Joshua Marshall

It was a later night than Al Gore wanted, but in the end, he got the result in New Hampshire that he needed–a slim but measurable victory over former Senator Bill Bradley in the state where Bradley arguably had the best shot of beating the vice president. But by making Gore’s margin of victory so […]

Since the mid-1990s, Democrats have played a deftlyexecuted but ultimately evasive game on fiscal policy. As surplusesbegan to appear on the horizon, they parried Republican calls for taxcuts with their own proposals for paying down the debt and “savingSocial Security.” This was effective–even ingenious–politics preciselybecause it ducked the root question of whether unspent revenues shouldbe […]

Visit the Web site of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and you’ll be greeted by an animated banner ad blaring: “Contribute! In the ’98 elections, Democrats were outspent 3 to 1.” Fair enough. As a whole, Republicans routinely outraise and outspend Democrats, and that’s been especially so since Democrats lost control of Congress in […]

When The New York Times revealed in April that Microsoft had hired Ralph Reed, the onetime executive director of the Christian Coalition, to lobby George W. Bush on the company’s behalf, the story that generated all the attention was Reed’s obvious, if bizarre, conflict of interest–he was also a paid adviser to Bush’s presidential campaign. […]

R emember pro-choice Republicans? They asked for so little–and they usually got it. But the elected officials among them could at least be counted on to show up and make a bit of a fuss at conventions and party functions. Remember a Bill Weld or a Christine Todd Whitman vaguely threatening a floor fight (even […]

In late March, when the National Association of Broadcasters held its annual Futures Summit in Pebble Beach, California, the assembled pack of Wall Street financial-analyst invitees presented the broadcasters with an astonishing but presumably welcome fact: Recent auctions in Europe and the United States indicated that the market value of the spectrum space–the airwaves over […]