Before the election, I wrote in this column that “several possible squeaker scenarios could produce some strange political dynamics after November 7” [TAP, November 6, 2000]. Of course, I had no idea just how strange the outcome would be, though I started off with the possibility of “one candidate winning the electoral college and another […]
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).
Posted inFeatures
Squeak or Sweep?
A year ago in these pages, I described the 2000 contest as a “parliamentary election.” With both the House and Senate so near the tipping point, the legislature and executive are genuinely at stake at the same time, as they typically are, though in a different way, in parliamentary systems. Indeed, with the Supreme Court […]
Posted inFeatures
War, Peace, and the Election
T he presidential debates this year were a failure by the standard we use to measure our public entertainments: their ratings were abysmally low. It was not really the candidates’ fault. Boredom with elections is one of the luxuries of our time. Not only have long prosperity and a seemingly unthreatened peace lulled us into […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Damage Report
T he past two years have humbled both liberals and conservatives-or should have. The 1992 election, liberals hoped, would set in motion a new cycle of progressivism. It didn’t. After the 1994 election, the new conservative leaders of Congress expected to stage a revolution. They didn’t. First President Clinton failed to secure the bolder aspects […]
Posted inFeatures
Reckless Predictions
You had no reason to notice it, but The American Prospect was totally Y2K-free this past year. We didn’t run a single article about the disasters that were supposedly going to befall the world after the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve. We also didn’t run any articles giddily anticipating all the wonders that […]
Posted inArticle
Florida: the Case for Rerunning the Election
November 9, 2000, 11:15 a.m. The next president should not arrive at the White House under the suspicion that his claim to office is illegitimate. Even without knowing the final recount in Florida, we do know that more than enough ballots to change the outcome were thrown out in Palm Beach County because of a […]
Posted inFeatures
The Betrayal
N othing about the 2000 election matters nearly as much as the ugly means by which it was brought to an end. Throughout our history, with the terrible exception of 1860, every party has been able to live with the victory of an opposing candidate for president. One reason is our confidence in a legal […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Of our Time: Democracy v. Dollar
D emocracy, many people have said, is a matter of faith, but why, dear Lord, must our faith be tested so often? Lately, the role of money in political campaigns has been mocking our civic creed. “Here the people rule,” we are taught, and we would like to think so. But if the voters (and […]
Posted inFeatures
A Reform That Doesn’t
Let’s say we decided to build a dam along a river. If we merely agreed to erecta small barrier that the river would run around, flowing easily through newchannels and old ones, no one would celebrate our plan as a great achievement.But that is how editorialists have hailed the Senate’s passage of theMcCain-Feingold bill, despite […]
Posted inFeatures
What You Need to Beat Goliath
In Michael Mann’s gripping new movie The Insider, the two central characters uphold the truth through acts of corporate disobediencethe moral equivalent of civil disobedience in an age when the threat to freedom so often comes from corporate rather than state power. Fired as head of research at cigarette-maker Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell […]