January 1997

Walter Cronkite

I moved from Belgium to Washington in July 1995 and my life has changed in a number of appreciable ways. I no longer eat French fries with mayonnaise. I no longer write on subjects like the Italian pension system. And I am, at long last, on the verge of joining the American consumer culture. I…

One of the more interesting fights of the First Gingrich Congress was the effort by House freshmen to restrict lobbying by non-profit groups (many more of them liberal than conservative) that receive federal grants. The idea behind the McIntosh-Istook amendment was that the $ 39 billion in federal…

How to approach the prospect of a second Clinton administration? On the occasion of Richard Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, the cartoonist Herblock, a Nixon-phobe of rare distinction, gave the new president a famously magnanimous graphical pat on the fanny. For years he had drawn an indelible…

David Boaz

The Scrapbook reported two weeks ago that Texas Rural Legal Aid, an arm of the Legal Services Corporation, had returned to the leftie glory days of the 1970s by filing suit on behalf of two Democratic office-seekers who had lost local elections. Well, the corporation and its tax-supported outposts…

Dick Morris

If in another few decades your grandkids come home from school coloring pictures of Uncle Sam and his sidekick Aunt Pam, don't say we didn't warn you. Aunt Pam is scheduled to make her inaugural debut this year cavorting alongside Uncle Sam on Pennsylvania Avenue. And she bears all the hallmarks of…

When congressional Republicans (Coverdell, Gingrich, Armey, DeLay, Boehner) met privately with the leaders of the Business Roundtable on January 9, the plan was to discuss the 1997 agenda after quickly putting to rest the bad blood over campaign donations. Republicans have long complained that…

The Association of Trial Lawyers of America is mobilizing its members once again against a sensible legal reform that might cut into their lavish incomes. We're talking about a change in the way automobile drivers insure themselves -- a change that would indeed jeopardize the million-dollar…

Either I am a lousy political columnist, or the country is in much better shape than I thought. Or both.

This is going to be Super Bowl XXXI, and it is with no pride whatsoever that I have to report having watched the preceding XXX. Only two have left memories in my mind. The first, when Joe Namath and the Jets shocked the greatly favored Baltimore Colts. The second, when my own team, the Chicago…

Despite the gushing coverage they receive, inaugural balls are never any fun. They're not glittery, they're not glamorous, and they're hardly exclusive (you can purchase an invitation, after all, through Ticketmaster). The Clintons, however, may just set a record for tawdriness. What follows is a…

WHEN HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH met with House minority leader Richard Gephardt two years ago to settle committee assignments, there was a problem. Representative Jim McDermott of Washington, the former ethics chairman and one of the most partisan members of Congress, planned to remain the…

The events of the past week -- President Clinton fighting a sexual harassment suit in the Supreme Court, Speaker Gingrich under investigation for violating tax laws and providing false information to Congress, and top House Democrats implicated in the illegal dissemination to the press of a tape of…

I went to the Army-Navy game m Philadelphia last December, and I won't soon forget it. And not just the game, which Army won when a desperate drive by Navy fell short in the final seconds. What happened moments after the game was even more memorable. Veterans Stadium suddenly went silent. The…

Four years ago, just weeks before the baseball playoffs, it occurred to me that I had no idea which teams were playing. Football season had started as well, and I could not name the quarterback, the star running back, the star wide receiver, or the star linebacker of any of the four teams that…

As a 15-year-old in 1946, I attended the final home game of my fellow townsman from Joliet, Ill., DePaul University basketball great George Mikan. When Joliet mayor Art Janke was introduced before the game to present an award to Mikan, the more than 20,000 fans gathered at the old Chicago Stadium…

LAST YEAR, D.C. CONGRESSIONAL delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton liked to tell the story of her meetings with residents of the nation's capital, lately a site of high and rising crime rates, failing schools, collapsing infrastructure, and impending municipal bankruptcy. The burning question on…

