72 articles
When the Secret Service closed off Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House last year, rollerbladers immediately claimed the abandoned roadway as their own. Entirely predictable -- roaches do the same thing to vacant apartments. Now two Washington architects, Doug Michels and James Allegro,…
Following the success of the Million Man March in October, Louis Farrakhan announced the formation of a "third political power" in American politics to elect candidates who have "the interests of our people and the poor and the vulnerable of this nation" at heart.
Bill Clinton calls it "outrageous." Because of Republican opposition, Felix Rohatyn asked that his name be withdrawn from consideration for the post of vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Press secretary Mike McCurry told reporters that attacks on Rohatyn are "based mostly . . . on…
Republicans have been doing a lot of snarling against the United Nations in the past year. And Republican congressional leaders are promising to translate this mood into legislation over the next few months. Some of the energy on these issues reflects legitimate concerns. A lot of it surely is…
What's next in Congress? An answer may not come until the end of March. That's when congressional Republicans are planning to convene in Philadelphia to consider their policy agenda. The goal of the Philadelphia conference, says a House leadership aide, is" to "remind people why they voted for…
The thaw has set in here in Washington, D.C., and it looks like we can resume lollygagging through life. We had another snowstorm a couple of weeks back. Well, not a storm exactly -- more like seven inches of pretty, powdery snow, barely enough to keep a third-grader in Duluth from skateboarding to…
When National Endowment for the Humanities president Sheldon Hackney launched his new initiative, "A National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity," he was throttled like a red-headed pifiata. "He thought it would be apple pie," a former NEH staffer says, "but it was P.R. winter."
EVERY NOW AND THEN, the Washington Post runs a series that plucks at the strings of Beltway hearts. Inevitably, these series distill the collective wisdom of the capital's political elites -- sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes an instructive mixture.
The Reading List is still on strike, pending your collective advice on whether to keep it or not. (The answer: Next week.) This week, however, let us commend to you a new book, just out in paperback from Vintage Books. Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing is an anthology edited and…
The United States has a fantastically complicated system of immigration law. It provides for more new residents each year than occur in all the rest of the world's nations combined. America also has sizable illegal immigration, which creates serious practical problems for those few states in which…
RALPH REED IS A MAN WITH A STRATEGY. For the past few years, the executive director of the Christian Coalition has been trying to integrate religious conservatives into the Republican mainstream. That way Christian conservatives wouldn't just wield influence on one or two issues, like abortion and…
THE REACTION TO NEWS that Bill Clinton's lawyers had just received a check for $ 891,000 from an insurance company to pay the president's defense bills in the sexual harassment suit brought against him by Paula Corbin Jones was entirely typical. It was party time on talk radioshosts and callers…
Former Nevada Republican senator Paul Laxalt used the Manchester Union Leader to lay into Steve Forbes the morning after the Iowa caucuses. Forbes's sin? Running ads showing Ronald Reagan warmly applauding Forbes's efforts as an executive for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. "Shame on him,"…
THERE'S A THRILL GAP IN THE REPUBLICAN presidential race. Bob Dole and Lamar Alexander attract plenty of press but not many voters excited to see and hear them. Dole took no chances on the day of the Iowa caucuses. He spoke to captive audiences at two insurance companies. Still, the crowds sat on…
ON NOVEMBER 30, PERUVIAN national police squadrons converged on a villa in the suburbs of Lima after they were told it might be a safe house for the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru -- one of the two terrorist organizations that have plagued the country for the past dozen years. The occupants…
ome time in the last 30 years, liberals and conservatives switched places in the poverty debate. It is conservatives -- market Republicans and new Democrats -- who are now most optimistic about incorporating the poor into main-stream America. Meanwhile, traditional liberals -- like Herbert Gans,…
Where was Nicholas Eberstadt when I needed him?
In a rude time, the notion of American "exceptionalism" has been spun on its axis on campuses and in other closets of higher social criticism. In such precincts, America is portrayed as exceptional usually for its racism and sexism, its economic and social inequities, the scope of its flaws.
