David Frum is a senior editor at the Atlantic and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Frum is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and the author of nine books, the most recent of which is Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. This week we exchanged emails,…
Henry Ashby Turner
Everyone has his price, the saying goes, and Eleanor Holmes Norton is coming pretty close to discovering mine. Norton is the District of Columbia's representative in Congress. She has proposed to save the District from its desperate economic and fiscal trouble by granting it a remarkable privilege:…
Everyone has his price, the saying goes, and Eleanor Holmes Norton is coming pretty close to discovering mine. Norton is the District of Columbia's representative in Congress. She has proposed to save the District from its desperate economic and fiscal trouble by granting it a remarkable privilege:…
Against the Dead Hand The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism by Brink Lindsey John Wiley & Sons, 368 pp., $29.95 John Maynard Keynes Fighting For Freedom, 1937-1946 by Robert Skidelsky Penguin USA, 608 pp., $20 THE LAMPS are going out all over Latin America. Two decades ago, there seemed hope…
THOSE LONG feature columns on the left and right side of the Wall Street Journal's front page are known inside the paper as "leaders." For many years, reporters at the Journal joked that if you had a fact, you had a leader, and if you had two facts, you had two leaders. Washington journalists seem…
"Naderites comfort themselves with the notion that Al Gore will win anyway and that a Green Party vote will push him to the left. And here is where they make their biggest error of all. For how did Clinton and his administration come by their achievements? By the skin of their teeth. Clinton never…
"Their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together. Which had the whiskers, which had the burnsides: which was which?"
Virtual History
IN HIS PURSUIT of the presidency, Al Gore has acquired something more than a new wardrobe -- he's acquired a new reading list.
IN THE EARLY EVENING of June 16, the dead body of 17-year-old Raynard Johnson was found hanging from a pecan tree in front of his family home in the little town of Kokomo, Mississippi. An autopsy established that Johnson had killed himself: There were no marks or bruises on him, no signs of a…
BY THE TIME Mexican voters ejected the PRI from power on July 2, it had racked up a record of 71 continuous years in power. Only two other 20th-century political entities have endured so long: One was the Communist party of the Soviet Union, which also died at age 71; the other is the Liberal party…
Sterling
Abraham Lincoln
Salisbury
IF AMERICANS do things his way, President Clinton vowed in his State of the Union, "We will pay off our national debt for the first time since 1835." This promise is now being treated as an unequivocally good thing. Alan Greenspan has endorsed it. Republican John McCain has adopted the Clinton…
Glass, glass everywhere: That's what travelers saw when they entered Washington's new Dulles International Airport in 1959. Under a concrete roof that curved like the takeoff trajectory of a jet hung four vast windows without a retaining wall in sight. And beyond the glass, there was only the sky…
WHAT IS JOHN McCAIN UP TO? Until now, McCain has appealed to voters and wowed the press by presenting himself as something bolder and better than an ordinary politician: a man beholden to nobody, a risk-taker, a truth-teller. The tax plan he unveiled last week, however, is the work of quite a…
Where are they when they're needed, all of our allegedly pro-family politicians? Two weeks ago, the Vermont supreme court handed down the incredible ruling that marriage violated the state's 1793 constitution. With that decision, the long-simmering theoretical argument over rights for homosexuals…
"He understood that reality is more than the facts before you; it's also how you feel about them, how you react to them, what your attitude is." That was one of President Clinton's reasons for choosing Franklin Roosevelt as his "man of the century," and a mighty revealing reason it is, too. After…
