The Trent Lott affair reminds us of the American capacity for mass denial, particularly where race is concerned. Republican racism, certainly, is an open secret. It isn’t limited to good-old-boy senators from Mississippi or South Carolina who are relics from a broadly discredited past. Ever since Lyndon Johnson declared, “We shall overcome,” and Richard Nixon […]
Robert Kuttner
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Notes for Next Time: Surviving Tyranny, Redeeming America. Follow Bob at his site, robertkuttner.com, and on Twitter.
Posted inArticle
Best for Last
In the end, the problem was not Al Gore’s stands on the issues. The problem was Gore. The difficulty was not Gore as a person but Gore as a politician. People who know Gore well say he is a delightful, relaxed and funny man in private. His kids are said to be among the genuinely […]
Posted inArticle
Ersatz Advisers
George W. Bush’s economic-team replacements are looking stranger and stranger. For starters, this was the rare case where the Bush team dropped the ball politically. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill got dumped before there was a new man in place. O’Neill had irritated the Bushies because he is a plainspoken fellow rather than a loyalist. One […]
Posted inFeatures
Comment: Sins of Commission
The appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair a commission on the September 11 attacks has provoked widespread clucking. As Maureen Dowd aptly put it, Henry Kissinger isn’t whom you hire to get to the bottom of something. “If you want to keep others from getting to the bottom of something, you appoint Henry Kissinger,” she […]
Posted inArticle
Budgetary Mess
In looking for the proverbial silver lining in a very cloudy election, Democrats can take comfort from one result. The Republican victory finally blew away the Democrats’ disastrous strategy of trying to attract voters by being the party of perpetual budget-balance. Last week at Washington strategy meetings, senior Democrats from both the party’s liberal and […]
Posted inFeatures
Comment: The Unconvincing Case for War
Recently, the Prospect sponsored a debate on Iraq. Interestingly, both teams were ostensibly liberal Democrats. Arguing for a U.S. invasion were Jonathan Chait, a Prospect alumnus and author of a recent New Republic cover piece on the liberal case for war, and Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst, National Security Council staffer under Clinton and […]
Posted inArticle
The Rich-Poor Gap in Decent Preschools
The well-named Jack Grubman, a onetime superstar stock analyst at Citicorp, first got into big trouble when it came out that he apparently shaded his stock picks in order to curry favor with Citicorp’s corporate clients. Last week it emerged that Grubman also bragged in an e-mail that he had upgraded his rating of sagging […]
Posted inFeatures
Comment: Outward Bound
The last time the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency for a full two-year term was 48 years ago, in the years 1953-54. Dwight Eisenhower was president. Ike, however, was a bipartisan sort of Republican who worked closely with Democrats in Congress. Among other un-Republican achievements, he gave us the Warren Supreme […]
Posted inFeatures
Comment: Spot the Spoiler
Bemoaning the failure of the Democratic Party to lead has become a newsroom sport. In The New Republic‘s version, the Dems have squandered their Roosevelt-Truman-Kennan foreign-policy heritage by wimping out on Iraq. In New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s rendition, “The problem with the Democrats is not that they are being drowned out by Iraq. […]
Posted inArticle
Nader: Influence for Good or Ill?
Nader: Influence for Good or Ill? Part II: Kuttner rebuts Chait’s review. Dear Jon, We invited you to review for the Prospect Justin Martin’s recent biography of Ralph Nader and Nader’s own memoir of the 2000 campaign. We didn’t learn much about these books from your diatribe, but we did learn a lot about what […]