IN A LEAD STORY LAST MONTH in the Wall Street Journal, Gerald Seib argued that President Clinton's electoral fate now hangs on the gender gap. " There have, of course, been gender gaps in past elections," wrote Seib, "but today the gap appears to be widening into a chasm." He cited a December 1-5 $…
Not long ago, health-care reform was almost fatally wounded by association with one of the greatest domestic-policy bellyflops in American political history: the Clinton "Health Security Act" of 1994.
People don t usually rap on my car window at red lights, so I was a little startled when, on my way to work a few months ago, I turned to find a man peering in at me and mouthing what seemed to be an urgent message. "My car got towed," he said once I'd rolled down the window. "Can you help me?" The…
It's not true that Bob Dole lacks a message in his presidential campaign; actually, he has two. It depends on who gets to Dole last -- will it be his campaign staff, or his Senate aides? When Dole addressed the National Governors Association on February 6, Senate staffers drafted his conciliatory,…
Blazing his way through Louisiana in early February, Pat Buchanan reinvented himself yet again. His ambition, he told crowds, was to be, we're not kidding, "a Huey Long for the '90s." (Apparently "Franco for the '90s" didn't click with focus groups.) It's a curious aspiration for a conservative…
A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY is the hobgoblin of little minds. So said Ralph Waldo Emerson back in 1841. Perhaps so. But when two major newspapers change their opinions 180 degrees without offering any acknowledgment of their earlier views or any explanation for the change, one has to wonder if there…
A blurb on Ben Wattenberg's book Values Matter Most reads: "It is a lucid look at the major 'hot button' issues, including welfare, and constructively breaks out of the usual liberal-conservative mindset." Who wrote that? E. J. Dionne? One of the Beyond Left and Right thinkers from the Democratic…
The Republican Congress has attracted a lot of enemies, but none so visceral as two old Nixonians, Kevin Phillips and Herbert Stein. A recent Phillips broadside in the Los Angeles Times called the current Congress the worst in half a century; things would only improve, he said, when Newt Gingrich…
The Reading List is, it must confess, tired. Week after week, coming up with book after book, and trying hard not to make too many mistakes has taken a toll. Even its deliberate errors are probably too easy: In only a few days, it has received several missives (including one from noted legal…
That scene in Casablanca -- you know the one we mean -- is such a journalist's cliche that we were not shocked, so to speak, when a search of the Nexis news database for the words "shocked, shocked" returned a stern warning from the Nexis gods: "Your search has been interrupted because it probably…
The intellectual phenomenon called "anti-anti-communism" ought to be dead by now, along with the system that the anti-Communists successfully dele- gitimized even as the anti-anti- Communists were doing their worst to delegitimize them. But an essay in the December 18 issue of the New Yorker…
Last week on Friends, the NBC situation comedy that has launched a thousand magazine covers, the star-crossed friendship between the cute nebbish Ross (David Schwimmer) and the adorable Jewish-American princess Rachel ( Jennifer Aniston) finally erupted into romance after almost two seasons of…
In 1991, as the novelist Barbara Kingsolver marched outside the Tucson federal building to protest America's involvement in the Persian Gulf war, a man sped by in a pickup truck and screamed, "Hey Bitch, love it or leave it!" Kingsolver, whose anti-war animus had already driven her to rip yellow…
John Updike is an odd duck among novelists: a bourgeois golfer, a non- dove during Vietnam, a conservative who writes beautifully about sex, and, most of all, a believer. "I was, by upbringing, a Lutheran," he wrote in his 1989 memoir, Self-Consciousness. "Faith alone, faith without any false…
THE DAY AFTER his State of the Union address, President Clinton rose early to attend a memorial service at St. John's Church across Lafayette Square from the White House. Clinton gave one of the eulogies to a loyal friend, former House member Mike Synar of Oklahoma. Cancer -- the same kind that…
With congressional Republicans unsure if they will ever be able to declare a clear victory over the White House in the budget battle, they're now hoping to use welfare reform as a means of highlighting President Clinton's govern- left, run-right strategy. On February 1, the House Republican…
Barnstorming high above Congress in the limitless political sky of his State of the Union, his white scarf trailing in the warm wind of recent poll results, the president makes an unassisted plane-to-plane transfer. His rickety "big government" turbo-prop spins out of sight. And suddenly a…
This week I received in the [mail an invitation to a book party. I hesitate to go, for, you see, I was a book partygoer in the glory days, back when going to a book party meant something -- namely that you were going to have to squeeze by Norman Mailer if you were going to make it to the bar.
