Dave Denison

Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy By Thomas Mallon. Pantheon, 224 pages, $22.00 Why did Mrs. Ruth Paine of Irving, Texas, make the notation “LHO purchase of rifle” on the March 1963 page of her Hallmark pocket calendar? Soon enough, everyone would find out that LHO was Lee Harvey Oswald. But […]

In the mid-1990s, a group of liberal activists, with the support of a few wealthy donors, developed a new strategy to reduce the power of money in national politics. Let’s not waste so much energy trying to get minor reforms through Congress, they reasoned. Let’s take the battle to the states and push for something […]

As Al Gore labors to be seen as a man of the people, the candidate’s demeanor continues to strike some voters as annoyingly confident. “He’s like the kid in school you wanted to beat up because he knows all the answers,” Tom Coveney, a 42-year-old Massachusetts banker, told The New York Times after the first […]

In the world of political campaign advertising, there is nothing sweeter than coming up with an ad that is so clever or outrageous it gets free publicity. Ralph Nader hit the jackpot in the fall campaign with his spot that parodied MasterCard’s “priceless” commercial. Nader’s campaign even ended up getting sued by the credit card […]

A small minority of Americans–maybe two million people, maybe as many as five million–will vote for Ralph Nader for president this year. Most have gotten into arguments about the decision or have had someone try to talk them out of “throwing away” their vote. Many have been told they are doing something harmful or, at […]

Don’t buy into the mainstream media’s propaganda about how the recent transfer of power in Washington was remarkable for its lack of violence. That ignores the mobs of bloodthirsty liberals rampaging through the nation’s capital, ready to hoist the heads of innocent conservatives on newly sharpened pikes. Or at least that’s how the sensitive souls […]

Sometime in the next few years, it is likely that the Supreme Court will be asked, “Are elections in the United States so distorted by the influence of money that they have ceased to be democratic?” It’s not hard to imagine the average attentive American answering that question along the lines of “Hell yes!” But […]

Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform By Bradley A. Smith. Princeton University Press, 286 pages, $26.95. Money Talks: Speech, Economic Power, and the Values of Democracy By Martin H. Redish. New York University Press, 319 pages, $35.00. It’s a shame that the debate over campaign financereform as played out in the mainstream media […]

For George Bush the elder, the recession of the early 1990s was adifficult subject, something best not discussed in public. As he put iton November 20, 1991, “I think more than anyone else in this country,obviously, that if the president misspeaks or sounds euphoricallyoptimistic, or overly pessimistic, you send the wrong signals to askittish market […]