Party in Search of a Notion
The opportunity before the Democrats is far bigger than a few House and Senate seats if they can recognize — and seize — this unique historical moment.
New Issue PDF
To download the May issue in PDF format, click here. The Vote-by-Mail Special Report is also available here.
Kitchen-Table Democracy
Here’s what Election Day will look like in Oregon this fall. Most of the voting will not take place on Election Day at all but probably sometime in October. It’s after dinner and the family gathers around the kitchen table to vote. Mom and dad, maybe with children old enough to be interested, get out…
Going Postal
The first time you hear about Oregon’s approach to voting, the idea sounds almost un-American. In 1998, the state that gave us assisted suicide decided to run all of its elections by mail: no voting booths, no frantic Election Day get-out-the-vote efforts, no dueling poll-watchers — and no trooping off to the local firehouse to…
A Technology Too Far
Touch-screen, computerized ballots — officially known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems — are not a way station to a glorious, all-Internet future for American democracy. They’re a technology cul-de-sac. An election system should be accessible, simple, and efficient. But it must also be as secure, risk-free, and confidence-inducing as possible. Reacting to the…
On the Oregon Trail
Oregon’s statewide vote-by-mail system remains unique — for now. But with little fanfare, liberalized absentee balloting laws elsewhere have prompted a steady expansion of mail voting. In the process, popular support is growing, from the ground up. States are following the gradualist pattern of expansion first set in Oregon. Laws permitting at-will absentee registration in…
The Curse on Unions
Solidarity For Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise by Robert Fitch (PublicAffairs, 560 pages, $28.50) Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement by James B. Jacobs (New York University Press, 320 pages, $32.95) America’s unions may be shrinking, but the literature on…
The Oregon Voting Revolution
How a vote-by-mail experiment transformed the democratic process.
Don’t Get Mad, Get Even
Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men — And What To Do About It by Evelyn Murphy with E.J. Graff (Touchstone, 352 pages, $24.95) Just when you thought the news couldn’t get any worse, here comes a report from the trenches of the American workplace, where apparently women are still being…
Fight Now, Think Later
Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered our Government — and How We Take It Back by David Sirota (Crown, 384 pages, $24.00) David Sirota is the kind of pundit you’d like to have on your side in a knife fight and wouldn’t want to cross in a dark alley. After toiling…
God, This Guy’s Good
That must be a joke, I thought — along with a million or so others. Months ago, there began to appear, on newspapers and Web sites and storefronts, pictures of a tall young white man in a long beard, broad-brimmed hat and flowing coat: the perfect Talmudic scholar, dressed in the uniform of the Hasidic…
We’re Working on Them
Right-wing bloggers love authority. They live to repeat slavishly the talking points of the Bush administration, bowing down like a pack of authoritarian cargo cultists before the words and images of the Jeep-in-Chief. Left-wing bloggers, on the other hand, are a notoriously unruly bunch, and they spend much of their energy in a steel-cage death…
Next Stop Iran?
During the early Cold War, while right-wingers called for the rollback of Soviet communism, the strategists of containment argued that the United States ought to be patient, confident that internal forces would weaken communism from within and that the “gravitational” force of a revived Western Europe would eventually draw Moscow’s satellites out of its orbit.…
Europe: Continental Drift
Silvio Berlusconi was trailing his center-left rival, Romano Prodi, in polls preceding Italy’s general elections on April 9 and 10. So, less than two weeks before the vote, he did what most politicians in such situations do: He moved to shore up the base — his allies in the hard right Italian Northern League. His…
The Philippines: Power Outage
Manila, The Philippines — For a man who might be jailed at any moment, Harry Roque Jr., appeared very relaxed when I met him in Manila in early March. Dressed in a white barong tagalog — the long, delicately embroidered shirt worn untucked by Philippine men — he welcomed me into his law office, crowded…
Nicaragua: The New Guy by Stephen Kinzer
Managua, Nicaragua — Within hours after the left-wing indigenous leader Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia last December, another outspoken critic of American power in the hemisphere, Daniel Ortega, sent him a message of “revolutionary jubilation.” As the head of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in the 1980s, Ortega led his country in a war against…
The Labour Soap Opera
London is a place where Thomas Frank’s famous book bears the title What’s the Matter with America?, thus extending the indictment to the whole nation, and where a small American child is required to affirm that she hates George W. Bush before she can join English tykes on the jungle gym. Even so, the principal…
First Among Thirds
One morning in 1989, Dan Cantor was honeymooning in Scotland when his new wife, Laura Markham, looked up from a newspaper article about electoral returns in a European Parliament election. The virtues of European political systems isn’t typical pillow talk between newlyweds, but Cantor and Markham were political junkies. She’d been struck by the success…
The Soldier in Me
It was January 1989, during my senior year in high school. My family was sitting at the dinner table when my mother turned to me: “I was talking to some mothers today, and their kids are all applying for colleges. When are you going to get to it?” I stared back, “I already told you.…
Life After Wartime
In all the public bickering recently between Japan and China, one fact has received remarkably little attention: Japan’s continuing refusal to pay compensation to victims of its militarist-era brutality. Ever since Japan surrendered in August 1945, one of the Japanese government’s key policy objectives has been to slough off all such compensation claims. Japanese officials…
Vice Squad
Bad heart, errant shotgun, and Halliburton stock options in tow, Dick Cheney has ruled the White House roost for the past five years, amassing enough power to give rise to the joke that George W. Bush is “a heartbeat away from the presidency.” Yet, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of words have been…
Party in Search of a Notion
The Democrats are feeling upbeat these days, and why not? The Republican president and vice president have lost the country’s confidence. The Republican-controlled Congress is a sump of corruption, sycophancy, and broken principle. Races in the midterm election that Democratic leaders wouldn’t have dreamed of a few months ago are in play (the Senate seat…
