David Brooks is a prominent conservative commentator and columnist for The New York Times. He was a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its founding in 1995, where he wrote extensively on politics, culture, and American national identity, contributing over 200 pieces to the magazine. His work at the publication helped shape its intellectual voice, including influential essays such as "A Return to National Greatness."
I'D NEVER REALLY CONSIDERED the way George W. Bush resembles Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island until I read Paul A. Cantor’s brilliant book, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization. As Cantor points out, Gilligan is not the smartest one on the island. He doesn’t have the obvious…
ACROSS THE COUNTRY Republicans and conservatives are asking each other the same basic question: Has the other side gone crazy? Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids? Because every day some Democrat seems to make a manic or totally over-the-top statement about George Bush, the Republican…
TWO VERY INTERESTING economics pieces (yes, it is possible) in the New York Times yesterday. The first is a front page piece headlined Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show. The average income of the 400 richest taxpayers in the U.S. grew to $174 million, up from an annual $46…
GEORGE W. BUSH is astoundingly popular with the American people. His approval ratings have hovered around the mid-60s or above for nearly two years--a phenomenon whose staying power cannot be explained by an initial reaction of support for the president after September 11. He has singlehandedly…
IN 1927, young Arnold Beichman went to Yankee Stadium to see Babe Ruth play. After the game, Beichman hung around the players' exit to get another glimpse of the Babe, who eventually emerged from the clubhouse, resplendent in a belted camel-hair coat, and climbed into the driver's seat of his big…
BOY AM I in a terrible mood. I watched and listened to the punditry on President Bush's speech on the USS Lincoln. The people he was standing before have been away from their families for ten months. That's mothers away from their kids, fathers away from their kids, men an women away from their…
GEORGE ORWELL was a genuinely modest man. But he knew he had a talent for facing unpleasant facts. That doesn't seem at first glance like much of a gift. But when one looks around the world, one quickly sees how rare it is. Most people nurture the facts that confirm their worldview and ignore or…
MICHAEL KELLY was born into a newspaper family. His father Tom was a reporter on the Washington Daily News. His mother Marguerite writes the wonderful "Family Almanac" column for the Washington Post. Sometime over the past few decades reporters became journalists, but Michael never really made the…
I WISH MICHAEL KELLY were alive to see this day. He would have known how to savor it. I wish Ronald Reagan could be aware of the scenes being played out in Baghdad. He would know that the liberationist sentiment he rekindled in the American heart didn't die out with the liberation of eastern and…
LET THE over-exuberance recommence! Washington is in the grip of a series of mood swings. An insanely negative tone prevailed in the war coverage here at the beginning of this week, but now it is the hawks who feel justified in gloating. If you had read the American press last Sunday, Monday and…
A S I WRITE, a couple of days into the war, the hawks are optimistic and the liberals are bracing to get beaten about with sticks. The hawks are optimistic because the Iraqi regime seems to be crumbling. None of the terrible things the doves predicted has yet come to pass: no mass riots on the Arab…
LET'S SEE WHERE WE STAND. Over the past six months, while the United Nations has been debating the definition of words like "immediate" and "unconditional," the United States has deployed hundreds of thousands of troops around Iraq. It has done so smoothly, and without the terrorist counterattack…
I DIDN'T THINK the president was at his best tonight. His reading was not smooth. I'm sure that many French, British, and high-toned American viewers will have their opinion confirmed that George W. Bush simply hasn't read enough books to be president, let alone lead the nation into war.
ASIDE FROM the one you're holding in your hands and a few others, the best magazine in existence is American Demographics. This thin journal serves up on a monthly basis a relentless stream of facts, data, and theories that seem at first glance to be highly significant and culturally revealing. I…
THE AMERICAN COMMENTARIAT is gravely concerned. Over the past week, George W. Bush has shown a disturbing tendency not to waffle when it comes to Iraq. There has been an appalling clarity and coherence to his position. There has been a reckless tendency not to be murky, hesitant, or evasive.…
THE MOST SIGNIFICANT THING President Bush said during his press conference--just about the only significant thing he said--is that regardless of the whip count, he will put a second resolution up for a vote in the U.N. Security Council.