As the new Congress gets down to business, the issue of health care will once again be at the top of the agenda -- which is good news for conservatives. No issue is riper for the strategy of dismantling regulation and letting the free market do its work. The problem is, no one much thinks this way.…

The morning meeting of House Republicans on the day of Newt Gingrich's reelection as speaker was highlighted by pro-Gingrich speeches from two Democratturned-Republicans -- Billy Tauzin and Mike Parker. Both argued that their old colleagues, under the same circumstances, would have unflinchingly…

With this issue we give a name and an editor to our cultural pages. Books & Arts will be the rubric for our expanded coverage of literature, biography, philosophy, history, art, movies, television, etc. The section's editor is Christopher Caldwell, who has been a senior writer here since the…

FOUR YEARS AGO, IN THE FIRST FEW weeks of the Clinton presidency, a three- star general attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff was at the White House on official business when he said good morning to a young, female Clintonista. Instead of answering in kind, she scowled and replied: "We really don't…

Does the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantee a right to doctor-prescribed poison for mentally competent, terminally ill patients who want a speedier death? Last year, the nation's two largest federal circuit courts of appeals, the Second and the Ninth, answered yes and invalidated…

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22. I'm in New York City, which is the best place to be when you're a Jew during Christmas week. As American families gather, the entire country seems to shut down for a few days -- all except New York, where Jews constitute a larger percentage of the population than in any other…

Don't expect another Haley Barbour. That's the message to keep in mind when the 165 members of the Republican National Committee convene on January 17 to select a new leader. "Most of the committee members are looking for another Haley, but there's not one in this race," says Tom Slade, chairman of…

Give the New York Times some credit: Its continuing efforts to pump up the Gingrich "scandals" verge on the heroic. Friday morning January 10, the Gray Lady greeted its readers with the headline "Gingrich Is Heard Urging Tactics in Ethics Case" over the byline of Adam Clymer, the paper's designated…

IT WAS DUSK. Brooks flicked a speck of lint from his velvet smoking jacket, poured himself a finger of Chivas, and held out his glass so that it could capture a few ounces of water leaking down from the bathroom upstairs. Through the hole in the ceiling that had been cut by the plumber who had…

It was dusk. Brooks flicked a speck of lint from his velvet smoking jacket, poured himself a finger of Chivas, and held out his glass so that it could capture a few ounces of water leaking down from the bathroom upstairs. Through the hole in the ceiling that had been cut by the plumber who had…

ON NOVEMBER 8, 1994, Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich ended decades of Democratic congressional dominance On November 5, 1996, Republicans held on to Congress and so strengthened their claim to be the new majority party. And on January 7, 1997, Republicans overcame Democratic…

DISLOYAL REPUBLICANS IN THE HOUSE don't get punished. They get rewarded. That is what's happened to the nine Republicans who refused to vote for Newt Gingrich's reelection as speaker on January 7. They suddenly became heroes in their districts, lauded for their independence and courage. In some…

Jane Amsterdam, the former Manhattan inc. editor who dropped out of the media whirl to drive horse carriages, has now been hired by Tina Brown of the New Yorker as a part-time editor. "At the moment, carriage driving is a lot harder to do than editing," Amsterdam told the New York Observer,…

From the living-room window of my sixth-floor apartment, I can see, less than half a block away, the headquarters of the world's greatest lost cause: the Women's Christian Temperance Union. I look upon it fondly, not because I am for bringing back Prohibition, but because I long ago enrolled in the…

It's a safe bet that on any given night, somewhere a group of American college students is engaged in a heated debate over the legalization of drugs, the ethics of seat-belt laws, or the absolute right of consenting adults to do whatever they please in their homes.