WHEN BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL of Colorado was elected to the Senate in 1992, he quickly became a darling of the national Democratic party. As the first person of Native American descent to serve as a senator, and someone who had spent part of his youth in an orphanage, he seemed to embody the…
Americans may be tired of politics, but you'd never know it from the sales of a book released last month called The Buying of the President.
NOT LONG AGO, A UNIVERSITY'S graduation rate was interesting only to professional educators. It was rarely discussed. It was a bit of information neither trivial nor profound; it was simply a statistic.
The extraordinary rise of Steve Forbes was entirely predictable. We know this to be true, because almost everyone predicted it over the past year -- even though none of us knew we were doing so.
So sorry, but the big contest is over, and nobody won. In the January 29 Reading List, you were asked to uncover an error in a list of books featuring ghosts (in honor of Hillary Clinton's unindicted co-author of It Takes a Village). In the plot description of Wuthering Heights, we said that "…
PRIMARY COLORS HAS OBSESSED Washington, especially its Democrats, for the last week or two. Not only because it's a roman a clef of the 1992 Clinton campaign, or because its author's identity is unknown -- but because the very people it's supposed to be about are vouching for its verisimilitude.…
Simple logic made a Republican presidential victory look almost inescapable. The incumbent Democrat, elected with a minority of the vote, had never come close to pleasing most of the electorate. His poll numbers were terrible. His domestic program, built around a cumbersome health-care scheme, had…
It has always been difficult to determine if the people at United Colors of Benetton are incredibly naive or incredibly cynical. Do they think they are making brave statements with their advertisements -- gays wearing tattoos, black men in chains, a company director standing naked to protest NATO…
Now we know why O. J. never took the stand. It seems Ron and Nicole weren't his only victims. As evidenced in Simpson's hour-long interview with BET the other week, he is free to maul the English language as well. A partial guide:
HOW is it that kids in Communist China don't seem to have time for much of anything but reading, writing, and arithmetic, while we Americans are the ones with the luxury of exploring the communal classroom, the intricacies of self-esteem training, and the blessings of outcomes-based education?