AFTER JOE LIEBERMAN completed his unsuccessful campaign for the vice-presidency, I pretty much concluded that anti-Semitism was no longer a major feature of American life. I went around making the case that the Anti-Defamation League should close up shop, since the evil they were organized to…
I MADE THE MISTAKE of watching French news the night of Colin Powell's presentation before the Security Council. The report on Powell's speech on A2, which is the second most important French channel, wasn't too bad. There was a sneering summary of Powell's argument that there is al Qaeda activity…
THE CENTRAL POINT to make about President Bush's State of the Union speech is this: For the past several weeks, the American people have had growing qualms about going to war against Iraq. This speech will reverse that trend. If President Bush's speech had been a dud, it would have been cataclysmic…
Nashville
LAST SUNDAY, the New York Times magazine published a document so amazing, I assumed that it would set off a world-wide sensation, a great cacophony of breast-beating, disillusion, and internal crisis. It was a letter Jimmy Hendrix wrote to his father in August 1965. The letter describes the…
I'VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME on elite college campuses recently--at Yale, where I taught a course, as well as at Princeton, Dartmouth, Kenyon, and a few less rarefied schools--and while I've temporarily given up on the game of trying to diagnose the ills of America's youth, I have found that things…
I AM APPALLED by my journalistic colleagues' failure to fully exploit the Liesel Pritzker story. Once upon a time, the American media knew how to treat beautiful heiresses--exhaustively. They were our royalty. Now it's Jennifer Lopez. That represents a profound shift in our culture (I would say…
AFGHANISTAN IS A MESS. We know that because everybody says so. Al Gore says so. But something more complicated is going on, as a fine report by Pamela Constable in the Washington Post earlier this week makes clear. The headline reinforces the conventional wisdom: "A Year After Taliban, Daily Life…
ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe? Are they about to go into Paul Krugman-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses? Are they about to go off on…
WHEN FACULTY MEMBERS at the Sorbonne gather to discuss who should get the prize for most evil alumnus, they probably rehash all the familiar names--Pol Pot, mastermind of the Cambodian genocide; Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru's Shining Path guerrilla movement; and Ali Shariat, the intellectual…
WELL, I'M HUMBLED. For the past two months me and just about every other pundit under the sun have been saying the same thing: There is no theme to this election, no trend. This nation is divided down the middle.
NOW THAT THE Anaheim Angels have reached the World Series, baseball nuts from Washington will be able to take the perfect conservative flight, from Ronald Reagan National Airport in D.C. to John Wayne Airport in Orange County.
IN THE PAST 20 minutes I have seen 4 1/2 acres of pelvic skin. I'm sitting in a sidewalk bar called Wet Willies in the South Beach section of Miami. I'm nursing a phosphorescent blue drink in a plastic cup, and on the sidewalk in front of me there is a parade of young women with their…
EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the…
Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens Basic, 208 pp., $24 GEORGE ORWELL was one of the best essayists of his time, and Christopher Hitchens is one of the best essayists of his. Orwell is famous for his intellectual honesty and his willingness occasionally to anger his allies on the left. So is…
THERE ARE SOME EXPERTS you treasure: Charlie Cook and Michael Barone on elections, Peter Gammons on baseball, People magazine on the best and worst dressed celebrities. For me, William H. Frey belongs on that list.
THIS IS TRULY the Groundhog Day war. Everything that happened before and during Desert Storm, we now have to live through again. The same people who lost Desert Storm for us (Scowcroft, Eagleburger, Powell) now make the same arguments against deposing Saddam. And we all have to pay respectful…
I don’t know if you've ever noticed the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue grill. He walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway visionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the…
I SOMETIMES find myself in dinner party conversations with people who complain about the increasing professionalization of kids' sports. And I find that most of the people who utter these laments have one thing in common: They don't know what they are talking about. Over the past four years, and…
GEORGE SANTAYANA once observed that Americans don't solve problems, they just leave them behind. They take advantage of all that space and move. If there's an idea they don't like, they don't bother refuting it, they just go somewhere else, and if they can't go somewhere else, they just leave it in…
JUST TO LET YOU KNOW, I'm not running for president. I feel I have to squash the speculation, which I'm sure is rampant across the land, after I spoke at a political rally following Senator John Edwards and House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt.
REPUBLICANS have been pretty sanguine about their prospects in this fall's midterm elections. They shouldn't be. It's true that President Bush's popularity ratings remain high and that, asked which party they would like to see control Congress next year, the voters are still evenly divided. But…
GEORGE BUSH has a novel approach to the Middle East; he tells the truth. Yesterday's statement wasn't filled with diplomatic jargon. It didn't try to reconcile six different policies through artful fudging. Instead the statement has the ring of honest conviction. This has a number of practical…
IT MUST BE MISERABLE to be on the Democratic left. For decades you've been inveighing against the evils of corporate power. For decades you've been waiting for a popular backlash against concentrated wealth, one that would finally provide momentum for the liberal economic policies you've been…
THE POWER of the religious impulse is really quite extraordinary. The sainted folks over at Opinion Journal inform us of the conniption being thrown by the American Atheists, the group founded by the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair (may God have mercy upon her soul). It seems that when the World Trade…
THANK GOD efforts to repeal the inheritance tax failed. There is no group in American society as left wing as the inheritors of great wealth. If we had repealed the death tax, in a few years, faster than you could say MacArthur Foundation, the country would have been rife with neurotic…
THE MOST INTERESTING THING I've read in the papers recently is a New York Times review of "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." The book is a sexual memoir by a 53-year-old French art critic named Catherine Millet, and somehow it seems to represent the pathetic end-point of a series of very long and…
WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, I stumbled across a small paperback autobiography by Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's. As I remember it, Kroc described the epiphany that was the seed of his whole empire: The key to creating a successful hamburger restaurant is not the hamburger, it's the fries. People…
THE PRESS, Tom Wolfe noted in "The Right Stuff," is a Victorian gentleman. After each event, the Victorian gent struggles to find the correct emotional response. Once the correct emotion has been discerned, it is repeated and recirculated with a pious self-assurance familiar to 19th-century drawing…
I DON'T THINK domestic policy is coming back.
