70 articles
Now we take you to the great Republican state of Kansas, where Democrats went kind of bonkers trying to defeat Republican House candidates. Seems that freshman Republican House member Todd Tiahrt found himself in a close race against Democrat Randy Rathbun. Voters received anonymous phone calls…
Bill Clinton is a bore. He's back to his pre-Dick Morris habit of blathering endlessly and turgidly about issues he is desperate not to discuss. Last week, at a press conference, he gave an answer about his stand on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution that was a masterpiece of…
Sick though everybody is of election talk, we here at THE WEEKLY STANDARD will never tire in our effort to bring you, our loyal readers, the voting news -- even if it involves a vote that will take place two years from now. That's how far ahead of the curve we are. (Either that or we don't have a…
It has come to this: A respected federal official, Bill Bradley, publishes an op-ed about campaign finance in the New York Times arguing for a constitutional amendment that would restrict the political speech of his congressional colleagues, their would-be successors, and American voters as a…
Congratulations to the Anti-Defamation League, which is now taking its noble mission against anti-Semitism to new heights -- of arrant absurdity. Its target: the U.S. Navy, which had the gall to agree to help with a rally to be held by Promise Keepers. That's the organization whose purpose is to…
Two years ago I had a call from Gene Siskel, who lives in Chicago, as I do. Siskel is a man others envy, possibly hate, for having what looks like one of the world's best and easiest jobs: sitting before a television camera, chatting about movies, for maybe -- who knows? -- a couple million a year.…
New Satan takes over in hell, wants to install airconditioning. That is Memoirs by Mikhail Gorbachev in brief. And brevity is a thing of which you'll have a high, fine appreciation after 769 densely printed, generously sized pages containing, in total, more than 350,000 words. Memoirs (Doubleday, $…
That the education issue was weakening GOP electoral prospects became clear the day a New York Times-CBS poll reported it was top priority among undecided voters -- and that twice as many Americans trusted the Democrats with it. And it's been no solace to learn from exit polls that Bill Clinton's…
SOME THREE DECADES AGO, Yevgeny Yevtushenko published a poem titled " Stalin's Heirs." It was a plea to the leadership of the Soviet Union to prevent the return of Stalinism. At the time, the embalmed corpse of Stalin -- once displayed in the Red Square Mausoleum alongside Lenin's -- had been…
HIS CHIN DIMPLED ENOUGH to insert a bullhorn, his brow furrowed enough to seat two co-eds, Mario Savio was just a Berkeley sophomore when he gave life to the Free Speech Movement by shouting from the roof of a police car in Sproul Plaza in 1964. Conducting the original sit-in and protesting the…
BRIEFLY LAST WEEK, House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on the verge of toppling, pushed by a small band of House Republicans and outside allies. Columnist Kate O'Beirne launched the first strike. Writing in National Review after the election, she called on Gingrich, beset by ethics troubles, to…
Republicans are in a pretty good mood these days in spite of Bob Dole's loss. Their party successfully preserved its majority in Congress despite an expensive and wildly deceptive Democratic onslaught against Newt Gingrich, Republican freshmen, and GOP efforts on Medicare, Medicaid, education, and…
There is scarcely a nobler quest in the world than the search for solutions to the continuing tragedies of starvation and famine. But perhaps in no other humanitarian venture do people so mistake good intentions for good policy. The subject of world hunger can cause the vision of ordinarily…
FOR FIVE DAYS LAST WEEK, the politics of food, population, and the environment was played out in Rome. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), a branch of the United Nations, convened a World Food Summit. It was rather like a sequel to the 1994's U.N. Population Conference, held in Cairo.…
Anyone glumly anticipating another four years of Clinton judicial appointments and continued expansion of criminals' rights can find cheer in a little-noticed initiative just adopted in Arizona. Despite a fierce opposition campaign run by injudicious judges and lawyers and abetted by a hostile…
