Five years ago, the government of Oregon looked far into the future and made a list of goals and commitments it called "Benchmarks." By the year 2010, the state legislature declared, all two-year-olds will be immunized against contagious illness. All displaced workers will be guaranteed jobs at 90…

Jon Katz

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…

Simple logic made a Republican presidential victory look almost inescapable. The incumbent Democrat, elected with a minority of the vote, had never come close to pleasing most of the electorate. His poll numbers were terrible. His domestic program, built around a cumbersome health-care scheme, had…

On the day that James P. Pinkerton decided to become a futurist and political thinker, Madison Avenue missed its opportunity to recruit a copywriter of awesome potential. Ever since the day in 1990 when he emerged from the recesses of the Bush White House to proclaim the "New Paradigm" to a meeting…