CALL ME Jack Kerouac. I'm sitting in the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago writing stream of consciousness-style while memories of my past pretensions flow back to me. The Billy Goat is under Michigan Avenue between the Chicago Tribune building and the Sun-Times building. It became famous when John…
I WAS STRUCK BY a little story in the local section of the Washington Post. The Prince William County, Virginia, School Board has just completed construction on a new school and they had to figure out what to call it. Four thousand local people signed a petition saying it should be named after Jeff…
AROUND 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world. Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts. They…
AROUND 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world. Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts. They…
IF YOU RELY on the American press, it is simply impossible to figure out what is going on in the West Bank. For example, in Thursday's New York Times there was an inept front page story entitled, Attacks turn Palestinian Dream Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust. Then inside there was another story,…
THE BRUTALIST bourgeoisophobia of the Islamic extremists is pretty straightforward. The attitudes of European etherealists are quite a bit more complicated. Europeans, of course, are bourgeois themselves, even more so in some ways than Americans and Israelis. What they distrust about America and…
THOSE ENERGY lobbyists are a lame bunch. They are lavishly funded by the oil industry. They get to work in fancy institutes and have open dining at The Palm. And look at how little influence they actually have on the Bush energy plan. Here's the biggest piece of legislation of the decade for them.…
OUR COLLEAGUE John Podhoretz came to Washington recently and made an astute observation. If you travel in conservative circles, he noticed, all anybody wants to talk about is the war. But among liberals, all anybody wants to talk about is campaign finance reform and Enron. In the large scheme of…
A COUPLE OF weeks ago I wrote a piece on how George W. Bush, who doesn't possess stellar academic credentials, has nonetheless made a series of extremely wise decisions while leading the war on terror. I pointed out that Bush's brilliant performance challenges our conventional definitions of…
Alexander Hamilton & the Persistence of Myth by Stephen F. Knott University Press of Kansas, 344 pp., $34.95 Writings by Alexander Hamilton edited by Joanne B. Freeman Library of America, 1,108 pp., $40 IN 1987, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy published a book called "The Rise and Fall of the Great…
HAS THERE ever been a bigger challenge to the American college admissions process than George Bush? Selecting the nation's future leaders, admissions committees at elite colleges insist that students have nearly flawless grades. Bush didn't. They require stratospheric SAT scores. Bush's were good…
THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE threw its big annual dinner Wednesday night. The speaker, Norman Podhoretz, delivered an eloquent tribute to America and the Bush administration. He described what the war on terror is really about. But he also delivered a startling warning: He predicted that we…
GEORGE BUSH has probably spent less time thinking about electoral politics over the past four months than any president has over a comparable period since the end of World War II. And what is the result of this benign neglect? The Republican party is, for the moment, in fantastic political shape.…
WHEN I LIVED in Europe, I used to watch the Olympics on European TV. I loved watching the BBC because their announcers were so good, but the problem was that if, say, a British runner came in eleventh in a particular race, you never found out who came in the top ten. Their cameras would only focus…
IT'S TIME TO PLAY "Grade the Democrats." Four prominent Democrats--who are coincidentally all thinking of running for president--have delivered ambitious policy speeches in the past three weeks. Responsible citizens will want to know what is on their minds (without having to actually sit through…
IT'S A bankruptcy of mammoth proportions. Thousands of people could see their life savings wiped out, hundreds of thousands will feel the pain, and tens of millions will have their lives seriously affected. Of course I'm talking about Kmart's decision to file Chapter 11. The odd thing is that while…
ON JULY 5, 1995, Enron Corporation donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Six days later, Enron executives were on a trade mission with Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor to Bosnia and Croatia. With Kantor's support, Enron signed a $100 million contract to build a 150-megawatt power…
THE ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER has undertaken a heroic and important task: getting reporters to think about religion. A few years ago a bunch of journalists and I were flown up to Maine to learn about evangelical Christianity from a group of academics. It was an intriguing and coherent lesson…
HAS SEPTEMBER 11 fundamentally changed the nation's political landscape? The common view among political consultants seems to be that it hasn't. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, appearing at a Hudson Institute event on January 3, argued that though change is more exciting than continuity,…
ON JULY 5, 1995, Enron Corporation donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Six days later, Enron executives were on a Clinton Commerce department trade mission to Bosnia and Croatia. With Kantor's support, Enron signed a $100 million contract to build a 150-megawatt power plant.…
IS THERE a starker contrast than the one between the glorious triumph of American arms abroad and the grubby selfishness of our politics at home? While American soldiers, seamen, and pilots risk their lives in and around Afghanistan, while the American people rally around their nation's cause with…
SNOBBERY is an ugly thing. The women's television network Oxygen ran an ad in the business section of Wednesday's New York Times. The body of the ad purported to be a series of quotations from made-up middle American newspapers about Oxygen's programming. "Too urban" said "Smalltown News." "Too…
IT'S BEEN a hell of a week:
"We are going into this war lightly," I.F. Stone wrote in the Nation on December 8, 1941. The editors of Life magazine agreed. "Americans took the news, good and bad, with admirable serenity," they wrote in their first post-Pearl Harbor edition. And it's true. If you look through American magazines…
THE INTERNET has had a good war. Every day I find truckloads of absolutely essential information as I do my early afternoon web surfing. I start with The Weekly Standard website (modesty forbids me from touting my own colleagues' work), then I move on to harvest the daily thoughts of two people who…
THE STIMULUS PACKAGE now dragging its sorry behind through Congress is a bill that is too stupid to fail. So many politicians have loaded so many bad ideas into it that under no circumstances will they not let it become law. First there are the bad pork barrel spending ideas--the subsidies for…
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris Random House, 864 pp., $35 IN 1903, in the midst of his struggles to build the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt was asked by Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, for a list of recommended books. The list, which Roosevelt wrote out…
I NEED A LITTLE HELP. I haven't figured out how I am going to respond to the rout of the Taliban. There are so many postures to adopt, and I just can't figure out which would be the most emotionally satisfying. Here are the candidates:
"A SINGULAR FACT OF MODERN WAR," the historian Bruce Catton once wrote, "is that it takes charge. Once begun it has to be carried to its conclusion, and carrying it there sets in motion events that may be beyond men's control. Doing what has to be done to win, men perform acts that alter the very…
I'M READING THE MORNING PAPERS and my mood is shifting faster than Bob Brenly's. The front page of the Washington Post tells me that American bombers are the military equivalent of Curt Schilling. The bombings have been "very effective," destroying at least 15 Taliban tanks, according to a Northern…
TWO OF THE MOST BRILLIANT EXPLANATIONS of Osama bin Laden were written eleven years ago. The first is an essay that appeared in the September 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly by Bernard Lewis called "The Roots of Muslim Rage." The second is a lecture delivered by V.S. Naipaul as part of the…
IF YOU WANT TO GET CHEERED UP, go to a college campus. I spent a day at Yale this week and found the campus alive with debate. Students were generally more supportive of George W. Bush and the war effort than their professors, and there was a wide range of views. What's more, some of the…
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, the New York Times has exhaustively and admirably run a daily feature called "Portraits in Grief." It is a page of small obituaries of people who died at the World Trade Center. Reporters are sent out to talk with the families, friends, and co-workers of the victims, and they…
TWO OF THE MOST BRILLIANT EXPLANATIONS of Osama bin Laden were written 11 years ago. The first is an essay that appeared in the September 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly by Bernard Lewis called "The Roots of Muslim Rage." The second is a lecture delivered by V.S. Naipaul as part of the Manhattan…
DO YOU REMEMBER THE SIGHTS and sounds of campaign 2000? Al and Tipper’s big kiss. Chaka Khan closing the show at the ultra-inclusive Republican convention. Granny D. marching for campaign finance reform at Arianna Huffington’s Shadow Convention. There were slogans like "Prosperity With a Purpose"…
DOES ANYBODY BUT ME feel upbeat, and guilty about it? I feel upbeat because the country seems to be a better place than it was a month ago. I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. But there's so much to cheer one up. In the first place,…
LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of…
MOST PRESIDENTS RETREAT to the bully pulpit after suffering a setback, but George W. Bush has done the opposite. Following the Jeffords defection, President Bush went down into the trenches, conducting detailed negotiations with members of Congress, and visiting the Capitol building to personally…
WE’RE A HALF YEAR INTO THE BUSH PRESIDENCY, and many conservatives are moderately morose, and many liberals are moderately happy. On the right, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot summed up the outlook earlier this month: "All of a sudden the political debate has taken a notable turn to the…
IT,S PERFECTLY OBVIOUS that by the time I am 70, I,ll be a museum piece. In the first place, I am going to be the last balding man in America. Scientists are clearly on the verge of stopping hair loss. Pretty soon, there will be anti-baldness shampoos, pills, and toothpaste. You,ll be able to…
FOR THE PAST HALF CENTURY, most people thought the Arab-Israeli conflict was a fight over land. Leaders would propose slogans like "Land for Peace." Diplomats would draw lines on maps, hoping to find some territorial arrangement that would be acceptable to both sides. But the events of the last…
All presidents need a little help from their opponents, and George W. Bush's opponents in the Democratic party and the media have done him a favor. First they tried to persuade America that George Bush is an imbecile who doesn't know enough to be an effective president. But now that he's run a…
NOAH WEBSTER DIDN'T JUST PRODUCE A DICTIONARY; he also wrote one of the most influential school textbooks in American history. It was called An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking, and it went through seventy-seven editions in the half century after its publication in 1785. It…
THE CHINA STANDOFF produced some strange bedfellows. Most commentators thought it ended with a clear triumph for the Bush administration. On the left, Frank Rich and Anthony Lewis thought so, and David Broder and Warren Rudman in the center agreed. So did Paul Gigot and Charles Krauthammer on the…
THE CHINA STANDOFF produced some strange bedfellows. Most commentators thought it ended with a clear triumph for the Bush administration. On the left, Frank Rich and Anthony Lewis thought so, and David Broder and Warren Rudman in the center agreed. So did Paul Gigot and Charles Krauthammer on the…
One of the many virtues of the campaign finance reform debate was that it prompted a national reevaluation of the film career of Yul Brynner. Robert Byrd got this going when he rose on the floor of the Senate to discuss the vulgarity of political ads on TV. The extremely senior senator from West…
Goldilocks is dead, and George W. Bush should admit it. The president has been selling his tax cut plan by saying that it's not too big and not too small -- it's just right, like Goldilocks's chair. This strategy of disciplined constancy worked well for Bush in Texas, and has so far in Washington.…
This year's tax and budget debate really comes down to one essential question: Is the money going to be there? The Congressional Budget Office projects surpluses of about $ 5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans insist that those projections are conservative, so the government can…
Milan
What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They've portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical,…
We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days…
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,…
Paris
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…
I hope Americans will take advantage of the Subway Series to overcome their narrow prejudices and recognize that not all New Yorkers are abrasive, arrogant jerks -- that only the Yankees fans are like that. For we are all formed by the things we love, and to be a Yankees fan -- as to be a Cowboys…
The First American
I'm not impressed by Al Gore's Internet boasts, because I was surfing the web before the web was invented. In 1979, I enrolled at the University of Chicago, and in lieu of a social life, the university offered us a really great library with open stacks. While students at other schools were wasting…
Conservatives are gloomy: Congressional Republicans seem to be losing yet another budget battle to Bill Clinton. The president vetoed their tax cut and paid no political price. So the Republicans turned around and adopted his priorities. Instead of insisting on a major tax cut, they are proposing…
Los Angeles
It started on Monday with a Hispanic girl singing the national anthem, a black Baptist minister preaching by video from the pulpit of his church, an Asian-American woman celebrating the virtues of voluntarism, and a black retired general defending affirmative action. It concluded on Thursday with a…
"I read THE WEEKLY STANDARD," Ralph Nader confesses, leaning across the table with that deadly serious look of his. "You guys need to think bigger."
My Love Affair with America
Though I own my house and have made certain commitments to it, I've begun sneaking out and seeing other houses on Sunday afternoons. The homes I spend time with are flashier and younger than the one I live in. They put ads in the Sunday paper announcing their availability and thrusting their charms…
GEORGE BUSH has opened up a startling 8 point lead over Al Gore, according to the latest Los Angeles Times poll, and the conventional view is that he's built this post-primary advantage by moving to the center. But that's not quite right. Over the past month Bush has moved to the center and the…
If you'd like to be tortured with dignity and humiliated with respect, you really ought to check out the Internet newsletter of the Arizona Power Exchange, an S&M group headquartered in Phoenix. The organization offers a full array of services to what is now genteelly known as the leather…
The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., is one of the finer history museums in the country, so naturally the people in charge are trying to muck it up. Unlike the Museum of American History, which has become a breeding ground for fashionable multicultural grievances, the Portrait Gallery…
We've had our first baby boomer president. McCain wants to save us from another
We're almost an hour into The Vagina Monologues, but so far, for some reason, I'm not really connecting with it. Eve Ensler has already performed many of the most popular vignettes from her one-woman play -- the gynecological exam bit, the lesbian prostitute bit, the feminist onanism workshop bit.…
"WHAT? Are we giving up?!" That's what one McCain loyalist moaned as the Republican tax debate raged in New Hampshire last week. His man, John McCain, had just proposed tax cuts far smaller than the ones George W. Bush has on the table. Moreover, McCain launched his program amidst a swell of…
Paris Drake is quite a piece of work. His criminal career started when he was 14, and he has been arrested 22 times in the intervening 18 years. Drake, a New York native who has no fixed address, has served time for drug-dealing, assault, weapons possession, larceny, and burglary. His prison…
In the early 1990s, the owners of the major league baseball teams held a meeting in Denver. Jerry McMorris, the owner of the new Colorado Rockies, decided to host a lunch not at a restaurant near the meeting site, but at a country club in suburban Castle Rock. It was a mistake. The men who own…
The quintessential C-SPAN moment came during a Booknotes program in 1991, while host Brian Lamb was interviewing Martin Gilbert, the author of a biography of Winston Churchill. Gilbert was talking about the interplay between private scandal and public life when the following exchange took place:
CONSERVATIVES will always have a soft spot for the eighties. They'll always have a nostalgic longing for the glory days of Reykjavik and Berlin, for the era of yellow ties, Drexel Burnham, Duran Duran, and Madonna-wannabes wearing their underwear on the outside of their clothes. And the best part…
At first blush, the Republican presidential field doesn't exactly overflow with new ideas. Steve Forbes updates the free-market policies and themes of Jack Kemp's 1988 campaign. Gary Bauer's campaign echoes the social conservatism of Pat Robertson's 1988 run. Elizabeth Dole reprises the Main Street…
Ames, Iowa
Adelaide, Australia
LOOK HOW FAR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY has traveled in just four years. In 1995, the main thrust of the Republican Congress was to get government off our backs. The Gingrichites called themselves the Leave Us Alone Coalition. Government was the problem, and the GOP mission was to cut and devolve federal…
New York
These days there are six members of my family: me and my wife, our three kids, and Baltimore Orioles left fielder B. J. Surhoff. I suppose we should count Mr. Surhoff as a member in absentia since he doesn't actually know we exist. But for the past three seasons, our older son, who is 8, has…
Let's say you've brought your kids to Washington, D.C., on their summer vacation. You've taken them to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, shown them the U.S. Capitol, and you find they're charged up about American history, maybe more than at any other time in their lives. Along the…
I wouldn't mind editing a glossy lifestyle magazine, unless it meant having to write one of those editor's notes that go in the front. I'm talking about the single page columns with names like "Welcome" and "From the Editor's Desk" that are supposed to establish rapport between editor and readers.…
Almost everywhere John McCain goes on the campaign trail, he gets the Hanoi Hilton introduction. A local poobah will be up on the podium, and he'll be saying what an honor it is to welcome Senator McCain to town. Except that when he says the word "honor" it's with an extra ripple in his voice so…
