78 articles
YOU WILL BE shocked to learn that architecture critic Paul Goldberger of the New York Times does not believe New York City ought to pine for its long-lost world's-tallest-building title. But it's lucky the Empire State Building wasn't constructed the way his argument is, or it would have collapsed…
Americans worry endlessly and admirably over the quality of our virtue as a people. We do it more and more these days, groping to account for the latest statistical or anecdotal indicator of decline. Here we seem too coarse with one another. There we seem too easy on ourselves as individuals. And…
Remember when everybody thought affirmative action as breathing its last? On Sept. 11, Congress reauthorized the Orwellian-sounding "Airport Improvement Program," which mandates that at least 10 percent of the companies operating at the nation's airports be owned by minorities or women. In so…
The recent news that the White House has used public funds to maintain a computer database of political supporters comes as no surprise, given this administration's continued inability to tell the difference between running for an office and holding one. What is surprising is the scope of the…
Nobody is going to accuse Ross Perot of being inconsistent in his choice of running mate. Pat Choate -- economist, xenophobe, former adviser to Pat Buchanan, and now the Reform party's candidate for vice president -- is as oblivious as Perot to the unseemliness of his associates as the man at the…
Jack Kemp told the Boston Globe that Louis Farrakhan's "self-help message" is "wonderful" and averted he "would have liked to have been invited to speak" at the Million Man March. Oh? What march was he talking about? The one where 40 percent of participants told the Washingon Post they had negative…
"If we lived in an even vaguely humane public environment," Newsweek columnist Joe Klein writes in that magazine's September 9 issue, "Dick Morris's private tragedy would be strictly off-limits?" But these days "trash that appears in Martians-stole-my-baby tabloids" quickly "moves up the media food…
As you might expect, there's turmoil in the Dole campaign. Last week, national chairman Don Rumsfeld was rebuffed by Bob Dole in his attempt to hire Ron Walker, who was Nixon's chief advance man. It seems Dole did not like the way the Nixon White House and campaigns conducted business, and wanted…
An entry in my journal of roughly five years ago reads: "I learned that my cholesterol count is a very fine 185. Must carefully cross all streets. It would be a shame to die with so splendid a cholesterol count." On the other hand, it might give my son a talking point at my memorial service. "My…
THE LATE ALAN BARON, the roly-poly political analyst and Washington raconteur who edified and amused the nation's political cognoscenti for two decades before his death in 1993, used to watch the slow atrophy of the national party conventions with sadness and pain. And he concluded there was only…
HIS YOUNG AUDIENCE KNEW Bill Clinton was talking about marijuana, but imagine for a moment that the soon-to-be president was referring instead to cigarettes in the 1992 forum he conducted with young people on MTV. Asked whether he would "inhale" given the chance to do it "over again," Clinton…
CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN HAVING a lot of fun with the Dick Morris affair. And far be it from me to be a spoilsport. It's hard to top a story with toe- sucking! prostitutes! and a love -- or is it lust? -- child! (Although Roger Stone has managed to top it with a story that makes Morris's sex life…
THERE'S A LITTLE NEWSPAPER STORE in my neighborhood my family and I have grown very fond of. It's the kind of place that brings memories of your own youth -- filled from floor to ceiling with comic books, miniature cars, whiffle balls, all the impossibly desirable amulets of childhood.
The extraordinary success of the PBS documentary series The Civil War lay in Ken Burns's ability to bring out the tragedy in that bloodbath. His film was a relentless chronicle of how good men butchered good men over the institution of slavery, with an omnipresent and anguished Lincoln, consumed…
In a speech to Trout Unlimited, Bruce Babbitt announced that he "would love to be the first Secretary of the Interior to tear down a really large dam." It looks like the secretary may get his wish. Congress in 1992 authorized the dismantling of two dams on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state.…
NESTLED IN THE MOUNTAINS of lush Vermont is a tiny town called Chittenden (pop. 1,102) that may soon become embroiled in a constitutional controversy. Like many small Vermont towns, Chittenden has no high school. Instead, its high school students are "tuitioned" by the town to the school of their…
THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE is more spectacularly "on-message" than any administration in memory. For example, every single person working there, from economist Gene Sperling down to the lowliest receptionist, has exactly the same worry about Bob Dole's proposed 15 percent tax cut: It will "blow a…
Like a pop-up target at a carnival shooting gallery, Robert S. McNamara has sharpened the literary marksmanship of writers and critics of the Vietnam war since the 1960s. And with publication last year of his sort-of apologia, In Retrospect, McNamara took as many hits from those on the left as on…
Everybody knows there is money to be made in lawsuits these days -- suits against breast implants, asbestos, Norplant, and the like. Fabulous riches to be made, amounting to billions of dollars for hard-working trial lawyers. So should it come as any surprise that this money has entered the…
As the Year 2000 approaches, so does an epic collision with technological shortsightedness. The impending disaster is already a hot topic in the world of high tech, but more of us should be paying attention. A coming computer crisis -- call it the Year 2000 Crisis -- says a great deal about the…
Several months ago, in an article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD called "The Radware: A Not-All-That-Modest Proposal," I suggested that conservatives should stop complaining about culture and do something about it: should create new institutions, starting with a museum. The museum's curators would dazzle…
Bill Clinton is serving up a grand feast of false accomplishments and just plain bull to his adoring fans at campaign rallies, thus giving new meaning to the old Ozark term "chutzpah."
I once had a bad day that lasted all of 1995. Admittedly, I was not diagnosed with a terminal disease, and no one died, but many other things just seemed to go wrong. There was the problem of men not calling me when they were supposed to. Then, I had to adjust to a hostile, foreign environment: I…
Everybody in Democratic Washington is very excited because the "right track- wrong track" numbers are heading Bill Clinton's way. For years, people have been telling pollsters they think the country is on the "wrong track," and it has always been deemed one of the most important numbers in polling…
One day in June, over a slice of strawberry cheesecake and a cup of decaf mocha cappuccino, Dr. John Hagelin told the Knight-Ridder news service that it "would be nice" if he could put every American in a deep trance. Literally. Hagelin, a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is the Natural Law…
The California Civil Rights Initiative, the anti-quota measure on the California ballot in November, continues to do well in the polls. It is even getting surprisingly friendly press coverage. A recent front-page article in the San Francisco Examiner, for example, profiled a 19-year-old southern…
It happens every four years -- a neologlsm is added to the American political vocabulary, usually put there by pollsters feeding a media hungry for nonsense terminology that will make them sound and feel like insiders. Remember when, in 1992, we learned about "rapid response" and the "narrowing" --…
THOUGH IT CHANGES LITTLE and solves nothing, the Clinton administration's decision to use force against Iraq last week was clearly the right one.
Bill Clinton was talking about his place in history with Dick Morris a few weeks ago in the Oval Office. They went over each of the presidents one by one, the Washington Post told us, to see where Clinton ranked. Clinton acknowledged with becoming modesty that he couldn't be in the top tier --…
One summer, on the cusp of middle age, Ann Kimmage traveled to Europe with her husband and two sons. On arrival in Prague, she switched immediately and naturally to Czech. Her sons gazed at her in astonishment. Clearly she had been there before. Could she explain? Thus did this American professor…
James Patterson's Grand Expectations is intriguing not as a work of history so much as a piece of history. It is the 1945-1974 volume of Oxford's History of the United States (829 pages, $ 35), and it reveals (like shale to a paleontologist) a tremendous lot about the world in which it was made. At…
Fraser, Michigan
FIRST STOP, SAN FRANCISCO. All is changed. Where one of my favorite cigar stores once stood, a construction crew is at work on a new NikeTown. Then to Los Angeles, and a stroll down Beverly Hills's posh Wilshire Boulevard. A mob scene, with four policemen organizing the eager customers into lines…
IN HIS AUGUST 11 SPEECH to the Reform party convention in Long Beach, California, H. Ross Perot said: "Never forget de Tocqueville's words when he studied our country. He said America is great because America is good. And if America ever ceases being good, America will cease being great."
