64 articles
After a brief intermission, we now return to our coverage of the co- dependent relationship between Jack Kemp and supply-sider Jude Wanniski. In an October 11 memo, Wanniski applauded the debate performances of Bob Dole in Hartford and Kemp in St. Petersburg. "The instant polls taken after both…
You don't have to be a right-winger to agree with Bob Dole that America used to be better. That elderly hippie Dr. Benjamin Spock, apostle of disarmament, macrobiotics, daily meditation, and weekly group therapy, was himself an eyewitness to the time of "tranquility, faith and confidence and…
On October 15, Bob Dole gave a major speech in California attacking Bill Clinton's character. The next day's Washington Post reported it atop the front page. But the New York Times buried its story about the speech on page A15, choosing instead to run not one, but two news analyses about the speech…
Move over, Socrates, Cicero, and Cato; make room for Bob Dole. He joined these classical masters of rhetoric during the debates by employing a favorite tactic of theirs: It's called praeteritio (translation: "the process of passing over"). The speaker promises not to mention something, but by…
Andrew Ferguson's recent evisceration of focus groups, another of the fine frauds of our day, is but the opening shot in a war I believe we must wage to the bitter end -- a war on the word "focus" itself.
It's been a rough couple of months for supporters of Proposition 209, the " California Civil Rights Initiative" that would ban the use of ethnic and gender preferences in state employment, contracting, and public education. Though CCRI maintains its steady 15-point public-approval margin in the…
OPEN YOUR EYES and you are in the still-pretty Victorian seaside town of Bournemouth, with clean beaches and a museum that houses the pre-Raphaelite paintings and chotchkes that newly rich families of the Victorian period so loved to collect. Close your eyes and listen to the speeches of the Tory…
THE SCANDAL OVER FOREIGN campaign donations to the Clinton campaign -- to date, three shady contributions of "Asian money" -- has broadened with amazing speed. Close Clinton associates are being accused not only of campaign finance fraud, but also of profiting off White House connections,…
So questionable is the Clinton administration's record on fighting drugs that FBI director Louis Freeh pressed a scathing memo into the hands of the president last year denouncing the president's lack of leadership. The letter was brutal enough that the White House is keeping the text under wraps.…
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV arrives in Washington this week to promote his new memoirs. They cover his political career before the collapse of the Soviet Union and highlight his contribution to the transformation of communism. He will undoubtedly receive a warmer welcome here than he does in Moscow. Just…
Of the making of books about the lives and loves of the 42nd president of the United States and his first lady there seems to be no end. Why this should be the case is not quite so easy to answer as some might think. True, Clinton's presidency has been dogged by scandal -- sexual, financial, and…
ELECTION YEAR 1996 IS LOOKING very much like election year 1972, when most voters decided to return an incumbent president to office despite doubts about his honesty and trustworthiness. Will a Nixon-like victory for Bill Clinton be followed by the aftermath of the November 1972 landslide -- the…
She was the Katharine Hepburn of letters, an outrageously dogmatic and stylish egoist who earned her arrogance by sheer intelligence, a flaming feminist who could be very hard on the male character and yet loved men and was loved by them. Her beauty was in her language -- and very mannered it could…
Barry Shapiro is hopping mad. "Are these, people fools, thugs, charlatans? he sputters. "These people" are the advocates of the California Civil Rights Initiative, the historic ballot proposition that would eliminate state- sponsored race and gender preferences in California, and they are…
As falls from grace go, former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders took a hard one. Elders hasn't heard word one from any administration official since she was canned in December 1994 after advocating school children be taught how to . . . butter their own corn, as my pals in the bunkhalls of Camp Alto…
Truth-squadding the wild claims of Clinton, Gore & Co. has proved too much for the Dole campaign. Clinton and Gore both trumpeted in their nationally televised debates the canard that Dole's economic plan would raise taxes on 9 million Americans. Neither Dole nor Kemp rebutted the charge. In fact,…
Thank God for Jesse Helms! As other Republicans around the country succumb to the lure of political correctness, Helms continues on his merry way to reelection. Most recently at a North Carolina auto race, he high-fived Johnathan Prevette, the 6-year-old who was charged with sexual harassment after…
Heads up. The sky is falling. Barring the possibility of some freak event or act of unprecedented self-destruction by Bill Clinton, this year's presidential campaign is over. On November 5, American voters will almost certainly return a Democratic administration to the White House. In fact, there's…
Jimmy Carter did not win the Nobel peace prize last week, thus really bumming out Al Hunt. For our part, we're delighted he didn't, because we got a taste again recently of just how reflexively anti-Israel this supposed " peacemaker" really is. (Check out his shocking book The Blood of Abraham if…
It's seldom a good sign when a Republican presidential candidate gets praised for not going "negative" on his opponent. "For 90 minutes," wrote David Broder in the Washington Post, "the campaign of tedium was elevated into a lesson in civics and civility. The first debate . . . may not have helped…
If there's one thing we know about politicians, it's that they really don't spend a lot of time reading books, or at least serious books (Ronald Reagan was very fond of a historical potboiler called Lion of Ireland, while Bill Clinton favors the pompous and portentous child-abuse detective novels…
Robert H. Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah (Regan Books/HarperCollins, 382 pages, $ 25) has an air of authority that borders on the magisterial. The legal scholar, former appealscourt judge, and defeated nominee for the United States Supreme Court has written a work of intellectual history and…
In the abortion world, the Lovejoy Surgicenter in Portland, Oregon, is famous. Over 4,000 abortions took place there in 1995, making it one of the highest-volume such clinics in the country. Lovejoy's doctors perform abortions as late as 25 weeks into pregnancy, and the center has been a favorite…
Memorandum to: Bob Dole
A Year ago, John Sweeney swept away the forces of Lane Kirkland to become president of the AFL-CIO. His triumph was hailed in the media as reinvigorating the labor movement with a breath of go-go progressive air.
