69 articles
Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge's prospects for the GOP vice-presidential slot may have peaked this past week. The week before, Dole had been impressed by Ridge. "He's an awfully good man," Dole told an associate after they spent time together at the All-Star Game in Philadelphia. Dole's staff also…
Your Scrapbook item "Worried About Dole? Join the Crowd" (July 8 & 15) reports the breathtaking news that Bob Dole is having trouble making his own case. This follows some umpteen other reports in your magazine making the same point. Enough already!
The House GOP task force on reforming Congress came up with seven proposals as part of the onceballyhooed "Reform Week." But one of the proposals that probably won't be debated is a bill to deny pensions to members of Congress or staffers convicted of felonies while in office. Perhaps it is mere…
I did something recently I probably won't do again: I spent a weekend at Harvard Business School. My main reason for going was to see a set of friends while they're all in one place. But a small part of me wanted to go because my economic ignorance has occasionally prompted me to think I should go…
Bipartisanship is not dead! Congressmen Tom Lantos (a D from CA) and Jon D. Fox (an R from PA) have joined hands across the aisle to battle the scourge of . . . pet theft? Yes: Congress has finally decided to take this bull by the horns and consider the Family Pet Protection Act.
Matt Labash's report "ACT-UP vs. PETA: Clash of the Titans" (July 8 & 15) is an amusing portrait of two radical groups pouncing on each other. But Labash rightly portrays ACT-UP as in this instance on the side of the angels, or at least on the side of the humans. Advances in medical research, based…
During the Cold War, one's view of the appropriate goals of American foreign policy usually went hand in hand with one's notion of the proper level of spending on defense. Conservatives favored aggressive containment of the Soviet Union and wanted increased military spending. Liberals opposed…
Bob Dole, Haley Barbour, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and Gov. Mike Leavitt of Utah (former head of the Republican Governors Association) were against it. But House Republicans went ahead and won passage of a welfare reform bill, and the Senate is expected to follow suit. Dole fears President Clinton…
BETWEEN PREPARATIONS FOR traffic snarls, heat waves, and terrorist attacks, city officials in Atlanta had a lot to contend with during the week preceding the opening ceremonies at this summer's Olympic Games. Yet Mayor Bill Campbell and his wife Sharon still found time to organize and host what…
An idea-novel is not a novel of ideas; it's not even necessarily a novel. An idea-novel is the novel as conceptual art, the novel in which an idea the author has for structuring a book becomes the only meaning in the book, triumphing over theme, development, and even plot. In recent years,…
AT MONDAY STAFF MEETINGS of the Dole presidential campaign, no one tells Bob Dole any bad news. It's like politiburo meetings in the dying days of the Soviet Union, says a Dole strategist, with aides chiming in with reports that "tractor production is up 400 percent." One prominent Republican now…
The phenomenon of black anti-Semitism has for some years now been widely spoken of as "the problem" of blackJewish relations. That is a rhetorical diversion of the kind most commonly employed by liberals when they are referring to certain kinds of unpleasant behavior on the part of blacks in order…
Independence Day, this year's box-office blockbuster, is not a science- fiction movie, even though aliens figure in the plot. It's not a special- effects extravaganza, even though the startling image of the White House blowing up made Independence Day a cultural phenomenon six months before its…
So Susan Molinari will be the keynote speaker at this year's Republican convention, joining an august list of stem-winding luminaries including Harold Stassen, Mark Hatfield, Dan Evans (who?), Richard Lugar, Guy Vander Jagt, Katherine Davalos Ortega (who again?), and Tom Kean. In fact, in the last…
WHO SAYS THE Republican congressional leadship is brain-dead? Well, sure, a lot of peoe do, but the point is: those people are wrong.