The press secretaries were inundated. Reporters were beginning to ask questions about corruption at the European Commission, the bureaucratic and regulatory nerve center of the European Union in Brussels. So Jimmy Jamar, commissioner Edith Cresson's spokesman, sat down and wrote a confidential memo…
I'M WILLING TO DO A LOT FOR YOU, dear Reader, but I'm afraid I couldn't quite drag myself to the "Call for Reconciliation" meeting Republicans and Democrats threw for themselves last Thursday at 8:00 A.M. The sight of a bipartisan congressional scrum of high-minded members from both sides of the…
THERE MUST BE A WAY to beat those guys. There must be a way to beat the Bill Clinton/Tony Blair triangulators, those political magpies who steal ideas from the right and left and mix everything into a Third Way souffle, light on intellectual coherence but apparently delectable to voters. There must…
Plainfield, Connecticut, is a nice, decent American community. It's a town of about 14,000 people, up near the northeast border with Rhode Island. It was incorporated in 1699 and quickly became a small industrial center, powered by the two rivers, the Quinebaug and the Moosup, that flow by. George…
We're reaching the tail end of the contented nineties and there's not a compelling legislative debate on the horizon. The do-nothing Republican Congress is still beating the dead impeachment horse. And the White House types are still harking back to the glory days of the Family and Medical Leave…
It's an iron law of American life that each new ruling class makes you nostalgic for the last one. But who could have predicted that we'd so soon be longing for the Rhodes-scholar types who trod the earth like giants in the early days of the Clinton administration? Who could have foretold that we…
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
THESE DAYS, RUSSIA'S ECONOMY depresses everyone. But it's worth remembering that just a few years ago, it was a glamorous and promising story. In the early nineties, when communism was freshly dead, Moscow was awash with Western experts telling the Russians how to reform their economy. These people…
If there's anybody left in America who qualifies as genteel, surely it's New York Times columnist and PBS frontman Russell Baker. But these days Baker has been in what for him qualifies as a quaking rage. He recently wrote a column titled "A Shudder of Disgust," about the degradation of public…
My family and I just got back from Disney World, and we had so much fun I was never once tempted to commit cultural commentary. But the guidebook I read beforehand was so odd I can't help it. There are over 2.5 million copies of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World in print (published by…
Shallow people are greedy for money, but profound people are greedy for real estate. The shallow person wants fast cars and glitz, but anyone with a broader worldview longs for the kind of home they have in Winnetka, Ill. The million-dollar houses stretch for mile upon mile through the North Shore…
Some people think we are in for a long era of Republican rule, others think the Democrats will return as the majority party, but Richard Rorty, America's most famous academic philosopher, predicts we are about to become a dictatorship.
Every so often the conservative movement casts up another hero. Sometimes the darling of the moment turns out to be a true hero, like Ward Connerly, the spokesman for the California Civil Rights Initiative. And sometimes the object of our admiration turns out to be Flake-o Supreme -- mention the…
DOES ANY COUNTRY have more reasons to be proud of itself than Great Britain? Twenty-five years ago the United Kingdom was a basketcase. Its economy was a shambles, the IMF had to take over its fiscal policy, and its people lived in cold flats with bad plumbing. Today, Britain has one of the most…
A few months ago a parent at my kids' school asked me if I wanted to contribute to a piece of Communist propaganda. Well, sort of. Ari directs the theater program at the Jewish Community Center in downtown Washington, and he said he was reviving Waiting for Lefty, the famous agitprop play Clifford…
Mancur Olson died last month, but I confess there was a time when I thought he'd been dead for centuries. I was taking a freshman course at the University of Chicago. Our reading list winter quarter included Aristotle's Politics, Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Treatises, Burke's Reflections -- and a…
First, a warning. This article reports on the public statements that certain women have made about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Many of these statements are crude, vulgar, and sexually explicit. As a result, parts of this article may be offensive to children, men, and others not yet accustomed to…
POTOMAC, MD., 7:30 A.M. The clock-radio comes on. NPR has nothing new. The pundit reaches across his pillow for the remote control and flicks on the network morning shows. They're back to health and fitness stories. C-SPAN has some congressman on discussing telecom reform. The pundit's heart sinks.…
Some people collect baseball cards, and others collect race horses, but I collect books that rethink liberalism. I've got books with titles like The Next Left and The New Liberalism, Who Needs the Democrats? and They Only Look Dead, stretching all the way from the mid-sixties right up to the…
It was the kind of statement you have to read a second time to make sure you got it right. Buried on page B-5 of the November 17 Washington Post was this morsel from Newt Gingrich: "There was a long period when Republicans thought education was a local issue and didn't realize it was a national…
I'm in a room with 2,000 New Yorkers, none of whom knows who Frank Rich is. It's about 9 p.m. at Rudy Giuliani's midtown victory celebration, but the crowd is area-code 718. These are the bridgeand-tunnel people from Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island, where few people read the columnists on the…
I've been thinking a lot recently about weekend footwear options for middle- aged men. Most men enter adulthood wearing sneakers for Saturday and Sunday outings, but very few men go to their grave shod that way. At some point in between puberty and senility, there is a moment in every man's life…
Heather Cox Richardson
I'm holding up traffic. I'm walking down the street in Burlington, Vermont, and I come to a corner and see a car approaching so I stop. The car stops. Meanwhile, I've been distracted by some hippies playing Frisbee in the park, and I stand there daydreaming for what must be 15 or 20 seconds. The…
I've seen women weep before, but never with the sense of hopeless desperation that comes over them as they listen to their husbands begin their third hour of summer-camp reminiscences. When middle-aged men start recounting those Jimmy Carter-era camp-staff parties at which they drank grain alcohol…
