Joshua Marshall

Harry Dent assures me that George W. Bush is going to win big in South Carolina on February 19. “He’s Mr. Handsome,” the South Carolinian recently told me, “got a gorgeous wife, good family. And he believes in Jesus Christ. That’s pretty strong down here.” Dent should know. A longtime adviser to the state’s nonagenarian […]

“I love a 50-50 tie,” Senator John Breaux of Louisiana told me recently. “This is the kind of thing you dream about being involved in. It’s a mandate for getting things done.” And, boy, does he want to get things done. Breaux has a reputation in the Senate as a consummate deal maker, a people […]

America’s Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through New Gingrich, by David R. Mayhew. Yale University Press, 257 pages, $30.00 Why was the Clinton health care plan rejected by Congress in 1994? Was it because of big-money lobbying from the health insurance industry? Or was the plan doomed from the first because Americans–anti-statists […]

A decade ago, if someone had told the president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Al From, that Al Gore would be heading up the Democratic ticket in the year 2000, he would have thought the DLC millennium had truly arrived. Today, though, it’s not so clear. Gore’s support for free trade, welfare reform, and […]

If you’ve caught much of the TV commentary about the “war against terrorism,” you’ve probably seen a lot of Richard Perle, the portly, Ronald Reagan-era assistant secretary of defense who kept the defense-hawk home fires burning throughout the Bill Clinton years from a perch at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. On such […]

When the Senate voted 51 to 50 to provisionally accept the outline of George W. Bush’s budget, the sole Democrat who crossed the aisle was Zell Miller of Georgia. (He was offset by Republican Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, with Vice President Dick Cheney breaking the tie.) Of all the wavering Democrats in the Senate […]

G eorge W. Bush and his advisers, stumbling toward the presidency in the aftermath of a bloody election, believe that early compromise and conciliation (or at least the appearance thereof) are crucial if the administration is to attain any kind of political legitimacy or success. But extremists in Bush’s own party have other ideas: Despite […]

Is George W. Bush gearing up to play the gay card against John McCain in South Carolina? Political pundits were genuinely perplexed on November 21 when Governor Bush told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that he would “probably not” meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, the gay Republican group that John McCain had met […]