What makes a movie a sentimental classic? It certainly doesn't have to be an artistic achievement, a work that advances the form. Think of some of the Hollywood perennials -- Casablanca, say, or Gone With the Wind. At their core, they are as preosterous as any romance novel, featuring tortuous…
Many second-tier GOP presidential campaigns have been waiting desperately for the United States Secret Service to ride to their rescue -- not for protection for their candidate, but because the Secret Service actually helps pay for campaign charter planes. The campaigns were hoping that the Secret…
Anyone who wants to know why "Europe" doesn't work very well when the United States refuses to call the shots can consult the last chapter of David Owen's Balkan Odyssey (Harcourt Brace, 389 pages, $ 25), a personal account of the ups and downs of European diplomacy in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995. To…
REAGANITES, we called ourselves -- and though we came in many different guises and had many different obsessions, we shared one pre-dominant quality throughout the 1980s: We were proudly unyielding, immune to compromise. We considered ourselves at war -- against the Soviets on the march around the…
David Owen, the co-author of the famously unimplemented Vance-Owen Peace Plan for Bosnia, has got a good thing going with Misha Glenny, the well- known author/journalist and expert on Bosnia. First, Glenny, in his The Fall of Yugoslavia a couple of years ago, had nothing but kind words for Owen's…
From It Takes a Village, p. 59: "It has become fashionable in some quarters to assert that intelligence is fixed at birth, part, of our genetic makeup that is invulnerable to change, a claim promoted by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein in their 1994 book The Bell Curve. This view is…
Frank Luntz, the GOP pollster, is frightened. Very frightened. On the back cover of Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg's 1995 book, Middle Class Dreams, Luntz tells readers just how frightened he is of his Democratic counterpart: "Stan Greenberg scares the hell out of me. He just doesn't have a…
We are all cultural conservatives now. In his State of the Union address this year, Bill Clinton borrowed a notion from the Promise Keepers, the evangelical men's group, that a father's checkbook will never be a substitute for a father's love. He endorsed school uniforms and attacked the decadent…
Hillary Clinton made a startling admission last week on her book tour. The first lady told audiences that she's been defending herself from bullies -- like Whitewater inquisitor Sen. Alfonse D'Amato -- since her childhood days on the mean streets of Park Ridge, Illinois, a small, upscale suburb 35…
MAYBE I'M SLOW. But it wasn't until a conversation with my friend Bob that I realized how ideological American sports have become. Bob asked if I'd been to the Washington Redskins football game the day before. Nope, I answered, I gave away my tickets and went to the University of Virginia soccer…
Maybe I'm slow. But it wasn't until a conversation with my friend Bob that I realized how ideological American sports have become. Bob asked if I'd been to the Washington Redskins football game the day before. Nope, I answered, I gave away my tickets and went to the University of Virginia soccer…
California governor Pete Wilson recently took one of the most controversial stands of his career -- and it had nothing to do with illegal aliens or affirmative action. Since last summer, Wilson has refused to accept a $ 42 million education grant from the federal government. Although the money has…
If Phil Gramm's presidential bid fails, political coroners might fix its demise at his meeting last summer with Steve Forbes. With the publisher mulling his own White House run, here was Gramm's chance to listen, to sound themes Forbes wanted to hear, to consolidate support.
There was almost universal dismay -- and some glee in other campaigns -- in Republican circles last week about Bob Dole's response to Bill Clinton's State of the Union. The dismay had little to do with the substance, but much to do with the performance: Dole looked by turns nervous, old, halting,…
ON JANUARY 4, THE FRONT PAGE of the Los Angeles Times extolled a string of untold Cold War successes of the Central Intelligence Agency. Reporter James Risen dwelt especially on one feat of "American bravery," when CIA agents installed eavesdropping equipment in tunnels and sewers below Moscow. It…
Too many of you figured out the deliberate error in the Jan. 22 Reading List to list names here -- indicating that it was really an easy one. Yes, as you guessed, Rover was not the name of the dog in Call of the Wild. It was Buck.
London
The era of bg government s over. With these words, in his State of the Union address, Bill Clinton announced the surrender of modern liberalism and conceded victory to conservatives. We win.
Ahundred and fifty years ago, James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, published an immense history of India, a country he'd never visited and whose languages he did not speak. Mill intended to expose to his readers the ignorance and backwardness of Indian culture; what he exposed instead was…
Disagreement is not a very easy thing to reach," observed John Courtney Murray. The act of disagreeing with a philosophical adversary requires an almost heroic selfiessness, a willingness to dissect your own world view to its very essence; after all, honest and genuine disagreement can only occur…
When Phil Donahue called a halt to his show the other week after nearly 29 years, he was almost universally lauded as the elder statesman of television talk. The man who pioneered the confessional talk-show almost three decades ago -- where guests willingly exhibited every imaginable emotion and…
In a crime-beleaguered age that cries out for both tougher crime control and greater personal responsibility, the new book by New York Judge Harold J. Rothwax carries a title that is sure to be greeted with public approval -- Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice (Random House, 238 pages, $ 22).…