Is BOB DOLE REALLY THAT SERIOUS about a big tax cut? Maybe not. Mike Murphy, the media consultant who left the campaign last week, proposed that Dole ride into Chicago during the Democratic convention aboard a train dubbed the Tax Cut Express. Dole could then have given a speech contrasting his 15…
WHAT A DIFFERENCE 12 months makes. A year ago, congressional Republicans were giddy over the prospects of passing $ 270 billion in Medicare savings, approving a budget that would come into balance by the year 2002, and revolutionizing the way Washington does business. Newt Gingrich's insurgents…
In July, the Cato Institute gave New York's George Pataki the highest rating of any governor in its biannual "Fiscal Report Card on America's Governors." A big win for the home team? You'd never know it by reading the New York newspapers. Neither the New York Times nor the Daily News made mention,…
Al Gore riveted the convention last week with the story of his sister Nancy's death from lung cancer and how it was caused by smoking. Nancy Gore Hunger died in 1984. In 1988, campaigning for the presidency in North Carolina, Gore had this to say: "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I…
All the speechifying, delegate traffic, and media oversaturation -- What Does It All Mean? For an answer on the convention floor, we gingerly approached the man who brought new meaninglessness to the word "meaning" when he coined the phrase "the politics of meaning" -- yes, Michael Lerner himself,…
We thought it couldn't get worse than San Diego, but since the Democratic convention was probably the worst American history, THE WEEKLY STANDARD has decided to give out the same prizes we did in San Diego -- the coveted Treacly Awards! (Hint: They're dominated by Al Gore.)
It's lonely these days for members of Bill Clinton's cabinet. Nobody wants their campaign advice, and they weren't invited to address the convention either. So they endured the ennui of Chicago by holding forth over breakfast or lunch with reporters. Interior secretary Bruce Babbitt allowed as how…
Mario Cuomo told the conventioneers that you couldn't do "anything better for a poor kid than what you did for a poor kid from New York City called Colin Powell, and that is give him a good public school." Here's a way to do better: Why not let a poor kid choose the nearest parochial or private…
Remember all those vicious personal attacks on Hillary Clinton at the Republican convention in San Diego by speaker after speaker? Speaker after speaker at the Democratic convention seemed to. "Stop attacking the president's family," Democratic chairman Chris Dodd declared indignantly. Al Gore even…
"There's a big market out there," said Bill Bradley last Tuesday, "for people who want straight talk about race -- for people who want to realize the full extent of their humanity." Humanity-extent realization has been Bradley's stock in trade ever since he announced his retirement last year. And…
A few mischievous souls at the big Comedy Central party on the first night of the convention were walking around with urine-specimen containers labeled: "Reelect Clinton/Gore '96, Just Say No to White House Drug Abuse." One reporter made a beeline for a profusely sweaty Roger Clinton, who has not…
When all five female Democratic senators spoke before the convention Wednesday night, we were disappointed they didn't follow the lead of Republican senators Lott, Ashcroft, Craig, and Jeffords. The men, you may recall, took off their jackets in San Diego and sang the Oak Ridge Boys' " Elvira." We…
Had there never been so much as a hint of sordid sex-play involving President Clinton's now-departed chief strategist, Dick Morris would still be the biggest news from the Chicago Democratic convention. And the story would still be a scandal.
Bob Dole's strategists would do anything to get inside information on which states the Clintonites hope to contest and which they have already written off. Well, look no further. We figured it out: Just study the floor map of their convention.