PRE-DEBATE WITH AL GORE, Jack Kemp had met every test as Bob Dole's running mate. He'd proved himself a team player, an effective second banana who voluntarily merged his positions on immigration and affirmative action with Dole's. "It made Jack a bigger person, being number two," says a Dole aide.…
There is an old Latin saying, sine diabolo nullus dominus, which means " without the Devil, no God." It seems entirely appropriate, then, that a year or so after being presented with a book entitled God: A Biography (by an American, Jack Miles), we should now get one called The Devil: A Biography…
On the night of the first presidential debate, in a cramped hotel room near Giants Stadium, three members of the Dole campaign's advance team mix a round of gin-and-Diet-Cokes and settle in to watch their candidate. The advancemen are tired, having worked 18-hour days for most of the week preparing…
Greensboro
BACK AT THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER, three weeks before Louisiana's "jungle" primary for the seat of retiring Senate Democrat J. Bennett Johnston, the state's Republicans were in a funk. Six GOP candidates were running against two Democrats, and Republicans feared the six would split the…
HOW PANICKED IS THE Republican retreat? This panicked: On Sept. 25, the Republican Congress -- remember, the one filled with extremists -- voted to create what will likely prove the biggest and costliest new entitlement program since Congress enacted Supplemental Security Income in 1972.
It is with pride that THE WEEKLY STANDARD greets the publication of senior editor Andrew Ferguson's first book, Fools' Names, Fools' Faces, which binds together 33 of his essays. Andy is the writer of whom Bill Moyers once said: "If he were a gentleman, I would challenge him to a duel." It features…
The headline of the week, or maybe the year, appeared in the Sept. 11 issue of The Hill. It concerned a certain retired congressman with a taste for Hill pages who shared his gender, if not his generation. The headline: " Studds' Open Seat Draws Mass. Crowd."
We've been trying to keep you up to date on the relationship between Jack Kemp and his longtime guru, Jude Wanniski, ever since Kemp's selection as Bob Dole's running mate. Two weeks ago, Kemp took Wanniski's advice and praised Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March. Now things are really…
I finished Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life last night, and it's a terrific book, and you don't know how hard it was for me to write those words: "a terrific book." Surely you've caught Toobin on one or another show this past month, talking about his account of the O. J. Simpson murder case;…
Four years ago, a man known to the residents of Indiana as the "Speedway bomber" surfaced in the press with a story that really intrigued Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury guy. As a drug dealer in the early 1970s, Brett Kimberlin claimed, he had sold marijuana on a number of occasions to a college…
The Sept. 5 Chicago Tribune featured the following correction (dug up by Steve Allen of the Internet Guild): "In her Wednesday Commentary page column, Linda Bowles stated that President Clinton and his former campaign advisor Dick Morris both were "guilty of callous unfaithfulness to their wives…
AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER, BILL CLINTON told PBS's Jim Lehrer the following three things: First, he claimed special prosecutor Kenneth Starr was engaged in a partisan effort to "get" him and his wife; second, he practically accused Starr of suborning perjury; third, he refused to rule out giving…
TWO OF THE COUNTRY'S best-known journalists embark on a two-and-a-half-year economics investigation that results in an article so long it has to be divided into ten parts. Their cash-strapped newspaper pours half a million dollars into an advertising campaign, and a leading publisher plans a book…
Lansing, Michigan
Democrats insist, Republicans privately acknowledge, and the newspapers generally agree that the GOP's 104th Congress ends in disappointment. But none of them can convincingly explain precisely how or why.
Netanyahu opened a tunnel. Arafat started a war. It is hard to find a publication or a government on the planet that has not denounced the opening of the tunnel. About the starting of the war, silence.
Judy Chicago has written her second autobiography, Beyond the Flower (Viking, 282 pages, $ 27.95). If you missed the first, don't worry; Beyond the Flower has everything you could possibly want to know about her. Chicago (nee Cohen) is best known for The Dinner Party, an "installation" that made…
In the last month, there have been several major surprises in the culture war over popular music. First, one of the music world's most liberal magazines issued a blistering rebuke of rock'n'roll's prevailing solipsism and spoiled-brat ethic. Then a respected classical-music critic published a…
It was one of the two or three oddest developments of the presidential campaign, if anyone is still keeping track Suddenly, sometime around mid- April, Bob Dole uncorked a new bit of rhetoric. "If something happened along the way," Dole announced at a campaign rally, "and you had to leave your…
The Senate may have failed to override President Clinton's veto of the partialbirth-abortion ban last week, but the total and staggering inability of the pro-Clinton forces to make anything resembling a coherent argument was testimony to the fact that a) the procedure is indefensible and b)…
"Vote for Clinton again?" writes a disgusted Katha Pollitt in the October 7 issue of the Nation. "As Voltaire is said to have replied when the Marquis de Sade invited him to a second orgy, since he'd enjoyed the first one so much: "No thanks. Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.'" Wow.
The key word is "consistent." Bob Dole is consistent. His campaign consistently misuses -- or just plain throws away -- its best weapons against President Clinton.
The pernicious dwarf has gone too far this time. "Now, here's a guy that's supposed to be a war hero," said Ross Perot of Bob Dole. "You'd think he'd be willing to stand up and talk to another person, wouldn't you? But he can't." A supposed war hero?
I was a target of the Clinton campaign's rapid-response team. My offense was small. I asked James Carville, the president's loyal political strategist, a touchy question on CNN's Crossfire. Now you might think this would have gone under the radar of the rapid-response team (RRT for short), that the…
Taxes were the Dole message last week, and Bob Dole began with a speech about his tax plan, a speech he had carefully vetted in the days before he flew to Detroit to deliver it. The final draft was handed to him on the plane Monday morning, and Dole -- who is very concerned that the numbers he uses…
When Russia was swallowed in communism, musical life was shackled to the state. Some got out, like Sergei Rachmaninoff. Some stayed and suffered, like Dmitri Shostakovich. Some chose to become functionaries of the regime, like Dmitri Kabalevsky (also a composer). But most were neither dissidents…
The first great, humbling confession that must be made by everyone who thinks about books is that we have no idea where books spring from. We may pretend from time to time that we have a notion of the mechanisms of creation, but most literary criticism and biography are like a careful…
America's behavior in Iraq over the past month "bears a close resemblance to the disaster of the Bay of Pigs, but unlike President Kennedy, no one is apologizing for this one." So said former Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As in 1961, brave…
The heart seems to have gone out of the defenders of the mainline media against charges of leftward bias. Where it was formerly asserted with vigor that the great organs of print and broadcast press were pictures of objectivity, now it is conceded that journalism just seems to attract people who…
At the start of his most recent bus trip -- this one down the Washington and Oregon coast -- President Clinton stood in a steady Northwest rain giving his standard stump speech to a few thousand hardy Democrats assembled at Seattle's Pike Place fishmarket.
IF YOU THINK IT'S EASY TO UNDERSTAND breaking economic news, consider the following lead in the Wall Street Journal: "Sales of existing homes remained robust in August, slipping just 0.5 percent from July." Robust and slipping both? Well, yes. It seems that the slippage from July still left home…
On October 8, the state of Maryland will put on trial a distinguished scientist. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, winner of a Nobel prize for medicine in 1976, famed for his work with primitive New Guinea tribes, and a man whose friends describe him as "some kind of genius," stands charged with molesting…
REPUBLICANS ARE EXITING the first Congress they've controlled in 40 years in terror-stricken retreat. Senate majority leader Trent Lott says they just want to get their work done and go home. He and others admit that their reluctance to risk political fights carries a cost. They probably erred in…
Picture in your mind urban America at its most frightening, somewhere in Bedford-Stuyvesant or North St. Louis or the West Side of Chicago: open-air drug markets flourishing in the daytime, 30-year-old single grandmothers who have never worked, teenagers with AK-47s ready to use them in a fight…