Editor's Note: Harvey Mansfield, one of America's leading political scientists and a widely published author, will deliver the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, May 8, 2007. The annual NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture is the most…
AS GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS stepped to the mike, the young crowd whistled and cheered. "Because you voted in 1992," Stephanopoulos said, "there are more student loans for young people. Because you voted in 1992, there are fewer guns on the streets. Because you voted in 1992, we made efforts to clean…
It is difficult to mount a searching critique of liberal culture -- as Willard Gaylin and Bruce Jennings set out to do in The Perversion of Autonomy (Free Press, 270 pages, $ 25) -- when you are determined to say nothing that any liberal could take as critical. The authors, both associated with the…
"Liberty, liberty, what [crimes have been committed in your name!" went the cry as the tumbrels of the French Revolution lumbered toward the guillotine. In the two centuries since, the bloodthirsty appetite of revolution, no longer calling for liberty, has grown with each new scheme for…
POLL RESULTS ARE THE SHEET MUSIC of politics; to hear the melody you have to listen to voters talking. The poll numbers have shown Bill Clinton far ahead of Bob Dole, with Ross Perot picking up some votes from both when he's included. The polls tend to suggest the election is over.
HERE WE HAVE A FELLOW who has made $ 6 million since January off his first novel -- a novel that won nearly unanimous critical acclaim and sold more than one million copies, with another 1.5 million coming out in paperback. His book turned into a pop culture obsession on the order of "Who shot J.…
Two years after murdering his ex-wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman and eight months after being acquitted of those murders, O. J. Simpson recently made front-page news. He hosted his friend A. C. Cowlings, two former trial jurors, and various gang members and philanthropists at his Brentwood mansion…
The brutal clash between moderates and conservatives expected at the Republican national convention in August is already unfolding in Kansas. At stake is the Republican nomination for Bob Dole's Senate seat and a lot more. The outcome of the Kansas primary on August 6 will affect the mood in San…
Here's how Bob Dole wins the presidency: In October the average American looks at her TV's sees Bill Clinton, and says . . . yuk. She then turns to her husband and tells him that she just can't stand the thought of Clinton as president for the next four years, that their kids should grow up with a…
NO biographer or historian has yet quite captured the greatness of Charles de Gaulle. Daniel J. Mahoney's De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (Praeger, 188 pages, $ 45) takes a new approach. It is an extraordinarily penetrating and original study of de Gaulle as political…
This is an awful moment for Bob Dole. He has spent nearly all the money he legally can to win the nomination, and he's not yet permitted to start spending the money earmarked for the general election. To make his case, he must rely entirely on his own words -- and Bob Dole has never been good with…
Journalists like to think of themselves as skeptics, but when it comes to their own trade they lean toward romance. TV journalists are especially susceptible, since their particular subclass of the profession, where the reach can be so vast, the depth so shallow, and the pay so large, carries with…
FORMER FBI AGENT Gary Aldrich's scheduled appearance on the June 30 This Week with David Brinkley drove White House officials to the phones. Leon Panetta, the chief of staff, called Robert Murphy, vice president for news coverage at ABC, and urged him to cancel Aldrich. George Stephanopoulos…
"I HAD HOPED THAT WE WERE hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we had got was a strandeded whale." Thus, in typically pungent terms, did Winston Churchill assess the Allied landing at Anzio in early 1944, an operation marred by irresolute leadership and lost opportunities.
ASK TRENT LOTT WHETHER HE will do the job of Senate majority leader differently from Bob Dole, and he will invariably remark, "The torch has been passed but the flame is the same." This may be appropriately deferential toward Dole, but it's not entirely accurate: At the all-important staff level,…
On the evening of August 21, 1987, standing before a frenzied crowd of over 100,000 Peruvians jammed shoulder to shoulder in San Martin Plaza in Lima, the renowned writer Mario Vargas Llosa delivered an incendiary speech denouncing President Alan Garcia's proposed nationalization of Peru's banks,…
The question has puzzled everyone from Freud to Seinfeld, but Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, has finally determined What Women Want. And guess what? It's the feminist agenda. According to Ireland, women from all walks of life, of every disposition and…
MOST OBSERVERS OF RUSSIA'S historic presidential election on July 3 believed that Boris Yeltsin and his colleagues had made a dramatic bid for reelection and won. But Time magazine's ensuing cover story, "Yanks to the Rescue," by chief political correspondent Michael Kramer, and the ABC news…
LAST YEAR BILL CLINTON, liberally dispensing vetoes, triumphed in the battle of the budget -- yet the Gingrich revolutionaries just may be winning the war.