BILL CLINTON HAS JUST WON a convincing victory. He takes to the microphone for his first Saturday radio address after Election Day. So, does he lay out a sweeping vision for the next four years? No, he calls for an end to liquor advertising on radio and TV. You sit there and think, "Bill Clinton is…
In a recent issue of the New York Observer, Sidney Blumenthal helps explain how he has become the least respected political journalist in Washington. "I am not a reporter," Blumenthal declared. "I don't believe that the accumulation of isolated fact upon fact yields some sort of pure truth, capital…
Many of the Scrapbook's readers have expressed sadness that our long- running chronicle of the codependent relationship between sometime supply- side publicist Jude Wanniski and onetime vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp seemed to reach its end last week. It's true: We had thought to ring down…
The commanding victory of the California Civil Rights Initiative set off predictable cries of horror from the state's liberals. A collection of advocacy groups, including the ACLU, immediately challenged its constitutionality in federal court. Twenty-three students were arrested for illegally…
E. J. Dionne's Election Day Washington Post column was positively Whitmanesque, an evocation of the envelope-stuffing communitarian politics of his Massachusetts childhood. Casting an American ballot is inherently good, he reminded me. Dionne even takes his kids to the polls with him, the better to…
It's been tough sledding this week for any Dole staffers with a little fight left in them. At a post-election forum 32 hours after Clinton declared victory, political consultants and operatives lined up 18 across for an epiphanic requiem filled with conventional wisdom. The only insider attempting…
The election results can be described and explained. Their practical effect can be logically predicted. But beyond that, it's difficult to make much of what happened last week. All year long, the two parties struggled mightily for control of the best-polling buzzwords. Somehow, along the way, no…
Come February, the tongues of congressmen will be folding themselves around such names as Arief Wiriadinata, Jim Riady, Grigory Loutchansky, Samir Danou, Jorge Cabrera, George Psaltis, and Tai-Ying. These are, of course, the donors of the shady contributions to the Clinton campaign that have been…
"Sure, it's not going as well or as fast as every"one would like, but it's . . . an alternative to K.Jconflict. The participants are still talking. . . . You take a step forward, a step backward. You go back and try again. What is the alternative? There is no alternative."
A perfect fact to remember us by, we "post-moderns" or whatever we are: When we say that entertainment is "adult," we mean it is infantile. The pictorial spelling-out of exactly what happens when a couple goes to bed is in the "Billy learns how to tie his shoes" spirit of edifying books for…
The search is on among those who would learn nothing from history for the large, irresistible forces that made this an unwinnable election for the Republicans. There are none. The reason for the Republican defeat is to be found not in the economy, not in the opponent, not in the stars, but in the…
AFSCME PARTY, 8:00 PM
When the plays of Shakespeare are brought to the screen, directors usually take liberties with the text. They cut and rearrange scenes, set them in a place Shakespeare never intended and in a time centuries after his death. The movies are like variations; the language, the soaring poetry, the music…
Was President Clinton's defeat of Bob Dole inevitable? Absolutely. It's the one thing that at least some Dole aides and nearly everyone advising the president agreed on by the end of the presidential campaign. Indeed, both now figure a Clinton win had been inevitable for months. The president's men…
No one ever loved Graham Greene, though many thought him as fine a novelist as we've had these last 50 years. No one ever made a shrine of Erich Segal's boyhood home, though his 1970 Love Story sold in the millions. Adoration from readers does not belong to authors to command, and neither…