NO PRESIDENT SINCE Herbert Hoover has linked his fate so closely to the stock market as Bill Clinton, and unlike Hoover's bet, Clinton's has thus far paid off brilliantly. In fact, the 1990s have not been a time of unusual economic prosperity. The gross domestic product rose faster in the 1980s;…
"A NEW ISOLATIONISM" -- that is the motive that President Clinton attributed to the Republican senators who opposed his test-ban treaty. His slogan was echoed on the front page of the New York Times in a news analysis by R. W. Apple: "The Senate's decisive rejection tonight of the Comprehensive…
IF An Affair of State, Judge Richard Posner's new book about the impeachment of Bill Clinton, is indeed as definitive as its admirers insist, my place in history is secure: While the book's index offers only three references to Trent Lott and four to Henry Hyde, it has six to me! (True, Hillary…
IF HE'S NOMINATED next summer, George W. Bush will be the first Republican presidential candidate since Jerry Ford in 1976 to owe nothing to the conservative wing of the Republican party. If he goes on to win, he'll be the first elected Republican president since Eisenhower not obligated to the…
Suddenly, unaccountable one-man investigations are back in fashion in Washington. After months of decrying Ken Starr, Donald Smaltz, and other inconvenient busybodies, the Clinton administration has executed a stunning triple-lutz on its latest scandal and appointed former senator John Danforth as…
IT CAN SEEM SO TERRIBLY UNFAIR. Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first majority in the House of Representatives since 1955, and then to two successive majorities for the first time since the 1920s. He forced welfare reform and a balanced budget onto President Clinton. His reward for this…
In the final eleven years of the twentieth century, time seems to have run backwards. The Red Army withdrew from central Europe, rescinding 1945. A dictatorship fell in Berlin, undoing 1933. Statues of Lenin toppled across Russia, annulling 1917. War in the Balkans was the first horror we passed on…
IN THE FINAL FRENETIC DAYS of campaigning before his June 3 reelection victory, Ontario premier Mike Harris unveiled a shockingly unCanadian stunt: He produced at his speeches a lifesize fiberglass replica of a pair of blue jeans. His aides poured thousands of Canadian one-dollar coins into them --…
It's a reminder of socialism's lingering prestige that people still refer to the tyranny that ruled Germany as "fascism" and the tyranny that ruled Russia as "Stalinism" -- as though one country had succumbed to a vast ideological system and the other simply to the evil of a single man. It would…
SOON AFTER PRESIDENT BUSH nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, Timothy Phelps of Newsday and Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio heard rumors that a law professor in Oklahoma had accused Thomas of making crude sexual remarks to her when they worked together almost a decade before.…
Compassionate conservatism? Yes, one sees how the phrase might put some people's backs up. It implies that there exists some group -- presumably a large group -- perhaps even a dominant group -- of un-compassionate conservatives. After all these years of enduring that line of abuse from liberals,…
Was it worth it? Was it worth losing five Republican congressmen in 1998 and risking more in 2000, consuming a year of the nation's time, dragging dozens of unwilling figures into the glare of publicity, and depressing the party's poll numbers, all in an attempt to punish the president for telling…
Everything will be different eighteen months from now. It's one of the oldest rules of politics, and also one of the hardest to remember. The present is so real, so glaring; the future so murky, so contingent. Who could believe in 1991 that the triumph in the Gulf would immediately fade? Or that…
IT MAY NOT LOOK LIKE IT, BUT THAT GUY, LYING all bloodied on the mat, surrounded by clumps of his own hair and fragments of his own teeth is actually winning the fight.
"HAVE YOU EVER COMMITTED ADULTERY?" The question has already been posed to Dan Quayle, and it's very likely to be asked of every other prospective candidates for president in 1999, the Republican candidates anyway. Diane Sawyer even asked it of Ken Starr. Starr and Quayle, it's the wrong answer.…
THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION'S DEFENDERS are shocked, absolutely shocked, that anyone might think the timing of the raid on Iraq had something to do with the impeachment vote in the House of Representatives. Geraldo Rivera -- usually a reliable indicator of this administration's thinking -- opined on…
THE PRESIDENT IS SECOND TO NONE in recognizing what was wrong in his behavior and apologizing to those who he's affected and hurt." Those few words by presidential spokesman Joe Lockhart last Monday unintentionally revealed how President Clinton has come to stand on the brink of impeachment by the…
There's no blinking the truth: Campaign '98 was not only a bad Republican defeat, it was a personal triumph for the president. Some happy-talk Republicans will want of course to deny the magnitude of the president's victory. They will point to the exit polls showing that voters still disapprove of…
"WHAT PRESIDENTS did you just smear then?" That was Chris Matthews's memorable reply to a guest on Hardball who argued that, after all, Dwight Eisenhower might have had an affair with his wartime driver. The reply shut the guest up: For a brief moment, the viewer wondered, Has a Clintonite been…
"Bill Clinton's problem is not a party problem, it is not a New Democratic problem, it's a Clinton problem." That's Elaine Kamarck, a former Gore staffer now decamped to Harvard, as quoted in the New Republic last week, and hers is a line we are very likely to hear repeated more and more as the…
Weirdly enough, the very grossness of President Clinton's misconduct has proven to be his best defense. The details of Kenneth Starr's report to Congress are so lurid that it's hard at first to see past them (this is almost certainly the first government document in history whose readers have…
Pour a couple drinks into a Republican above a certain age, turn the conversation to politics, and the odds are that sooner or later he will start to grumble about the bad rap Richard Nixon got. The wiretapping didn't start with Nixon, after all -- and what were people supposed to do in 1968…
WE CAN'T READ THEIR MINDS, of course, but the hoary defenders of the Social Security status quo would have had to be superhuman not to cheer as the stock market slid through the last week of August and then crashed on the 31st. For years they have endured the complaints of young taxpayers that…
Does anybody, here in 1998, still believe that on-line chat is the most important use of the Internet? Sad to say, the answer is yes -- and not any old anybody, but Michael Godwin, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco think tank devoted to on-line issues.
Bluster minus resolve equals humiliation: That is the Clinton foreign-policy formula. Over the past five years, the United States has endured such humiliations in Somalia, in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, and at the hands of China and Iran. Last month, it suffered yet another -- this time at the United…
Bluster minus resolve equals humiliation: That is the Clinton foreign-policy formula. Over the past five years, the United States has endured such humiliations in Somalia, in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, and at the hands of China and Iran. Last month, it suffered yet another -- this time at the United…
For the last six years, Americans have been debating the question of how much character counts in a president -- and, thus far, the people who answer "not much" seem to be winning. Bill Clinton needs to hold on only two more years to finish his presidency and get safely out of town.
These days, a Washington journalist who evinces an interest in Social Security is likely to find himself in the same predicament as someone who buys from a mail-order catalogue: 72 hours later, the Post Office will need a forklift to deliver all the bales of printed matter to his doorstep. Proposal…
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson called Barry Goldwater a "ranting, raving demagogue who wants to tear down society." What would Johnson say now if he could see Goldwater being saluted as a "truly fine man" by the first Democratic president to win reelection since 1964? In his cynical way, LBJ would…
SCIENTISTS TELL US that a human embryo recapitulates in only nine months the entire evolution of life, from single-celled molecule to Homo sapiens. Something similar seems to be going on over at the Clinton White House: It appears bent on cramming a reenactment of every presidential scandal in…
"Civility in politics: going, going, gone." So complained a headline in the New York Times this winter, and sine then hardly a week has gone by without some new offense being reported against good manners and even common decency. Cuddly felon Webb Hubbell worries that a deranged special prosecutor…
Okay, maybe in some sense they deserve what they get, but I still can't help feeling sorry for the baby boomers. They're like a gigantic herd of wildebeests starving to death because their own hooves have trampled all the grass.
David S. Landes
THE ONCE-MIGHTY Progressive Conservative party of Canada took another step toward extinction late last month. There are not many left to go.
Patrick J. Buchanan
IS IT WORSE TO MUG AN OLD LADY TO raise money for a criminal gang than it is to mug an old lady because you want to buy a case of Dr. Pepper and a box of Moon Pies? If you say yes, you might want to update that resume. There's a job waiting for you in the Clinton communications office.
RECENTLY AL HUNT, the Washington executive editor of the Wall Street Journal, published another in his series of columns in defense of President Clinton. Slyly, Hunt omitted any mention of the president. Instead, he drew a contrast between two Republicans: Senator John McCain, a heroic prisoner of…
Ninety years ago, Max Beerbohm drew a series of cartoons titled "The Young Self Meets the Old Self" about the strange twists in the lives of the famous and near-famous of his day. Max, we miss you now! A generation of young liberals who were jolted into political activism by presidential lying are…
Michael Lind
IN THE FIRST HOURS AND DAYS of the burgeoning Monica Lewinsky scandal, reporters naturally wanted to find out whether the president had personally urged the onetime White House intern to lie under oath, or if he himself had lied in the deposition taken by Paula Jones's lawyers. But in their…
THE CO-PERPETRATOR OF THE WORST terrorist attack in American history; a woman convicted of pick-axing two sleeping people to death; a cold-blooded mail-bomber on trial for two murders and two maimings: These are some of the people who have convinced sympathetic listeners that they ought to escape…
Feminist bookstores sell T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, "What part of No don't you understand?" It's a question that might fairly be asked of President Clinton. A majority of Americans have made unmistakably clear their aversion to government-controlled child care. But this aversion has not…
IF YOU WERE A POLITICIAN and wanted to enact a law forbidding private citizens to criticize you, what would you call it? If you possessed any flair for publicity at all, you'd do what nearly half the Senate and almost all of the media have done: You'd call it "campaign-finance reform." Proponents…
G. A. Henty
"TELL US WHAT YOU FEEL!" That's the demand that has been barraging the British royal family for two weeks. Ah, you can imagine the Windsors thinking, if only we dared! This woman who broke up her marriage when it failed to live up to her Barbara Cartland fantasies, who then disgraced herself with…
"It's a good thing Americans have a holiday formally set aside for Thanksgiving. It means there is at least one day a year on which complaining is prohibited. Not that complaining is an altogether bad thing -- America's endless dissatisfaction is an important spur to progress -- but it is often a…
In college, my friends and I used to debate the year that one was irretrievably, unqualifiedly, with no more excuses middleaged. The age we finally settled on was 37. And here I am. If my college self could somehow be introduced to my now middle-aged self, what would he think? More than anything, I…
Robert Tombs
IT'S BEEN ANOTHER BAD WEEK for conservatives. In France, the second round of legislative elections on June 1 proved every bit as devastating to conservatives as the first round a week before: The socialists won 268 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, with another 39 going to the Communists.…
In Leo Tolstoy's telling of the story, Napoleon began the battle of Borodino -- the battle that doomed his hopes of conquering Russia -- exactly as he began every battle. He reviewed his men, gave them an inspiring speech, and sent them out to attack the enemy. In the past, the result had never…
It's been a long, long time since I was last in Cambridge, Massachusetts. How long? Well, let's put it this way: As I drove along Mt. Auburn Street, I passed the battered old sign of the University Typewriter Repair Shop and realized that the first time I had seen it, I was actually taking a…
You open a magazine and there's an advertisement -- for blue jeans, for perfume, for a radio station, it could be anything. The ad copy says something like, "Breaking all the rules."
On its bad days, the conservative movement is beginning to look like the French Third Republic. Premier Gingrich teeters daily on the verge of collapse as whispers of coups and counter-coups flutter round him. At the rostrum, the supply-siders are accusing deficit hawks of wrecking the Republican…
SOMEWHERE, RICHARD NIXON'S SHADE is watching with admiration the performance of the Clinton White House. If only he'd run Watergate like this! Then he could have claimed that the break-in proved the need for tougher federal anti-burglary laws.
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…
Is the fight against discrimination being lost? Defenders of America's vast anti-discrimination apparatus would like you to think so. The celebrities, activists, lawyers, diversity consultants, university administrators, and corporate bureaucrats who campaigned against the California Civil Rights…
HOW PANICKED IS THE Republican retreat? This panicked: On Sept. 25, the Republican Congress -- remember, the one filled with extremists -- voted to create what will likely prove the biggest and costliest new entitlement program since Congress enacted Supplemental Security Income in 1972.
