In May of 2004, Paul Rivera had an idea. His proposal, based on his experience working in three previous presidential contests: Put staff in every market where Hispanic and African American voters were important and spend $1 million to test different base-vote mobilization strategies so that by July, the best one could be implemented and […]
Features
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Winning by Losing Well
The torrent of bad legislation coming out of Washington won’t end anytime soon: an appalling budget; a throw-grandma-from-the-train Social Security proposal; hair-raising judicial appointments; bankruptcy, environmental, and tort-“reform” bills written by and for corporate patrons; and shredding what’s left of the safety net. Here’s the trillion-dollar question for national liberal organizations and the Democratic Party: […]
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Dear Leader’s Paper Moon
“[The Reverend Sun Myung] Moon’s speeches foresee an apocalyptic confrontation involving the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and North and South Korea, in which the Moon Organization would play a key role. Under these circumstances, the subcommittee believes it is in the interest of the United States to know what control Moon and his followers […]
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Disorder in the Court
On May 12, leading lights of the conservative movement threw a gala banquet at the Capital Hilton in Washington to honor House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in his moment of need. After dessert and a closing invocation by Family Research Council head Tony Perkins, the crowd of almost 800 rose up and began shuffling out […]
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The Chauffeur’s Dilemma
Let’s consider our political moment through a story. Suppose a chauffeur drives a sleek limousine through the streets of New York, a millionaire in the backseat. Through the window, the millionaire spots a homeless woman and her two children huddling in the cold, sharing a loaf of bread. He orders the chauffeur to stop the […]
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Pray and Tell
On May 13, 2004, as the world media were in full scrum over Abu Ghraib, an FBI agent who had spent time interviewing terrorism suspects at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, fired off a gloomy e-mail to a colleague. Venting about what had happened in Iraq and expressing his fears that, despite […]
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The DeLay Wannabes
Amid all the turmoil over House ethics rules and Tom DeLay’s expanding assortment of scandals, the embattled majority leader’s Republican minions quickly resorted to the old “everybody does it” defense. “The things that Tom has been criticized about in one way or another every member of Congress could be criticized about,” declares Majority Whip Roy […]
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Labor’s Civil War
By harold meyerson On Tuesday, May 3, 167 of the AFL-CIO’s 426 employees reported to work to find that their positions had been eliminated. Whole divisions were being scrapped, publications abolished, programs terminated. Some departments were being consolidated, and 61 new positions being created within them, but the house that Federation President John Sweeney had […]
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Best in Show
On May 2, 2005, Tony Blair’s government will begin its ninth year of running the United Kingdom. That tenure makes Blair the nation’s longest-sitting Labour leader in the history of his party, and one of the longest of any party in the modern history of the nation. Indeed, Blair, who turns 52 on May 6, […]
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Big-Think Central
In adopting neoconservatism as its grand strategy, the Bush administration took a breathtaking gamble. It broke from the conventional foreign-policy wisdom of both parties, cleaving to an aggressive but idealistic new vision of America’s role in the world. The strategy would either succeed spectacularly, touching off the promised domino effect of freedom in the Middle […]
