Features

Let’s get one thing straight right from the get-go. We would rather be last in reporting returns than be wrong… . If we say somebody has carried a state, you can pretty much take it to the bank, book it that that’s true. –Dan Rather, CBS News, early evening, November 7 We’ve always said, you […]

As the U.S. Senate gears up for a vote this spring on the campaign finance reform bill drafted by Arizona Republican John McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russell Feingold, it would do well to consider a lament from one of its recent escapees: “Today’s campaigns function as collection agencies for broadcasters,” Bill Bradley observed a few […]

There are basically two kinds of New Hampshire voters. The first kind–not very different from those in the rest of the country–is represented by Frank Claik, a local dignitary from Littleton, who recently shook hands with George W. Bush. Claik is a former Democrat who switched parties out of disgust with Bill Clinton; he now […]

T he presidential debates this year were a failure by the standard we use to measure our public entertainments: their ratings were abysmally low. It was not really the candidates’ fault. Boredom with elections is one of the luxuries of our time. Not only have long prosperity and a seemingly unthreatened peace lulled us into […]

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 […]

For the record, John Anderson, the 77-year-old former Illinois congressman last seen vying for the presidency in 1980 as a third-party candidate, is not running for the Reform Party nomination this year. But that hasn’t stopped his diehard supporters from creating www.draftanderson.org. They’re serious. Indeed the campaign is moving forward with all sincerity, boasting a […]

A s more Americans become disengaged from politics, America’s political class has declared civil war. The 2000 election is a case in point. Prior to election day, it was dull, lifeless, and tightly scripted. The candidates fulminated over their differing versions of prescription drug benefits. Half of America’s eligible voters didn’t even bother voting. After […]

V oting turnout is very likely to decline again this year. Some of the decline reflects the fact that both candidates are widely seen as boring. But dwindling voter interest also represents a long-term trend. In this issue of the Prospect, “Rousing the Democratic Base” by Robert Dreyfuss underscores what political scientists have long observed: […]

T he electoral college is a constitutional time bomb that has been ticking for more than a century. It finally exploded on election day. Unkind as it is to say so–hasn’t Al Gore suffered enough?–it’s only fitting that it blew up in the Democrats’ face. The explosion, of course, was Gore’s apparent loss to George […]

Before the election, I wrote in this column that “several possible squeaker scenarios could produce some strange political dynamics after November 7” [TAP, November 6, 2000]. Of course, I had no idea just how strange the outcome would be, though I started off with the possibility of “one candidate winning the electoral college and another […]