Animal-rights soirees usually go off without a hitch, like the Great American Meatout on Capitol Hill, where vegan activists try to convince congressional staffers that Fib Rib veggie sticks really are delicious. Sometimes Animal Rights people (call them AR for short) are nakedly aggressive, as…
HOW COULD THEY? How could mid-level Clinton White House officials have decided to search through the confidential FBI files of Republicans? How could senior White House staffers have tried to force a criminal investigation of seven hapless sivil servants after their firing from the travel office?…
PANDEMONIUM BROKE OUT at the White House on June 20 when Attorney General Janet Reno's decision to hand the Filegate investigation over to independent counsel Kenneth Starr was reported on CNN. The news shocked President Clinton and his aides. They hadn't a clue it was coming. leetngs on other…
These are heady days for the self-appointed disciplinarians of American politics. There's so much for them to do, many Republican and Democratic fannies to spank. Festering national problems demand commonsense, compromise solutions, you see. But our party politicians never come when they are called…
What writer, struggling at the keyboard, wouldn't want to be like Michael Lind? He is the Niagara Falls of the profession, a great big unstoppable torrent of words. Faster than most people can think, faster than anybody can research, Michael Lind produces a thundering flow of critique,…
IT WAS A STEREOTYPE CONSTRUCTED by friend and foe alike: Hillary Clinton was the smarter of the Clintons. She was the efficient one, he the charmer. She focused while he empathized. The stereotype allowed her admirers to elevate Hillary Clinton to the status of feminist icon, and her enemies could…
There's no denying how pleasurable academic success is -- sailing through childhood on the good ship lollipop of easy A's, fawning teachers, and proud parents. So pleasant an experience should be universal, no?
No, sir, it's not lost." "You can't find it?" "We don't know exactly --" "Then it's lost."
America's girls are said to face a grave threat: their schools. Word has it that hordes of sexual harassers prey on girls in classrooms and corridors; that teachers routinely ignore or mistreat them; that sexist textbooks degrade them; that gender-biased tests underrate them; and that the entire…
A FLURRY OF PUBLICITY about the supposed revelations in Roger Morris's Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America has obscured what the book really is. To be sure, Morris gives us some anonymous ex-spooks who claim young Bill Clinton was passing information to the CIA during his notorious…
PICKING THROUGH THE DROPPINGS of the Washington Post's campaign on behalf of Bob Woodward's new book The Choice, the strangest tidbit you will find concerns not the first lady's creepy cadre of New Age spiritual advisers but the commander in chief himself. Hillary Clinton may have talked to people…
The June 24 Saudi Arabian bombing led President Clinton to warn that "the cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished." If there is one act more predictable than the Pledge of Allegiance before school, it's the invocation of "cowardice" by U.S. presidents every time a bomb goes…
No image is more frequently seen on television than the United States Capitol. Day after day, night after night, it is there -- behind a reporter, a politician, an anchorman; in documentaries, sitcorns, and movies. Usually, the view is confined to the Capitol's massive dome. That is the picture…
Buckle your chin strap, America: The man they call "consumer-advocate Ralph Nader" is running for president. His party is the Green party, and last week he issued something of a manifesto in the pages of the Nation. Titled "A Voice, Not an Echo" (itself an evocation of Barry Goldwater's slogan in…
It is not voice that makes Roddy Doyle's novels run, though ever since his first -- The Commitments, a comic 1987 tale of a gang of poor Dublin kids trying to form an American-style soul band -- the Irish novelist has garnered praise for giving realistic modern voice to the poverty-stricken…
Unlimited Access, a new book by a retired FBI agent once assigned to the Clinton White House, is out this week from Regnery. Gary Aldrich's memoir will get widespread attention for the immediately relevant charges it features -- that the White House allowed staffers without proper security…
At a private Washington reception this past week, one GOP strategist was asked virtually the same question by three prominent Democrats: "When is Dole going to begin doing something?" One of the Democrats, a senior member of the White House staff, expressed amazement at how easy it had been for the…
Despite the apologies and [explanations for Fitegate -- "Inexcusable!" said Leon Panetta -- we know that senior officials inside the White House long knew about the illicit activity and did . . . nothing about it. Is that excusable, Mr. Panetta?
