70 articles
Buried deep in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal is an interview with venture capitalist Bill Davidow. As the crash in the value of Internet companies sours investors and fills the financial pages with tales of impending doom, Davidow has taken to reminding all who will listen, "There was a…
The morning of the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, the New York Times trotted out the story of Clarence Thomas's potential "conflict of interest."
AN ENDLESSLY FASCINATING topic of conversation about the 2000 presidential election has been why Al Gore wasn't winning big as the nominee of the incumbent party in times of unprecedented peace and prosperity. He had four aces, and he still couldn't rake in the pot. An equally fascinating question,…
GENERATIONS of law students have learned that the U.S. Supreme Court should avoid entanglement in "political" cases in order to preserve its reputation for impartiality. Unless, of course, such cases involve certain selectively chosen constitutional principles, which invariably call for the…
While the country looks forward to being united, not divided, by the Reformer with Results, THE SCRAPBOOK has to resolve some unpleasant housekeeping matters. According to our records, several celebrities vowed to vacate the country if George W. Bush was elected. We feel we must hold them to their…
At the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Celebration in Aspen, Colorado, two tribes of American Indians staged a mock battle for the foreign visitors. In the audience were Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer, both then in their seventies. At the end of the battle, when one of the Indians raced across the…
Theremin
NOW THAT THE U.S. Supreme Court has effectively stopped the Florida recount, it is natural to believe that the justices have once again saved us from political and legal disaster. There is no doubt that the Florida Supreme Court's stunning decision to order manual recounts across Florida created…
Most people's idea of getting away from it all is to vacation on some Caribbean island, go on a cruise, get a tan. But my favorite getaway is upstate New York in the bitter cold of December. In Schoharie County, way up in the Catskill Mountains, sits a log cabin my friend Steve's grandfather built…
Exhibitionism
IT WAS THE DEFINING public policy dispute of the 1990s, and Andrew Card, president of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association, wanted to make sure his voice was heard. President Clinton had offered up his health care reform in late 1993, and by spring of the following year it was in…
China is cracking down on fasting in East Turkistan, the province where Muslim Uighurs who chafe at Beijing's dictates are now trying to observe the prescribed fasts of the Muslim month of Ramadan. In the name of "public health," schools have arranged mandatory lunches for Uighur students, and…
The president's most trusted adviser is a Soviet agent. The nation's leading nuclear scientist is turning secrets over to the Kremlin. The entire federal government is honeycombed with Communists. American intelligence agencies are infested with Russian spies. Soviet agents are working in the…
A group of House Republicans will be meeting behind closed doors this week to choose the new chairmen of a number of committees. One of the most important races will determine who succeeds John Kasich as Budget Committee chairman. Seeking the top job are Saxby Chambliss, Jim Nussle, Nick Smith, and…
We have no trouble conceding that Al Gore's was an especially generous and gracious speech last Wednesday, in which the vice president conceded that he'd lost this year's election. All indications are, however, that Gore's supporters still cannot bring themselves to concede that George W. Bush…
GEORGE W. BUSH has never left much doubt that he intended to name Colin Powell his secretary of state. What Bush may not have foreseen is that Powell would try to press his influence beyond Foggy Bottom. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been lobbying for Pennsylvania governor…
"So much for states' rights," Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne sneered in commenting on the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore. His comment encapsulated several weeks' worth of noisy complaints about Republican politicians. As the Gore camp portrayed it, the GOP was cynically selling out…
IT'S GOING TO BE CROWDED in the Oval Office of President George W. Bush. Andrew Card will have the title of White House chief of staff, but in truth a troika of equals will have instant access to the president: Card, political adviser Karl Rove, and communications czarina Karen Hughes. This sounds…
LOST IN THE litigation shuffle that ended the presidential contest was the Florida Supreme Court's Monday, December 11, revised decision in Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris, the first case decided by it, and the case the U.S. Supreme Court remanded for clarification. This is a pity: Had…
Hi! I'm Larry.
