Peter Schrag

A fter the muddled 2000 election and the evenly divided Congress it produced, it didn’t take any special wisdom for the pundits to conclude that nobody got a mandate and that voters were too split to send any clear signal. But on some major issues, the electorate spoke with absolute clarity. One such issue was […]

March 7 is primary day in California, Ohio, New York, and most of New England; it could all but decide who will be the major party presidential candidates this fall. But of all the states, as one campaign consultant said, California “is the killer.” And California this year will conduct one of the more extraordinary […]

At least since 1996, when voters in california and Arizona approved ballot initiatives legalizing the medical use of marijuana, Americans have been trying to send the same message to Washington, D.C.: The nation’s escalating, $20-billion drug war is a disastrous and costly failure that is stuffing the prisons, ruining thousands of lives both here and […]

T here are few issues on which Americans are as much out of sync with their elected leaders as they are on the so-called war on drugs: suppression of crops and traffickers abroad, interdiction at the border, criminal sanctions for users at home. If it’s hard to find voters who believe U.S. drug policies are […]

If California’s misbegotten electricity deregulation scheme is ever reduced to canvas or film, the artist would have to be some cross between Hieronymus Bosch and Federico Fellini. At one level, it’s a surreal story of grossly compounded economic errors; at another, a gruesome morality tale–not only about corporate greed and political stupidity, but about the […]