It wasn't supposed to be this way. As soon as the Republican victories of November 1994 made clear that Jesse Helms, fire-breathing senator from North Carolina, would be the next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, there were dire predictions: Helms would impair U.S. diplomacy. He would…
Remember the Steinberg cartoon, a New Yorker's view of America? It's time for a sequel, a Leftwinger's view of America, which would depict the country based on the geography of the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius" awards. This year, the activists at MacArthur selected four of the twenty-one winners…
The White House is so outraged by the misconduct of its personnel security chief, Craig Livingstone, that it is -- sending him on a vacation at taxpayer's expense. What else would you call "administrative leave with pay"? That's how Livingstone's boss, White House counsel Jack Quinn, described the…
A conceit of the modern age is that we're free and independent- thinking people who decide, wholly on our own, how to live our lives. Stereotype plays on this theme. One is the rebellion of children of conservative parents who transformed themselves into counterculture radicals in the 1960s.…
A conceit of the modern age is that we're free and independent-thinking people who decide, wholly on our own, how to live our lives. Stereotype plays on this theme. One is the rebellion of children of conservative parents who transformed themselves into counterculture radicals in the 1960s. Another…
A fund-raising appeal for the Republican National Committee's coffers has recently arrived in GOP mailboxes across the state of California. The pitch letter is printed on "Bob Dole" stationery. The hook, in classic direct-mail marketing fashion, is an "official 1996 Republican Party Campaign Issues…
WHEN BOB DOLE TRAVELED to Kentucky on June 13, he hoped to convey to the state's huge tobacco constituency that as president he would end the Clinton administration's war on nicotine. "To some people," Dole said, "smoking is addictive. To others, they can take it or leave it." These politically…
FOR THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN THE Liberal Media Conspiracy, the lead editorial that ran in the Washington Post on June 17 must have come as something of a surprise. Over the course of 600 sarcasm-laden words, the Post dismissed the notion that the White House had committed anything so innocuous as a…
The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. Right? Wrong. Nearly 70 percent of the Russian people voted against the Communist party in the first round of the Russian elections on June 16. The balloting proved free and fair, despite confident predictions of widespread government fraud by…
An attentive reader (whose name we have, alas, misplaced, so we urge him to write in again and tell us who he is) offers the following:
Three new contributing editors join us this week. Joseph Epstein, the literary critic and American Scholar editor who wrote our recent cover story on arts policy, will contribute a monthly essay beginning in September. David Gelernter, the polymath poet-painter-computer scientist-Yale professor…
REMEMBER ALL THE NEWS STORIES and columns from last year about how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer? Well, you can forget about them -- it isn't so.
Conservatives inside and outside the Senate were taken aback by the recent decision of the Senate Republican Steering Committee to name Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas as the replacement for the previous chairman, Larry Craig. When it was started, the Steering Committee was designed to be a forum for…
When the Southern Baptist Convention recently voted to censure the Disney Corporation, principally for offering health insurance coverage to the partners of gay employees, a spokeswoman for the convention explained the vote: "The Disney Company is not the same Disney that it was years ago when we…
Ice hockey is a Bob Dole kind of sport: It's about hard work; it's about small-town values; experience; whatever. Growing up in the New York exurbs, I became a New York Rangers fan, waiting on them year after year as they fumbled away every chance to repeat their Stanley Cup triumph of 1940. But I…
The six "Ashcan" artists painted New York City with headlong ardor and limited subtlety starting around the turn of the century; George Bellows, Robert Henri, and John Sloan are the big names. They petered out gradually in the wake of the 1913 Armory show, which introduced Americans to the Fauves…