November 2000

Paris

Somehow it figures that the American Academy of Actuaries would have a highly sophisticated theory of how to hedge political risks.

The bizarre, heart-stopping aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, historic as it is, would never have occurred if the election had been held just one week earlier. National pollsters are nearly unanimous in believing that a George W. Bush lead of perhaps 5 percentage points at the end of…

Virtual History

GOING TO LAW, as the phrase used to be -- that is, suing the rascal whose sheep are in your meadow and cows in your corn -- is a hallowed tradition in this land of liberty. In our time, it has become more than a tradition, rather a national pastime, ranking just under baseball and a click above…

ON THE EVENING of November 15, Al Gore took a break from wrangling over the election outcome to telephone the country's highest-rated black radio host, Tom Joyner. The call was to thank Joyner for his help in getting voters registered and motivating them to go to the polls. So grateful was Gore…

West Palm Beach, Fla.

Al Gore, presidential candidate of the Dimple party, proposed a meeting with George W. Bush last week "not to negotiate, but to improve the tone of our dialogue in America." Bush cordially turned Gore down. But there's plenty Gore can do on his own to "improve the tone." He can start by putting a…

Gore strategists last week told the New York Times that their campaign is preparing to call not just for a recount but for a revote in Palm Beach, if necessary, and that they (the Gore people) have nicknamed this "the nuclear button option."

After he muzzles his advisers, if he is indeed serious about improving the tone of "our dialogue," Al Gore should dissociate himself from the not-so-subtle slurs by backers who are associating George W. Bush with the Nazis. Charles Paul Freund, writing for Reason Online, points to one egregious…

In 1972 an international film critics' poll, conducted by Sight and Sound magazine, determined that two of the ten greatest films ever made had been written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Almost thirty years later, as the ballots for this decade's Sight and Sound poll go out, the Swedish…

"Well, we just have to win, then." -- Bill Clinton, concluding that candor about Monica Lewinsky might destroy his presidency. "I'm not like George Bush. If he wins or loses, life goes on. I'll do anything to win." -- Al Gore, explaining this year's campaign.

In the person of Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, the Gore camp and its followers have merged the two key villains of the impeachment battle into one. For the purposes of Gore's postelection spin, Florida's top elections official has been made into an amalgam of Kenneth Starr and Linda…

A New Birth of Freedom

People in my Virginia neighborhood don't gather in bookstores on Sunday nights to talk about ideas. People in certain parts of Northwest Washington do, as I discovered last weekend when I attended a discussion of The Slate Diaries at Politics & Prose, a lefty bookseller on upper Connecticut Avenue.

"This isn't about some numbers game or just simply counting up the ballots."

FOR SIX YEARS I was the head of a Ralph Nader group, and later for a decade I served on the board of the liberal League of Conservation Voters. As a producer at ABC and Fox News, I saw old-fashioned political consultants transformed into hardened kamikaze pundits, escalating their rhetoric and…

The issue of character may come and go in real politics, but it is the defining feature of movie politics. Nearly every conservative observer has complained about Hollywood's ideology in recent years -- but few of these observers seem to have noticed that liberalism appears in films not as an…

THE SCRAPBOOK thinks it knows why poor Bill Daley shows such distress over those voters who "miscast" their ballots in Palm Beach. Cook County, Illinois, where Daley was raised, had a long tradition of "four-legged voting." This is a technique perfected by employees of Daley's late father, who was…

West Palm Beach, Florida

The presidential election of 2000 is the impeachment drama of 1998-99 all over again. And Al Gore is Bill Clinton. Only Gore's behavior is worse -- worse because Clinton's misdeeds were of a gravity about which people might at least plausibly disagree. What Gore has done is directly challenge…

THE MOMENT that House Republicans feared came and went on October 3. That was the day of the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Republicans were apoplectic over the prospect that Gore would make them part of the national campaign. "Governor Bush," Gore might have said,…

IN AMERICA, even the electoral process takes a backseat to litigation. Well before the recount of Florida's ballots had concluded, several lawsuits had been filed, in both state and federal courts in Florida, seeking to set aside the results of the election in Florida and force a re-vote in Palm…

America Before T.V.

Study of Revenge

THE SCRAPBOOK has cultivated a particular interest in Vermont this year. In these pages last spring, Geoffrey Norman and David Orgon Coolidge detailed the various depredations inflicted on the state by a progressive political class -- not the least of these being a "civil unions" (read: gay…

THIS COUNTRY IS TIED. Over the past decade, we've had an information revolution, a huge wave of immigration, large demographic shifts. We've impeached a president, seen the emergence of Third Way Democrats, and watched the rise and quiescence of the Gingrich revolutionaries. And after all this…

"A theater of distraction and misdirection" -- Henry Hyde's elegant phrase, originally used to describe the fatuous defense mounted by President Clinton's lawyers during his impeachment trial, kept echoing back to us last week. In all but its particulars, the case presented by Vice President Gore's…

Austin

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to go see a Broadway play these days -- but Broadway likes to pretend you do. So many plays have appeared in recent years in which science and math are a metaphor -- or at least a pretext -- for portraying any number of themes, that they form nearly a genre…

I'm no red-diaper baby, but I grew up hearing lots of talk about the party line. This had nothing to do with politics. The party line was the phone line we shared with the neighbors -- a rapidly dying practice, according to an article in USA Today. There are apparently only 5,000 of these…

If It Ain't Got That Swing

The thing that drives so many creative types batty is not their own lack of success but the caprice of success. Great actors spellbind in regional theater while selling ties at Macy's to pay the rent; lousy actors sign eight-figure deals to say the F-word in front of a movie camera. It's when the…

THE MATHEMATICS of this presidential election is as confusing as any since 1968. If one truth was held to be self-evident at the start of this campaign, it was that George W. Bush could not lose Florida and win the presidency. Yet some polls in the final days had him losing Florida and winning the…

November 2000 has been a good month for the school voucher movement -- whatever the fate of the ballot initiatives in Michigan and California. The campaign has elicited a new round of pro-voucher pronouncements from prominent liberals.