For all the media moaning about too-tightly scripted conventions, one needed only visit peripheral events like "Women Win '96, A Fund-Raising Celebration for Democratic Women" to witness the dangers of flying blind. All five female Democratic senators turned out on the afternoon of Aug. 26 to honor…
Chicago
Chicago
Terrorism has been quietly emerging as an issue in the race between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. Dole portrays the president as insufficiently wary of the world's rogue states. Soon, though, Clinton will have handy ammunition -- when the Senate approves a chemical weapons treaty endorsed by the…
JESSE JACKSON CAME TO THE END of his prepared speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago last week and decided to keep on talking. Veering from the text, Jackson launched without warning into an account of his father's brushes with racism during the Second World War. In Jackson's telling,…
AT THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION, Bob Dole pledged to cut income taxes by 15 percent, balance the budget, and leave Social Security and Medicare untouched. Tough-minded reporters believed none of it and shared their skepticism with a national television audience. Two weeks later, the Democrats met in…
Chicago
By any typical measure, Mary Kay Zuravleff's The Frequency of Souls (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages, $ 23) is not a very good book. A tale of love, death, and refrigerators, this short first novel by a thirty- six-year-old former editor at the Smithsonian is not so much full of holes as full…
A friend who has taught college-level creative writing tells me that whenever he chastises his students for having written something outlandish, or flat, or discordant, they resort to the same disclaimer: "But that's the way it really happened!" Which leads him to explain with a sigh that for three…
I would think that it is not just contrariness on my part that makes me wince, these days, on hearing talk of civil society. Liberals and conservatives, communitarians and libertarians, Democrats and Republicans, academics and politicians appeal to civil society as the remedy for our dire…
In retrospect, it was merely a matter of time before Tom Hayden would finally proclaim himself an Indian. For a quarter century or more, Indians have been Hayden's favorite people -- equaled in his affections for only a few years by the Communist Vietnamese. But whereas Communist imperfections…
Chicago
Mario CUOMO'S SPEECH Tuesday night fell far short of his performance in 1984. Its impact on the convention floor was dwarfed by Jesse Jackson's oration a few minutes earlier. But Cuomo, more than any other speaker last week, did succeed in highlighting a fundamental difference -- perhaps the…
Stan Kenton had a grand ambition. He wanted to transform jazz into the modern equivalent of classical music. Over the years, Kenton wandered down one blind and tone-deaf alley after another in search of his new musical paradigm. Even before he had figured out what he wanted his new highbrow music…
It was meltdown time in Republican World after THE DAILY STANDARD (a mini- version of this magazine we put out only in San Diego at the Republican convention and will issue in Chicago this week as well) broke the story that Dan Quayle intended to use prolife language in his convention speech. When…
Intellectuals love to talk about what an emotional medium television is, but it's hard to know exactly what they mean until you meet people who watch a lot of it. I finally understood one day this March when I went on a political show to discuss Ross Perot. During the program I made the point -- in…
Since Bob Dole proposed his economic plan, we've seen a resurgence of a hoary journalistic genre: the "most economists" story. In the current iteration, a journalist in question -- Richard Stevenson of the New York Times or, most notoriously, Clay Chandler of the Washington Post -- reports that…
If the media have wanted you to know one thing about the campaign lately, it's this: Bob Dole's post-convention "bounce" in the polls doesn't mean much. This has always been true of such "bounces" -- that they can be artificial and short-lived -- but opinion-makers have bent over backwards to…
On the final evening of the Republican national convention in San Diego, just before that business about someone accepting the party's nomination for the presidency of the United States, four distinguished senators shed their suit jackets to harmonize an a cappella barbershop version of "Elvira" in…
As Bill Clinton accepts his party's presidential nomination, he will look over a sea of liberal delegates who are 66.8 percent white, 18.9 African American, 9 percent Latino, 3 percent Asian-Pacific, and 1.4 percent Native American. A quick check of voting patterns also shows that the composition…
ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 15, 1996, two amazing events occurred. The first was the speech Bob Dole delivered at the Republican National Convention in San Diego accepting his party's nomination for president of the United States.
LUCKY BOB DOLE. Since President Clinton has just published a campaign book, Between Hope nd History, Dole's new book on his plan to cut taxes is sure to get prominent display in bookstores, right next to Clinton's. The biggest problems for Dole advisers were deciding whether to publish the book as…
In his multivolume Story of Civilization, Will Durant tells the tale of a young English nobleman who was a favorite at the court of Elizabeth I. Once when he was presenting himself to the queen, he bowed with elaborate obeisance -- and inadvertently broke wind. So utterly consumed with…
Unlike its sister disciplines, classical music has been spared a fixation on politics. Paintings and sculptures may be more political than artistic, and novels and poems more political than literary. But music, dwelling in its otherworld of notes and modulation and rhythm, has been able to sail on.…
Near the end of the 1992 campaign, Paul Begala, a Clinton adviser, said that Marlin Fitzwater was the most political White House press secretary in American history. Four years later, Republicans have decided that line has a nice ring to it.
President Clinton has published a new book, Between Hope and History: Meeting America's Challenges for the 21st Century (Times Books, $ 16.95). By all accounts, it had a remarkably brief gestation, a few months from conception to birth. You can't blame him for wanting to get it out as quickly as…