling papers can be glimpsed as through a glass…
The Verdict on Vouchers
Observers marveling at President George W. Bush’s ability to push a radical agenda through a closely divided Congress have tended to attribute the administration’s success to the impressive party discipline within the Republican congressional caucus. And impressive it is — both historically and, especially, in comparison to the anarchic behavior of the Democrats during the…
Saving Black Boys
In the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments … it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust…
The Weakly Standards
When standards of learning (SOLs) first appeared in my Northern Virginia public-school classroom nearly seven years ago, they were hardly more than a lunch-table punch line — another unfortunate abbreviation coined by board-of-education bureaucrats to browbeat our low-achieving, high-minority school. SOLs constituted a body of knowledge that students would learn in each academic subject. The…
Testing Our Patience
State and federal law assume that the quality of public education can be gauged by the number of students who reach the “proficiency” mark on a standardized test. Indeed, the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law provides serious penalties for schools that fail to make sufficient annual gains in these numbers. It is a…
The Best Investment We Can Make
Scotty and I shared a table in Mrs. Kerner’s kindergarten class in 1984. He was the classroom’s centripetal force, always drawing the teacher’s attention away from the rest of us. He rarely finished even the simplest assignment, instead wandering the room or doodling on his desk. He cried easily and threw raging tantrums. Other days,…
Bush’s Education Fraud
Well before he became president, George W. Bush had made his education plan, the No Child Left Behind Act, the showcase of “compassionate conservatism” — meaning, in the conventional shorthand, a conservative route to liberal ends. Its objective was to force schools to close the huge racial achievement gaps in American education, to pay attention…
A National Task
An educated citizenry is the hallmark of America’s democracy and central to the success of its economy. That was true at the founding of the republic, when Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s call for independence, sold 112,000 copies in three months — the equivalent of 17 million today — to the remarkably literate colonial settlers of…
The Last Word
It’s the most anemic jobs recovery on record. Productivity is soaring, but that’s mainly because fewer workers are doing more. At least 150,000 new jobs have to be created each month just to keep up with population growth. We haven’t come close. In December, the private sector produced a paltry 1,000. Not to be ghoulish…
That Was Then
We live in an upside-down world where Republicans defend deficits and Democrats attack them. These are seemingly opposite views. But both have led, mistakenly, to cuts in social investment as well as to needlessly slow economic growth and high unemployment. For years Republicans tried to slay Keynesian economics, the idea that in an economic downturn,…
Second Act
The Bush administration has been at times dangerously ambiguous in its policy toward North Korea. With a second round of six-party talks likely for early 2004 and North Korea’s nuclear program chugging along, the upcoming debate on Capitol Hill over a new bill, the North Korea Freedom Act, may well be pivotal in pushing U.S.…
Bad Max
Observers marveling at President George W. Bush’s ability to push a radical agenda through a closely divided Congress have tended to attribute the administration’s success to the impressive party discipline within the Republican congressional caucus. And impressive it is — both historically and, especially, in comparison to the anarchic behavior of the Democrats during the…
Our Mongrel Planet
Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures By Tyler Cowen, Princeton University Press, 179 pages, $27.95 In a short story by the late William Maxwell, an American named John Reynolds takes his family to Le Mont-Saint-Michel 18 years after his magical first visit. Their hotel is bland, the food mediocre and they are…
We See That Now
We confess. It’s all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation’s most august publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his integrity, smeared his family, invaded his privacy,…
Robert Rubin’s Contested Legacy
In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington By Robert Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, Random House, 448 pages, $35.00 In 1992 the incoming Clinton administration had, broadly speaking, two strategic options for domestic policy. The first was a double-or-nothing “social democracy” strategy. Federal spending at the time was running at 22 percent…
Robert Rubin’s Contested Legacy
In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington By Robert Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, Random House, 448 pages, $35.00 If a Democratic president gets to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan when the latter’s term is up in 2006, Bob Rubin is the odds-on favorite. He has the financial credentials: Goldman-Sachs, U.S.…
The GOP Deploys
An undisclosed location, Va. — From the outside, the headquarters of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign is completely unremarkable — so unremarkable that passersby have no way of knowing it’s even there. Through the tinted windows of the Arlington office tower where the headquarters is lodged, people shuffling papers can be glimpsed as through a glass…
All Eyes on Dixie
And now, as candidates and journalists shake the New Hampshire snows off their boots and the primary process heads south, we can look forward to a spate of media stories raising the question of whether any Democratic presidential candidate can effectively compete in the 11 southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North…
All Eyes on Dixie
How to balance northern and southern strategies is as central a challenge for the national Democratic Party in the 2000s as it was for the Republicans in the 1960s and ’70s. The irony is that some of the same tactical considerations apply — at least if one reverses regionalisms. Three decades ago, the GOP’s obvious…
America as a One-Party State
America has had periods of single-party dominance before. It happened under FDR’s New Deal, in the Republican 1920s and in the early 19th-century “Era of Good Feeling.” But if President Bush is re-elected, we will be close to a tipping point of fundamental change in the political system itself. The United States could become a…
