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It’s been a long, exhausting week. If you’re like us, you may be having feverish nightmares about counting ballots and flashing electoral maps. And you wake up confused about the intricacies of Florida election law and the ramifications of “pregnant chads.” You keep listening to press conferences with Governor Bush’s many lackeys, and it seems […]

Chris Hansen-Nelson’s gray hair stands out in this crowd. Out of the six hundred or so Bill Bradley volunteers staying at the Nashua Boys and Girls club tonight, there are only a handful of veteran campaigners. Nelson came of age in 1972, the first year in which 18-year-olds were allowed to vote. “We were all […]

The Wall Street Journal Pundits have a host of explanations for why Bill Bradley’s and John McCain’s candidacies failed: Mr. Bradley failed to respond to Al Gore’s attacks; Mr. McCain blundered in attacking the religious right; Mr. McCain stole Mr. Bradley’s thunder; the public isn’t that interested in reform after all. The real explanation is […]

”Politics ain’t beanbag” — Finley Peter Dunne One of the many oddities of this cliffhanger election is what might be called the entitlement gap. Right from election night, the Republicans have behaved as if the election was theirs, while Vice President Gore has temporized. This sense of Republican entitlement in turn translates into a partisan […]

Snnnnnck. Out come the long knives, the jabbering classes urging Al Gore — now that the Supreme Court and a Florida circuit court have given him no love — to put country above self. Congressional Democrats leak that time is running out. “Last gasp for Gore,” The Boston Globe informs us; “Aura of Pessimism Pervades […]

After one of the emptiest political conventions on record, the stage is actually set for a very consequential November election. Though the Republicans did their best to camouflage it,theirs remains a highly conservative program. There really are enormous differences of substance between the two major candidates. If the election can be made to turn on […]

The London Observer Al Gore is finally on a roll. But where will it take him? This past week he’s been telling Americans ‘we’ve got to put you first’ and not ‘the ones with connections, the ones with wealth, the ones with power above and beyond what the average family has in this country’. He’s […]

Americans will be asking questions about the 2000 election for some time to come. Here are two big ones: How could the world’s most secure democracy have ended up with a balloting system in which millions of votes routinely get lost, miscounted, stolen, or spoiled? The premise seems to be: What the hell, it’s close […]

A funny thing happened to Al Gore on the way to his surprisingly effective acceptance speech. He became a liberal. The speech was as liberal as anything FDR or LBJ or Jesse Jackson or one of the Kennedys might have delivered. It was built around a commitment to fight for ordinary people, against large and […]