Robert Kuttner

W hoever wins, this will be the election that was stolen. Republicans have played the nastier hardball, throwing around phrases like coup d’etat, questioning the very legitimacy of courts to decide questions of law, intimidating vote counters, and shamelessly using election officials as partisan hacks. Thus energized, they are certain that George W. Bush truly […]

What is Tom Daschle up to? “In this divided government,” he declared upon becoming Senate majority leader, “we are required to find common ground and seek meaningful bipartisanship.” He told the press he would not seek repeal of even the most ill considered portions of President Bush’s tax cut. In an op-ed in The New […]

As we go to press, the prospect of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords switching parties has cheered despondent Democrats. However, it’s not clear where a party-switch free-for-all would end, since several maverick senators in both parties would be in play. Of course, having Tom Daschle as majority leader, and having the power to orchestrate hearings, could […]

Liberals confront the charge that we are anti-business. Modern liberals liketo strike a “third-way” pose of being pro-entrepreneur and pro-market whilesocially liberal on such issues as tolerance and the environment. Old-timeanti-corporate liberals, such as trade unionists and Naderites, are said to bestuck in a 1930s time warp. But every so often, politics offers a graphic […]

Of all the revelations in The New York Timesinvestigation of partisan favoritism in the counting of Florida’s overseas ballots, none was more galling than the new information on the role played by Gore and Lieberman. At a time when campaign strategists were pressing Florida election officials to disallow military ballots that lacked witness signatures or […]

T he nomination of defeated Missouri Senator John Ashcroft as attorney general will test whether Democrats will spend the next four years getting rolled. This is George W. Bush’s signature appointment, his thank-you gift to the far right. How bad is Ashcroft? This bad: He was one of three senators to sponsor the Human Life […]

Not long ago, the Democrats were taking comfort from their five-seat gain inthe Senate and their 50-50 tie. But the Senate, it’s now clear, is far from trulytied. On the John Ashcroft confirmation vote, Republicans held all their troops andeight Democrats defected, four of them northern liberals. On the outrageous voteto scrap new safety standards […]

Imagine that you’re Senator Tom Daschle. You have two somewhat conflicting goals. One is to block the worst parts of the Bush program, this year. The other is to move down the hall to the big office, the one that says Majority Leader instead of Minority Leader, probably in November 2002. You could get lucky, […]

P olitics, as Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley had it, ain’t beanbag. But lately the Republicans have been playing political hardball while too many Democrats play beanbag. Candidate George W. Bush managed to have it both ways, casting himself as a uniter but offering raw partisan rhetoric against the Democrats. During the debates, Bush kept […]

The first casualty of war is said to be truth, but more precisely the casualty is complexity. In war, there are Evil and Good, Enemies and Allies, a Them and an Us, conveniently spelled U.S. George Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Excoriating an enemy whose suicide bombers […]