In 1996, Republican party candidates took little or no credit for their legislative accomplishments, feared the label "extremism," began describing themselves as full of "common sense," and finally maintained their control of the House and Senate by going on the attack against their Democratic…
To appreciate the ways in which the political landscape has been altered since Republicans took control of Congress two years ago, consider the ways in which the Democratic party has changed in the past four years. Before 1994, Democrats on Capitol Hill actively sought a $ 265 billion tax increase…
The British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow famously suggested nearly forty years ago that the West had unfortunately developed not one intellectual culture but two. On one side were the scientists, who could not distinguish Jane Austen from Agatha Christie; on the other, the artists, ignorant of…
Dear Fellow Conservative:
Oh! Can we go to Red Lobster? Can we? It's my favorite!" she implores, batting those pig-bristle eyelashes that make me want to buff my shoes and/or get my car washed. "She" in this case is the former Tammy Faye Bakker (now married to one Roe Messner), and I have followed her to a book signing for…
Bob Dole has angrily denounced the New York Times for pro-Clinton bias. By all accounts, Dole's audiences have loved this media-bashing. But the working press has laughingly dismissed Dole's pique as groundless. They have too covered Clinton's "scandals" and "failures," reporters say; Dole's list…
America is a land without heroes these days. Indeed, we have become almost obsessed with the idea that there is no such thing as heroism. Our journalism, once full of breathless stories about the Herculean efforts of powerful men and the selfless acts of ordinary folk, has become mostly an exercise…
October 24 was one of those days when everyone in the news business seemed to have been reading the very same obscure academic journal. "Discrimination May Affect Risk of High Blood Pressure in Blacks," was the New York Times headline; "Study: Discrimination May Cause Hypertension in Blacks,"…
FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, President Clinton has gotten gentle, sometimes flattering treatment in the media. Now, the cycle of good press is over. The intense, unfriendly coverage of the foreign-contributions flap indicates what's in store for Clinton in a second presidential term: rougher handling by…
The Washington Post has editorialized against colorblind public policies, but it has embraced colorblindness in an area where color presumably does matter -- in describing the appearance of individuals. And in an instance where appearance matters in alerting readers to keep an eye out for suspected…
THERE'S A STRONG ELEMENT of wishful thinking in the idea that Bill Clinton is an unprincipled poll surfer; he was brought around on welfare reform, some conservatives argue, and he can probably be brought around on most anything else. This may be a misreading of the president, especially on the…
Jennifer Riest of Regnery Publishing was surprised, to say the least, when she spoke this summer to a distressed shopper from Norman, Okla. Why, the customer asked, had Regnery "given in to White House pressure" and stopped the presses on Unlimited Access, Gary Aldrich's account of working as an…
A few months ago, Michael Lind delivered a primal scream of a book about how the Republican party is intellectually inert and conservatism is a secretive conspiracy. After letting his rage out in the pages of Out of Conservatism, Lind is feeling much better. In last week's New Yorker, he argues…
Big spending on the campaign trail causes tidal waves of criticism for wealthy Republican office-seekers. Not so for their Democratic counterparts. When Michael Huffington spent over $ 29 million in California for his 1994 Senate campaign, the media charged him with trying to buy the election. This…
Thomas Sowell, syndicated columnist and fount of books, has written another one: Migrations and Cultures, his thirty-first. It is the first volume of a planned trilogy on the subject of race and the movement of peoples. For at least twenty-five years, Sowell has been one of the foremost…
Do you think Americans are ignorant and apathetic about the election?" asks the pollster. "I don't know, and I don't care," answers the citizen, slamming the door.
