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 Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? In addition to writing for the Prospect, he writes for HuffPost, The Boston Globe, and The New York Review of Books.
Follow Bob at his site, robertkuttner.com, and on Twitter.
Recent Articles
Comment: Who Governs?
Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001W 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 won and Al Gore would be a usurper. For his part, the vice president has a fair case that, if voters' true intent can be measured, Florida is his. Gore also won the popular vote by more than 300,000. In our system, that doesn't count, but it does lend legitimacy. If Gore is denied the presidency, it will be because (1) the media created the premature sense that Bush was the rightful winner, (2) the Bush campaign effectively ran the clock on Gore, and (3) there was no clean way for the courts or anyone else to render a definitive ruling. But whoever takes office January 20, the opposition will insist that the wrong president was...
Comment: Drug Stupor
Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001The Democrats have had a pretty good month. President Bush has been unable to hold Republican legislators on an array of issues ranging from oil drilling to stem cell research. Particularly sweet was the Senate's passage of the patients-rights bill, with nine Republican defectors voting aye. The vote is awkward for the White House, which has threatened a veto that Bush doesn't really want to deliver, and it demonstrates that the managed-care industry isn't 10 feet tall. It also shows that Majority Leader Tom Daschle can play hardball--he refused to let the Senate recess for its Fourth of July break until Republicans consented to a final vote--and whets the Democrats' taste for more victories. As the Italians say, l'appetito viene mangiando: The appetite grows the more you eat. But though Democrats prevailed on the crucial and divisive issue of whether to allow patients to sue HMOs that deny necessary care, the bill is pretty weak tea. It allows doctors to order expensive treatments,...
Comment: How Would Gore Govern?
Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001W hat a pleasant surprise that Al Gore, having tried just about everything else, stumbled on the idea of running as a progressive. Maybe this shift was inevitable. Despite the appeal of centrism to elites, voters just do not elect Democrats to kiss up to business or dismantle government. They can get that, full strength, from Republicans. Voters elect Democrats to be champions of ordinary people. The success of Gore's shift is a double vindication for the likes of us. This magazine has long argued that Democrats don't get elected by repairing to the center on pocketbook issues. And we've repeatedly documented that most Americans are not sharing in the current boom. Even if average incomes are slightly up, economic security is down. You wouldn't notice this by talking to the donors and lobbyists who dominate American political life. But it's hard to miss if you talk to actual voters. Seemingly, the Democratic convention was a victory party for the Democratic Leadership Council. But...
Comment: Sequels Always Bomb
Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001Of all the revelations in The New York Times investigation 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 pre-election day postmarks, Lieberman appeared on Meet the Press and urged that military ballots be given "the benefit of the doubt." Only in the Times account, eight months later, did senior campaign officials pour out their rage, on the record, at Lieberman--and not for a single blunder but for a whole mentality. Gore, if anything, was worse. The Times quoted Joe Sandler, then the general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, recalling Gore's exact words: "If I won this thing by a handful of military ballots, I would be hounded by Republicans and the press every day of my presidency and it wouldn't be worth having." It...
Comment: The Great Obfuscator
Robert KuttnerDec 19, 2001President Bush's heavily choreographed decision to support "limited" stem cell research generated the desired headlines and TV commentary. He had anguished over the decision, we were told, and navigated a prudent course between zealous scientists who would play God and zealous traditionalists who claim a pipeline to God. Under Bush's guidelines, stem cell research can qualify for federal funding if it involves existing "lines" of privately developed embryonic stem cells. Others could not, but the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos can continue with private funding. Bush had carefully chosen a middle ground between, as he put it, the good and the good. This construct is, of course, nonsense. Bush has essentially let science policy be dictated by fundamentalist Protestant views about when life begins. (The Catholic hierarchy, which consistently opposes trifling with embryos under whatever auspices, lent cover to Bush's middle-ground charade by helpfully opposing his policy.)...
