Features

We live in an upside-down world where Republicans defend deficits and Democrats attack them. These are seemingly opposite views. But both have led, mistakenly, to cuts in social investment as well as to needlessly slow economic growth and high unemployment. For years Republicans tried to slay Keynesian economics, the idea that in an economic downturn, […]

The Bush administration has been at times dangerously ambiguous in its policy toward North Korea. With a second round of six-party talks likely for early 2004 and North Korea’s nuclear program chugging along, the upcoming debate on Capitol Hill over a new bill, the North Korea Freedom Act, may well be pivotal in pushing U.S. […]

Observers marveling at President George W. Bush’s ability to push a radical agenda through a closely divided Congress have tended to attribute the administration’s success to the impressive party discipline within the Republican congressional caucus. And impressive it is — both historically and, especially, in comparison to the anarchic behavior of the Democrats during the […]

Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures By Tyler Cowen, Princeton University Press, 179 pages, $27.95 In a short story by the late William Maxwell, an American named John Reynolds takes his family to Le Mont-Saint-Michel 18 years after his magical first visit. Their hotel is bland, the food mediocre and they are […]

We confess. It’s all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation’s most august publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his integrity, smeared his family, invaded his privacy, […]

In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington By Robert Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, Random House, 448 pages, $35.00 In 1992 the incoming Clinton administration had, broadly speaking, two strategic options for domestic policy. The first was a double-or-nothing “social democracy” strategy. Federal spending at the time was running at 22 percent […]

In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices From Wall Street to Washington By Robert Rubin and Jacob Weisberg, Random House, 448 pages, $35.00 If a Democratic president gets to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan when the latter’s term is up in 2006, Bob Rubin is the odds-on favorite. He has the financial credentials: Goldman-Sachs, U.S. […]

An undisclosed location, Va. — From the outside, the headquarters of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign is completely unremarkable — so unremarkable that passersby have no way of knowing it’s even there. Through the tinted windows of the Arlington office tower where the headquarters is lodged, people shuffling papers can be glimpsed as through a glass […]

And now, as candidates and journalists shake the New Hampshire snows off their boots and the primary process heads south, we can look forward to a spate of media stories raising the question of whether any Democratic presidential candidate can effectively compete in the 11 southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North […]

How to balance northern and southern strategies is as central a challenge for the national Democratic Party in the 2000s as it was for the Republicans in the 1960s and ’70s. The irony is that some of the same tactical considerations apply — at least if one reverses regionalisms. Three decades ago, the GOP’s obvious […]