For weeks now, the Scrapbook has been chronicling the strange, symbiotic relationship between Jack Kemp and supply-side publicist Jude Wanniski. Now comes a piece of primary evidence on the meaning of Jack 'n' Jude. It's located on Wanniski's Web site, which he uses for the worldwide distribution…
Every American schoolkid knows the story. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt essentially stole the province of Panama away from Colombia, used American troops to guarantee its independence, and committed U.S. technological prowess to building a great ditch linking the Atlantic and Pacific…
In 1941, when I was in the seventh grade, I elected the academic instead of a vocational program at my junior high school. I lived with my divorced mother, a secretary and the family's only high school graduate. My teacher asked what I wanted to be; "a lawyer," I said, and I said it with fear. My…
The November issue of First Things, the conservative monthly, features a symposium called "The End of Democracy: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics. " Its introduction, by editor in chief Richard John Neuhaus, suggests that an unrestrained judiciary is seizing control of crucial sections of…
BUMMED OUT BY ANOTHER can't-do candidacy, miffed that his "battleground" state got bumped from the battle plan, Tommy Thompson took a stunning home- stretch shot at the top of the ticket. "I thought George Bush's campaign was probably the poorest-run presidential campaign," the governor of…
As we stand in awe at Bill Clinton's shamelessness, we should not overlook the prowess of his vice president, next to whom the president can seem positively refreshing. Last week, Al Gore denied that he had the slightest inkling that fund-raising -- fund-raising of all things! -- was going on…
Jimmy Carter is at it again, making his best effort to muddy and confuse things in Nicaragua by coming to Sandinista party leader Daniel Ortega's assistance for the third time in less than two decades. In 1979, Carter helped Ortega fight his way into power and establish a Communist dictatorship…
The California Civil Rights Initiative on the ballot next week seems to be headed for passage. The latest Los Angeles Times poll has the anti-quota initiative ahead, 54 to 31 percent. The proposition is receiving strong support not only from Republicans and conservatives, but also from Democrats…
About ten years ago, a gaunt, bald man in sandals walked up to me at Logan airport in Boston and handed me a book. "This is for you, friend," he said, smiling. "I wanted you to have it." The unsolicited gift turned out to be a hard-bound copy of the Bhagavad Gita, the holy Hindu poem, done up in…
The Republican presidential campaign has stripped its poorly tooled sprockets in the effort to illuminate Bob Dole's advantages over Bill Clinton as a guide and steward for the next four years of American public life. It remains possible, nevertheless, through the smoke generated by the GOP's…
Last week's Senate hearing on the alleged links between the CIA, the contras, and drug-dealing in inner-city Los Angeles saw the return of one of Washington's peskiest, and most partisan, investigators: Jack Blum. Described by the New York Times a few years ago as a "doggedly liberal Democratic…
Santa Barbara, California
Not all that long ago, revelations about an American president's shady financial entanglements with an Indonesian businessman would have stirred up a debate about more than campaign finance. During the Cold War, liberal Democrats and left-wing activists would have made a big fuss over the…
As a writer, the novelist John Dos Passos wanted to be "the architect of history." The trio of novels he called U.S.A., much esteemed in their day but neglected in the years after Dos Passos's death in 1970, were an effort to rebuild the recent past in a condensed and dramatic form. Dos Passos…
Whether you will admire, despise, or dismiss the subject of Sally Bedell Smith's new biography of Pamela Harriman depends on how you react to the following anecdote, which appears in the introduction of Reflected Glory (Simon & Schuster, $ 27.50). Flying to the Adriatic for an inspection tour of…
MAKING IT POSSIBLE FOR EVERY 12-year-old to "log on to the Internet" is one of President Clinton's main goals for the schools. The Democrats would be foolish to waste this occasion for another helpful, informative TV ad, so here is a suggested script:
The past few years have seen the deaths of Ralph Ellison and Joseph Mitchell, two of America's most remarkable writers. The one a novelist, the other a journalist, each was thought by many people the best at his respective trade.
MICHAEL FOX calls school vouchers "the civil-rights issue of our generation. " Two years ago, when Republicans took control of the Ohio House of Representatives for the first time in his 22-year legislative career, Fox pushed through an innovative voucher experiment in Cleveland. As a result, right…
I AM RIDING WITH THE KING, and not your bushleague Huey Long or Elvis variety of royalty either. For in the Piedmont, where they crank out stockcar racing champions like western Pennsylvania does quarterbacks or East St. Louis does crack dealers, Richard Petty is still the King of NASCAR -- even…
WHILE ENUMERATING THE SINS of his opponent in his rambling closing statement at the second presidential debate, Bob Dole blurted out this indictment: "President Clinton opposes term limits." Perhaps supporters of limiting congressional terms should have been grateful for those five little words, in…
It's hard to imagine Ed Rollins playing moralist, but there he was at the National Press Club in Washington last month, a Jeremiah with warm-up jokes. Distrust of the political system has reached dangerous levels among voters, he told his audience; the public is "cynical," even "disgusted," with…
Barring some unforeseen occurrence -- such as his staying alive for six more years -- this fall marks Strom Thurmond's last campaign. So let's get this over with right at the beginning: