The People’s Republic of Vermont strikes again. Four years ago, Senator Jim Jeffords delighted liberals and outraged conservatives by abandoning the Republican Party, depriving it (however briefly) of its Senate majority. Two years ago, Howard Dean’s anti-war presidential candidacy made him (also briefly) the left’s hero, the right’s scourge. Now another left-of-center Vermonter is about […]
Jon Margolis
Jon Margolis, a former national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, is the author of The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964.
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Antisocial Security
Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan’s first budget came out, I went to one of those press briefings in the New Executive Office Building where senior officials armed with charts and graphs (this was the pre-PowerPoint era) explained the budget’s impact on domestic policy. Reporters could ask questions, but we had just gotten copies of […]
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Primary Colors
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Turns out that not only can John Kerry skate pretty well, he can even play some hockey. Not as well as the former Boston Bruins and (female) Olympic stars with whom he was zipping around the ice here the other day, but the defense really did seem to be trying to stop […]
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Comeback Kerry
Maybe it was the volunteer firefighters. A month ago Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) seemed to be such a fumble-mouthed bumbler that one columnist urged him to “accept the fact that the game is over,” and another organized a betting pool to guess the date when he’d drop out of the presidential race. Now he’s the […]
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Center Stage
Considering that he is the Democratic Leadership Council’s (DLC) “New Democrat of the Week,” it should come as no surprise that St. Petersburg, Fla., City Councilman Rick Kriseman has endorsed Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), and that there is one Democrat he’d have a hard time supporting. “I don’t agree a lot with [Rep.] Dennis Kucinich […]
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Park Wars
It’s a high-energy scene in the interior department’s John Muir Room on the second Wednesday in June. Rangers from the National Park Service dispense information while their bosses dispense Bluebonnet ice cream. Guests from the Forest Service exchange gossip with their Interior counterparts, while other visitors pause to examine the displays set up around the […]
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Primary New Hampshire
NASHUA, NEW HAMPSHIRE–Political lore says that George Bush (père) lost the 1980 primary when he sat grinning dumbly as Ronald Reagan proclaimed that he had “paid for this microphone” during a debate here. Of course, that this is not true (the debate merely helped turn a loss into a rout) matters less than its being […]
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Disappearing Candidates
“I am the Democrat who can beat Rick Santorum,” says Bob Rovner in his introduction to hotel-lobby chatter at a Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee meeting. The hotel is not even in Harrisburg, the Democrats having forsaken downtown. It’s off a bypass of the interstate east of Harrisburg. “I’m the best Democrat. I’m a fresh face, […]
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Chamber of Horrors
The upper chamber of Congress should be up for grabs. But in too many Senate races, Democrats have issues but not candidates. Or they have national issues but not local ones. Or they have candidates but not money. Can they win anyway? Politically speaking, Rod Grams is mired in what a leader of his party […]
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Voters and Vouchers
Pick up the newspaper or tune in to a Sunday morning TV gabfest and you’re likely to read or hear about the sizable majority of Americans who approve of voucher plans–school choice, as proponents put it. These assertions are sustained by the holy writ of the public opinion poll, rooted in random sample, buffered by […]