During the summer of 1975, a debate of historic proportions occurred on the floor of the House of Representatives. The debate was significant not because of its rhetoric, which was rather shopworn, or because the issue under discussion was dramatic -- a bill mandating the admission of women to the…

When President Clinton abandoned his 1992 campaign pledge to get tough with China, he quickly settled into that comfortable, bipartisan consensus of policymakers, politicians, Sinologists, and journalists who have long supported a policy of "engagement" with China. "Nothing is more important than…

"You have to see it to believe it," said my wife. She had just returned from one of her trolling sessions at our nearby mall, and what I had to see to believe was a new restaurant -- a "theme restaurant," called Rainforest.

Outgoing New Hampshire governor Steve Merrill -- the only major contender for the Republican party chairmanship who is not a member of the national committee -- is pursuing a "gubernatorial" strategy to round up the support of the 83 members needed to win the RNC's Jan. 17 vote. His success with…

Congressional Republicans say tax relief will be a top priority this year. And as always, the most important work will be carried out by the staff. That has ardent tax-cutters in the party fretting over the resume of Lindy Paull, staff director of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee. Though…

"Defund the Left!" was the rallying cry of conservatives in the early Reagan years who had high hopes of taking out the Legal Services Corporation - - a high-minded-sounding federal agency that had veered from low-glamour work like representing the indigent in divorce court to the more exciting…

Like a company announcing its bankruptcy in the back of the classifieds, the New York Times, when forced to make public amends for past mistakes, does so as inconspicuously as possible. Over the holidays, the Times's editors seemed to be using the absence of their many vacationing readers to dump…

The nomination of Anthony Lake as director of the CIA is in big-time trouble. And the word is that President Clinton won't fight too strenuously for confirmation. How come? The CIA was merely a convenient dumping place for Lake, whom Clinton no longer wanted as his national security adviser after…

NOW is the winter of Republican discontent, and it won't be made glorious summer by dumping Newt Gingrich. Nor, in truth, will it be made glorious summer simply by rallying behind Gingrich, though such a show of political courage would help. For the true cause of Republican discontent is the…

Chandler Burr states in the Dec. 16 issue that conservatives are "unaware of the clinical research -- all but universally accepted among biologists -- showing that homosexuality is a biological trait." Contrary to what he asserts, there is no universal acceptance of this notion because most…

As congressional Republicans reload for a new round of budget battles with the White House, they might well take the advice that critics used to give John F. Kennedy: less profile, more courage.

In President Clinton's first term, the Democrats had a vision: a sudden and dramatic takeover of the nation's health-care system that would upend the nation's economy and transform its politics. The plan was candidly megalomaniacal, grandiose, and preposterous. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats were…

Henry James spent his life avoiding sex and contriving in his fictions strategies of reluctance and shyness in its regard. But the age of Daisy Miller has yielded to that of Diana Spencer, and the Jamesian repressed has returned with a vengeance. A recent biography of James, Henry James: The Young…

The week between Christmas and New Year's, usually a dead time for punditry, sprang to political life when Newt Gingrich found himself in trouble yet again. For the media and the Democrats, the situation is simple: Newt bad, Newt forced to admit error, Newt dead.

War, as Clausewitz said, is the continuation of politics by other means, but what happens when you live in a country whose opposing factions no longer take up arms against each other? Law becomes the battlefield, and its weird nooks and crannies become the terrain where the battle is fought. And…

Many Republicans are taking it for granted that they will make big gains in the congressional election in 1998. The president's party, they like to say, usually loses big in elections in his sixth year. Speaker Newt Gingrich likes to quantify it: The party out of power, he says, has gained an…

The science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick was a madman, an agoraphobic amphetamine addict periodically hospitalized for mental problems and profoundly psychotic for the last eight years before his death in 1982 at the age of 53. He was a clumsy prose stylist, whose disorganized, maniacal, and…

Republican congressman Michael Forbes of New York says he agonized for days before deciding to oppose Newt Gingrich's reelection as House speaker on January 7. "I've had an upset stomach," Forbes says. "I haven't slept well." Some of his House colleagues are dubious. They attribute his sudden…