AT THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION, Bob Dole pledged to cut income taxes by 15 percent, balance the budget, and leave Social Security and Medicare untouched. Tough-minded reporters believed none of it and shared their skepticism with a national television audience. Two weeks later, the Democrats met in…
This is an awful moment for Bob Dole. He has spent nearly all the money he legally can to win the nomination, and he's not yet permitted to start spending the money earmarked for the general election. To make his case, he must rely entirely on his own words -- and Bob Dole has never been good with…
This is an awful moment for Bob Dole. He has spent nearly all the money he legally can to win the nomination, and he's not yet permitted to start spending the money earmarked for the general election. To make his case, he must rely entirely on his own words -- and Bob Dole has never been good with…
As a columnist for the New York Times, Tom Wicker stood for 25 years among America's preeminent liberal journalists. What he said in the thousands of pieces he has published since the mid-1960s, he is saying again in Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America (Morrow, 218 pages, $ 25). It is as…
As a columnist for the New York Times, Tom Wicker stood for 25 years among America's preeminent liberal journalists. What he said in the thousands of pieces he has published since the mid-1960s, he is saying again in Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America (Morrow, 218 pages, $ 25). It is as…
WHATEVER ELSE IT ACCOMPLISHES, Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the Colorado gay-rights case isn't going to win a niche in the Legal Reasoning Hall of Fame. In fact, the decision is so illogical one wonders whether it deserves to be called "reasoned" at all.
WHATEVER ELSE IT ACCOMPLISHES, Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in the Colorado gay-rights case isn't going to win a niche in the Legal Reasoning Hall of Fame. In fact, the decision is so illogical one wonders whether it deserves to be called "reasoned" at all.
Twenty years ago, Jude Wanniski published a book arguing that the stock market astutely gauged the wisdom (or folly) of the policies being pursued in Washington. It's now 1996; the stock market has recorded its best two-year performance since the early 1960s. What does that tell us about the…
IN 1991, NEW YORK TIMES columnist Tom Wicker published a book suggesting that Richard Nixon had, despite everything, been "one of us" -- a liberal after all. Not even Wicker could ever have imagined that the day would come when liberals would attempt to rehabilitate George Wallace. But in a…
A YEAR AGO EVERYONE -- Republican and Democrat -- was predicting that by now President Clinton would be relegated to irrelevance and on his way to unemployment. Instead, the Republican Congress has been stalled by a very-far- from-irrelevant Clinton, and the Republican presidential nominee trails…
Ahundred and fifty years ago, James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, published an immense history of India, a country he'd never visited and whose languages he did not speak. Mill intended to expose to his readers the ignorance and backwardness of Indian culture; what he exposed instead was…
Suppose, just for a laugh, that we wanted to design the worst possible campaign finance system. Suppose we wanted to force politicians to think more about raising money than about legislating. Suppose, to compound things, we also wanted to ensure that the money arrived under circumstances that made…
In an increasingly conservative America, one political figure defiantly resists the historical tide. This .man still denotinces big banks and multinational corporations. Still unabashedly puts the interests of the American factory worker ahead of those of the so-called international trading system.…
In an increasingly conservative America, one political figure defiantly resists the historical tide. This .man still denotinces big banks and multinational corporations. Still unabashedly puts the interests of the American factory worker ahead of those of the so-called international trading system.…
IT WAS A SCENE FROM the Latin America of the 1950s, or, perhaps, the Europe of the 1930s. Near midnight, Jacques Parizeau, the heavyset, mustachioed premier of the province of Quebec, puffed to the rostrum to acknowledge his 50.5 to 49.5 percent loss in the October 30 referendum on secession from…
This week, several hundred of the sort of people Harry Truman would likely have cursed as "bloodsuckers" on one of his intemperate days will pay upwards of $ 1,000 per ticket to attend a black-tie fundraiser for the Truman Library at the National Building Museum in Washington. The dinner is iust…
In Iran or Nicaragua, a revolution occurs when a badly shaven leader harangues a street mob into frenzy, leads them through tle streets to sack the palace, guns down the palace guard, writes a new constitution, and invites his supporters to pillage the country's treasury. After a couple of…