As a result of Friday's Florida Supreme Court decision, Al Gore may be sworn in as president on January 20. If he is, he will receive our best wishes upon assuming the burdens of office. We will support his policies when we think they are right for the country. We will pay proper respect to the…
On Friday afternoon, December 8, a 4-3 majority of the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling that required the state to immediately implement Al Gore's scheme to "recount" his way to the presidency. The majority's opinion is unique in the annals of judicial capriciousness and overreach: an…
There are many ways to analyze the results of the 2000 election, but my favorite begins like a James Michener novel with the ice age. When the temperature dropped, large quantities of ocean water were locked up in the polar ice caps, causing the sea level to drop by 200 feet. This exposed soft,…
After more than a decade, our apartment is being repainted. Rugs have gone off for cleaning. Furniture that we have had for more than twenty years is being replaced. The sense of a new leaf is upon me, which has brought on the urge to live, somehow, differently than I have until now. No way could…
Just when THE SCRAPBOOK was tempted to give Bill Clinton some small amount of credit for lying low during the Florida litigation, we came across a remarkable interview that the president granted to New York Daily News gossip columnist Mitchell Fink.
Malcolm Bradbury -- novelist, teacher, critic, and scriptwriter -- died in England on November 27, at the age of sixty-eight. He was best known for The History Man, one of the great academic comedies ever written, and Rates of Exchange, a comic attack on communism set in a fictitious country in…
Of all the asinine post-election pieces THE SCRAPBOOK has read (trust us, we've read them all), there's been none worse than Washington Post fashion writer Robin Givhan's 800-world broadside against Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris's cosmetics choices. Entitled "The Eyelashes Have It,"…
MAINE VOTERS' REJECTION on November 7 of an initiative to legalize physician-assisted suicide was only the latest in a string of defeats for the American euthanasia movement. Granted, the margin was narrow -- 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent. And with the Netherlands finally in the process of formally…
The last thing my sisters and I would do on Christmas Eve -- before retiring to our separate rooms and our private paroxysms of insomniac anticipation -- was make sure our parents had put out cookies for Santa Claus. After all, we didn't know the man. Perhaps he was the type who, sensing a…
In Washington, D.C., down in the nest of government buildings known as the Federal Triangle, there's a colossus called the Ariel Rios Building. Nowadays it houses the Environmental Protection Agency, but back in the 1930s, it was used by the postal service.
FORGET ABOUT THE PRESIDENCY for a minute. Has anyone looked at what the elections have done to the world's most deliberative body? They've turned it into a chamber of horrors.
The most bizarre Florida moment of the past month came courtesy of Matthew Staver, a lawyer who intervened on behalf of Seminole County absentee voters against the unsuccessful suit brought by a Gore loyalist to throw out the absentee votes cast in that county. As part of his closing argument,…
BEFORE THIS ELECTION, if you had read the Florida election code, you might have thought it entirely reasonable, if unremarkable. It seems to divide the responsibility of counting votes among different governmental bodies. You might have thought that the county canvassing boards had the primary…
BEING A QUADRUPLE MURDERER who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize means never having to say you're sorry to your victims' families. At least that's what some journalists and one particular Swiss politician seem to believe.
When Dick Cheney met with House GOP whip Tom DeLay last week, he got an urgent piece of advice. "The first person you should call on Capitol Hill is Jack Murtha," DeLay said. Murtha is a veteran Democratic House member from Pennsylvania who's not well known to the public. But he's a powerhouse, and…
Jerusalem
NO DISINTERESTED OBSERVER can believe that any known method of counting the six million votes cast in Florida would provide certainty. The only sane approach is to count the votes according to the laws in place on November 7, and accept that result. But that's the one thing Florida's supreme court…
GEORGE W. BUSH has met Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, exactly once. That was at the funeral of Republican senator Paul Coverdell of Georgia last July. Bush has never met Dick Gephardt, the House Democratic boss. So, obviously, he's never done any political, legislative, or public policy…
Exhibit 1
Al Gore and Joe Lieberman know they won Florida. Can they prove this? Of course not. So how can they know this? They just know. They know, because more people wanted to vote for them, even if somehow they didn't. And how do they know this? Because of some ballots that were double-punched and other…
My Father's Daughter
Tallahassee, Florida
Listening to Jesse Jackson's version of events in Florida, you'd think the Republicans were trying to elect George Wallace, not George W. Bush. According to Jackson, in Seminole County, "Republicans went in and began to fill out absentee ballots. That is a case of tampering before the court now. .…
WHAT'LL BECOME OF Katherine Harris? During the stormy two and a half weeks between Election Day and her final certification of George Bush as winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes on November 26, the Florida secretary of state was accused of being opportunistic, partisan, corrupt, and stupid.