Massive forces are fundamentally reshaping American society, turbocharging the transition from an industrial to an informationage economy, radically altering the way we do business, and compelling large numbers of American executives to go to work each day in cowboy boots and blue jeans.
Politicians decorate their offices with mementos of the power they have and portraits to remind them of the virtues they wish to possess. And if you go to a politician's office these days and look over his shoulder as he's charming you with his geniality, you're likely to spot the stern and…
Paul Johnson says there is a mutual attraction between Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair that is, at its core, sexual. "Lady Thatcher is incapable of having a relationship with a male politician without a slight sexual element," the historian recently wrote in the Daily Telegraph. Johnson says that…
You're in your twenties, born into the age of selfesteem. From your earliest childhood, television characters from Mr. Rogers to Big Bird have been lovebombing you with messages about how special you are. At school, entire curricula have been established to enhance your sense of self-worth. You've…
I understood why Christopher Darden lost the O. J. trial when I saw him on the cover of Pen World magazine. There he was caressing an Omas Bibliotheque Nationale fountain pen. As one of the editors of Pen World noted inside, the person who owns an OBN pen tends to be passionate and classy, but is…
Editor's Note: Robert L. Bartley, the distinguished former editor of the Wall Street Journal, died today at 66. Here are two articles about him published previously in The Weekly Standard.
Robert Bartley has edited the Wall Street Journal editorial page for 25 years, and I bet that in all that time he has never held a single traditional editorial meeting. Instead, at various points during the day the editorial writers will hear Bartley's gleeful cackle coming from the office of…
The original Library of Congress building celebrates its centennial this year. When I mention the Jefferson Building, as it is now called, to people who have done research there, they smile at the memory of it. There's something about the place that seems to inspire affection.
HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A PRESIDENT SO hungry for a notable place in history? Bill Clinton can't .stop talking about how history will regard him, as if he wants the affection of future generations as cravenly as he seeks the love of his own.
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 14, 1996, there was an article buried deep inside the Home section of the New York Times that was so crammed with cultural import it made your head spin. The story was about Jane Amsterdam, the onetime media Pooh-Bah who edited both Manhattan, inc. and the New York Post in the 1980s.…
During my first week as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago, a teenager committed suicide on the northwest side. It was my job to call his neighbors and try to get them to tell me why he did it. A few days later, a semi-notable died in a car crash. I had to call the woman who had been…
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…
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…
Greensboro
Bill Clinton was talking about his place in history with Dick Morris a few weeks ago in the Oval Office. They went over each of the presidents one by one, the Washington Post told us, to see where Clinton ranked. Clinton acknowledged with becoming modesty that he couldn't be in the top tier --…
Chicago
Above, on his perch, the parrot sleeps, but below, in the lobby of the San Diego Marriott, the Pundit Gods sweep by. CNN's William Schneider is soundbiting his way across the room, a radio microphone shoved in his face. James Carville is chatting with the Washington Post's Richard Cohen as Norman…
just after the Republicans took over Congress, budget chairman John Kasich put out a hit list of 386 federal agencies slated for elimination. He said that Washington had become an "evil" city corrupted by special interests and bloated government. The idea was to remove government from large swaths…
Coming home from work the other day, I stopped by our local fancy bread store and bought a walnut olive loaf ($ 4.25) and a bottle of Evian water ($ 1.25). As I counted the change from my $ 10, I began to wonder: Now that staples like water, bread, and coffee come in upscale versions, what will be…
What writer, struggling at the keyboard, wouldn't want to be like Michael Lind? He is the Niagara Falls of the profession, a great big unstoppable torrent of words. Faster than most people can think, faster than anybody can research, Michael Lind produces a thundering flow of critique,…
What writer, struggling at the keyboard, wouldn't want to be like Michael Lind? He is the Niagara Falls of the profession, a great big unstoppable torrent of words. Faster than most people can think, faster than anybody can research, Michael Lind produces a thundering flow of critique,…
IT WAS A STEREOTYPE CONSTRUCTED by friend and foe alike: Hillary Clinton was the smarter of the Clintons. She was the efficient one, he the charmer. She focused while he empathized. The stereotype allowed her admirers to elevate Hillary Clinton to the status of feminist icon, and her enemies could…
IT WAS A STEREOTYPE CONSTRUCTED by friend and foe alike: Hillary Clinton was the smarter of the Clintons. She was the efficient one, he the charmer. She focused while he empathized. The stereotype allowed her admirers to elevate Hillary Clinton to the status of feminist icon, and her enemies could…
As I was listening to Margaret Thatcher speak at a conference in Prague last month, I began reminiscing about the four years, starting in 1990, I spent writing from Europe for the Wall Street Journal. I was recalling the devices I would use to trick Americans into reading articles on European…
As I was listening to Margaret Thatcher speak at a conference in Prague last month, I began reminiscing about the four years, starting in 1990, I spent writing from Europe for the Wall Street Journal. I was recalling the devices I would use to trick Americans into reading articles on European…
The editor had triumphed. All through a long New York spring evening, it had been John Updike this and Norman Mailer that. He'd kept his tablemates at the Freedom Forum's annual Free Expression Dinner in a state of conversational bliss, and when the meal was over everybody at his table was in such…
Some people write books. But I am pioneering a new, miniaturist form of literary production. I write book proposals. Dozens of them.