The Frailty Myth

About a week ago, I spent a few days struggling with the suspicion that I was spiritually polluted. It was something David Brooks wrote that got me started.

Cornelius David Krieghoff may be Canada's best-known artistic product, though "byproduct" is perhaps the better word. The German-Flemish painter was born in Amsterdam in 1815, emigrated with his parents to North America in 1835, and eventually settled in Montreal in 1840. He was completely…

New York

Sex & Power

As dirty tricks go, the leak to a Maine TV reporter of George W. Bush's 1976 arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol is a mixed bag. THE SCRAPBOOK has to award it 10 points for timing: It's the first November Surprise. On the other hand, the information itself is true. World-class dirty…

This week features the last presidential election of the 20th century. I say this not to associate myself with the pedants who insist the 21st century doesn't begin until January 1, 2001. I say it because this campaign has been about the familiar issues of the latter part of this century, not about…

MOST AMERICANS want to keep Uncle Sam out of their bedroom, and they probably feel the same way about the rest of the house. Too bad for them. The federal government is poised to invade America's homes with a slew of new energy efficiency standards for clothes washers, air conditioners,…

ONE ISSUE that has been virtually absent from the presidential campaign -- for the simple reason that the major candidates apparently agree on it -- is welfare reform. Yet just four years ago, the historic legislation that ended the federal welfare entitlement was highly controversial. In…

It was no surprise to find Martin Peretz making the case for "Gore, a Fiscal Conservative," in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week. The editor-in-chief of the New Republic is also the press corps's Gore-booster-in-chief. What did come as a surprise for those who read the endorsement with…

SOON AFTER CHRISTMAS in 1996, Republican representative Bill Archer of Texas met privately with President Clinton in the White House. Clinton had just been reelected. Archer, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and an advocate of scrapping the federal income tax, was eager to enlist…

It must have chagrined Mitch McConnell to wake up last Wednesday and discover that the New York Times loved New Jersey's Republican senatorial candidate Bob Franks more than he did. Maybe McConnell, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was daunted by the more than $ 50 million…

New Carrollton, Maryland

The next issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD will be printed the Friday before Election Day. So you don't have to wait a whole week for our brilliant analysis of the election returns, a special DAILY STANDARD will be published on our website early Wednesday, November 8. Visit weeklystandard.com early and…

While motoring along nicely in Roger Shattuck's Proust's Way, I was stopped when I read, on page 186, apropos of C. K. Scott Montcrieff's translation of Remembrance of Things Past, that "many critics, myself included, pointed out annoying bloomers and occasional excesses of style." Looking up from…

Last week, the Washington Post ran on the cover of its "Health" section an account of an $ 840,000 HUD program contracted out to something called the National Institute for Medical Options. The program pursues "alternative wellness" therapies in public housing projects, taking residents with…

Jerusalem

"He now leads the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the only thing he has to offer is fear itself." George W. Bush, acceptance speech at the GOP convention, August 3, 2000

ASK A FEW prominent Democrats about the relationship between Al Gore and Bill Clinton and the word you're most likely to hear, probably more than once, is "psychodrama." According to those who know him, Gore has come to resent a lot of things about Clinton. He resents Clinton's lack of respect for…

A long time ago, I saw some photographs taken at one of the clandestine meetings of Polish and Czech dissidents in the 1980s. Like high school year-book pictures or snapshots of the prom, they had a certain dated charm. There the dissidents all were, looking younger and happier, gleefully toasting…

The Beatles Anthology

In a recent interview, Daniel Patrick Moynihan compared the United States of 2000 to Rome in its golden age, mere decades before its fall. "Enjoy what joy we have," said Moynihan, "and expect things to be worse." The comparison to Rome is apt: America, like Rome, is enjoying a festival of wealth;…

When the RAND Corporation issued a study last week challenging the results of Texas's statewide educational assessment tests, Democrats gleefully sent the findings to reporters across the country and set out on the stump to eviscerate George W. Bush's education record. "[Bush's] claims to…

As a lifelong Yankees fan (my earliest baseball memory is Moose Skowron grounding out to end the 1957 World Series), I am, of course, overjoyed by the renewal of the Ruth-Gehrig-DiMaggio-Mantle dynasty. These Yankees -- whose fourteen consecutive wins in Series games (ended in game three of the…

Murfreesboro, Arkansas

This year's congressional spending bills are coyote ugly, with federal spending exceeding the Republicans' own self-imposed budget caps by close to $ 100 billion. Republicans no longer have a credible anti-big-government agenda to promote. Nowhere is that more evident than in this year's farm bill.

REPUBLICAN SENATOR Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas made an urgent call to Karl Rove, George W. Bush's chief campaign strategist, shortly after returning to Washington on October 25. Television ads attacking George W. Bush on Social Security were airing all over his home state, and Hutchinson had seen no…