Bath, England
This Friday night, I am due to have drinks with some friends. But there's a problem: I've been avoiding these people for weeks.
BEHIND AL GORE'S unprecedented challenge to George W. Bush's slim but certified majority of electors is the vice president's claim to the moral and political high ground based on having won the popular vote. For now, the recount in Florida is at issue, but soon the fight may move to the Electoral…
Like the 17-year locust, Republican unity has made a brief appearance, but it's unlikely to survive the staffing of a putative Bush administration or reappear anytime soon. Even as liberal Democratic consternation over solid GOP support for Bush was growing, the first rumbles of conservative…
Maestro
Overheard on the elevator: The latest poll shows that 60 percent of Americans think Gore should concede; the other 40 percent are serving on his legal team.
Gore partisans are still complaining about what they term the "rule of the mob" or, more punctiliously, the "near riot" by Republican activists that they claim "intimidated" the three-member Miami-Dade Country canvassing board into discontinuing its hand recount the day before Thanksgiving.
Feeling ambitious, Professor David Clemens of Monterey Peninsula College last semester proposed a new course for the English Department, "English 38 -- More or Less Human? A Study of Literature, Technology, and Human Nature." The required materials had a nice contemporary ring. Students would read…
By a process intellectual historians will one day scratch their heads bloody over, articulate Americans -- a good many of them, anyway -- seem lately to have rejected the very possibility of honest argument about issues of great public moment. In the pages of our finest newspapers, for example,…
London, England
Two weeks ago, THE SCRAPBOOK noted that an "Emergency Committee" of intellectuals and show-bizzers, aflame about Florida's ballot mess, had published a pro-Gore ad in the New York Times. "Vice President Gore has been elected President by a clear constitutional majority of the popular vote and…
"Their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together. Which had the whiskers, which had the burnsides: which was which?"
LOOK AT A MAP of how America's counties voted on November 7 and you'd think the Democratic party is barely clinging to life. Al Gore country consists of the West Coast, the Northeast, urban areas of the upper Midwest, and isolated patches with large Latino or black populations. Almost everywhere…
Right Ho, Jeeves
The Hill Bachelors
Every two hundred years, we tend to have a small problem. A glitch appears in the electoral system; a deadlock ensues; a loophole presents itself; an unscrupulous figure bursts through the breach, calmly creating incredible havoc. In 2000, this figure is Albert Gore Jr., trying to make up new rules…
John J. Pitney Jr., WEEKLY STANDARD contributor and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, is just out with a new book, The Art of Political Warfare (University of Oklahoma Press). As his title suggests, Pitney has catalogued -- brilliantly -- the various ways in which public life in…
The China Threat
We hold fast to the idea that the winner of an election is the candidate who gets the most votes on Election Day. Florida election law embodies this same idea, as it should, and seems to have been reasonably well crafted. The Gore campaign, fearful that its backers failed to produce enough votes…
An Honest President
Republican attorney Mark K. Seifert has e-mailed THE SCRAPBOOK a diary of his experience as a Florida recount monitor, parts of which we reprint here:
The Knox Brothers
AS THE NATIONAL SPOTLIGHT lingers on the turmoil in Florida, back in Washington a number of congressional Republicans are vying for leadership positions and committee chairmanships. The outcome of these contests will offer some clues about the coming term.
The word downsizing, both an excuse and not a very happy euphemism for firing people, needs, I have decided, a mate: upsizing. The country seems to be in a serious upsizing phase. When and where and how it began, I don't pretend to know, but I have a lurking -- as opposed to a somersaulting --…
WE ARE TOLD one of Al Gore's proudest achievements is winning more votes for president than his boss ever did. However, Al Gore has also surpassed Bill Clinton in a more dubious respect: By his campaign's handling of the issue of military absentee ballots, he has managed to worsen the already…