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES PRIDES ITSELF on being Sensitivity Central in American journalism. Its editor, Shelby Coffey III, created a media frenzy when he championed a new stylebook for the paper that epitomizes political correctness. What, then, explains the paper's decision to pull three "B. C."…
Irving Howe was on the warpath. The year was 1954, and Howe saw the forces of depravity closing in. He saw the great maw of middle class commercialism -- magazines, publishing houses, movie studios. Vast institutions that could buy you off, beat you down, crush your spirit. Howe surveyed the…
When it comes to government funding of the arts, I support the Spanish Court option. Which is to say, I believe the federal government should lavishly fund the arts, but should also be able to determine content. The Congress could budget $ 10 million for a statue, but it would have to be Newt…
He says his followers are peasants. He speaks for working men and their grievances. He rails and rouses audiences like a carnival barker. But Pat Buchanan's presidential run is in fact as close to an intellectual's campaign as we have seen in modern politics. The Buchanan campaign doesn't have a…
UNTIL NOW, LAMAR ALEXANDER has been the Canada of politics. He's got some radical ideas -- like ending the welfare state or adding another branch to the Pentagon -- but everything he touches turns boring. Pat Buchanan calls on his followers to "Lock and load!" For Alexander, it would be "Chip and…
RALPH REED IS A MAN WITH A STRATEGY. For the past few years, the executive director of the Christian Coalition has been trying to integrate religious conservatives into the Republican mainstream. That way Christian conservatives wouldn't just wield influence on one or two issues, like abortion and…
This week I received in the [mail an invitation to a book party. I hesitate to go, for, you see, I was a book partygoer in the glory days, back when going to a book party meant something -- namely that you were going to have to squeeze by Norman Mailer if you were going to make it to the bar.
We are all cultural conservatives now. In his State of the Union address this year, Bill Clinton borrowed a notion from the Promise Keepers, the evangelical men's group, that a father's checkbook will never be a substitute for a father's love. He endorsed school uniforms and attacked the decadent…
Travelgate I can forgive. Likewise the futures trading profits and the attempt to nationalize health care. But now Hillary Clinton is insisting that she wrote her book It Takes a Village herself. This outrage violates the social contract.
Pat Buchanan may have made more news, but it was William J. Bennett who uttered the most noteworthy sentence at the 1992 Republican convention: "Plato understood in the end there is only one political issue: how we raise our children."
WHEN STEVE FORBES STARTS A SENTENCE, you now for a fact that he's going to finish it on me. The language is straight Reagan -- America is "the last best hope on earth," our "greatest days are just ahead" -- but there's no Reaganesque dallying for a lump in the throat, no misty-eyed gaze into the…
Jerusalem
It takes a rude man to make a civil society. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani created a diplomatic contretemps late last month when he threw Yasser Arafat out of a concert the mayor was hosting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. For days, Giuliani had been saying that Arafat and…
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY may not be as libertarian as it seemed a few months ago. Just after the November election, sweeping anti-government rhetoric was the order of the day, and controversial libertarian ideas went unchallenged. Among these was the idea that if government would just get out of the…
AT A WASHINGTON STRATEGY SESSION for conservatives last week, Paul Weyri ch was pounding the table about the disasters attendant upon the Republic shoul d a lobbying reform defr to right-wing hearts fail in Congress. The next day, L amar Alexander came to the Cato Inst itute to declare that the…
You buy a brand of ice cream that sends proceeds to benefit the rain forest. You channel your savings into socially responsible investment funds. Your bath products do not rely on animal testing and you rarely go to a " rock concert that isn't sponsored by Amnesty International. Yet every other…