Democrats should not promise an impossible victory, only an honorable end to the Iraq War as expediently as possible.
Paul Starr
Paul Starr is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American history, he is the author of eight books, including American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now (Yale University Press, October 2025).
The Hillarycare Mythology
Did Hillary doom health reform in 1993? Here’s the real story, from the Prospect co-editor who was a White House senior health policy advisor at the time.
BLOOMBERG AS DEM…
BLOOMBERG AS DEM VP CANDIDATE? When Michael Bloomberg announced he was leaving the Republican Party, my initial reaction was that it was a disaster for the Democrats. If he ran as an independent candidate for president, Bloomberg would almost certainly cut into the votes of self-identified independents that Democrats picked up in 2006 and that […]
Why Immigration Reform Matters
From our July/August print issue: If there is a deal to be had on immigration in this Congress, liberals and progressives should be part of it.
The Sunlight Solution
Increasingly, the law lets the public know what’s in the clothes it wears, the air it breathes, and the water it drinks.
Offering the Young a New Deal
This article originally appeared in CampusProgress.org. A few years ago, watching TV with my teenage son, I was struck by a point that financial-advice guru Suze Orman made to an audience of college students. What assets in America, she asked, are undervalued? Certainly not stocks, nor residential housing. The prices for both of those had […]
Is Rising Inequality Reversible?
New figures came out at the end of march showing that income inequality in 2005 reached the highest levels since the 1920s. By coincidence, presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani that same day declared his support for the flat tax and received the endorsement of Steve Forbes. That the current front-runner for the Republican nomination could believe […]
Why Liberalism Works
Liberalism is deeply rooted in American soil, so much so that in the years after World War II, many historians and social scientists regarded the liberal project and the American civic creed as more or less the same. The proposition that each of us has a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” […]
CAUTIONARY NOTE.
CAUTIONARY NOTE. I am not yet convinced that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can overcome the obvious obstacles to their election. According to the latest New York Times/CBS poll, if the election were held now, Americans would choose an unnamed Democrat over an unnamed Republican by a 20-point margin. Nonetheless, both Clinton and Obama have […]
Deadline Dilemmas
The strange thing about the debate in Congress over a deadline for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq is that the objective political interests of the two parties are the reverse of their stated positions. Republicans are facing a disaster in the 2008 election if the Iraq War continues unabated. But if the Democratic Congress […]

