The First Amendment to the Constitution does not impose, as some believe, “a wall of separation between church and state.” That phrase comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to Connecticut Baptists, cited approvingly by Supreme Court decisions in 1878 and 1947.
You should clear the decks and read Michael Barone's new piece in the American Interest. It's an examination of the future of the Republican party and I simply don't think you can have an informed view on the subject without drinking in Barone's thoughts first:
Not even the most experienced reporter is likely to recognize him as he takes his seat in the New York delegation or struggles to make his way through the jostling crowds on the floor of the Republican National Convention this week in Tampa. David Koch (the name is pronounced like the soft drink)…
The Prince of Darkness
To understand a nation's character, it seems to help to be a foreigner: Who has understood the American character better than the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville? Seymour Martin Lipset, who died on December 31, was not a foreigner or even, quite, an immigrant: He was born a year after his…
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Supreme Command Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime by Eliot A. Cohen Free Press, 272 pp., $25 EVERY SO OFTEN a book appears just at the moment when it is most needed--even though that moment was entirely unpredicted. Such a book is Eliot Cohen's "Supreme Command," a superb study of…
Harry & Ike The Partnership that Remade the Postwar World by Steve Neal Scribner, 324 pp., $26 "HARRY & IKE," Steve Neal's book on the relations between Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, might well have had a second subtitle--"Great Presidents Behaving Badly." It tells two stories. The first is…
HALF A CENTURY AGO it was plain which way democracies were heading: left. In the United States, the Democrats held the White House for the nineteenth straight year. In Britain, the Labour party had just created the National Health Service and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy.…
American Pharaoh
Truman and Pendergast
MEG GREENFIELD, the editorial-page editor of the Washington Post, who died May 13, was one of the great patrons of conservative ideas over the last 25 years. Not that she was a conservative herself: Her views were still recognizably rooted in 1950s liberalism, in the ideas that were in the air…
"THE DIFFERENCES ARE MUCH DEEPER in the Republican party than in our party," says House minority leader Richard Gephardt. From the other side of the Democratic party, Al From's Democratic Leadership Council, comes the view that divided Republicans "have moved steadily out of the mainstream on a…
It was an election about nothing, an election to determine the outcome of an issue -- impeachment -- about which few candidates had anything to say: That verdict has been voiced repeatedly over the last few weeks. But in fact, like most elections, this one was partly about government. And not so…
START WITH THIS ANOMALY: Most Americans say they oppose impeaching Bill Clinton, yet almost all signs point to a victory in the November 3 congressional elections for the Republicans, who are more likely to vote for impeachment. The explanation lies in turnout: All the evidence we have from recent…
Ulysses S. Grant is universally ranked among the greatest American generals, and his Memoirs are widely considered to belong with the best military autobiographies ever written. But he is inevitably named, by conservatives as well as liberals, as one of the worst presidents in American history.
While the more euphonious "Latinos" is heard often in California and sometimes in Texas, the Census Bureau prefers the clumsy word "Hispanics" to describe them -- the people descended from the European colonists, American Indians, and African slaves in Spain's former possessions in the New World.
ONE THING LAST WEEK'S California primary for governor did not prove is that voters reject candidates who spend heaps of their own money on their campaigns. Political reporters, few of whom could self-finance a campaign, and other politicians naturally resent such candidates, but voters don't much…
Barry Goldwater was the sort of citizen-politician the Founders originally hoped would lead the republic. No one foresaw how far he would go, when in 1952, the proprietor of his family's department store and a second-term member of the city council of Phoenix, Ariz. (1950 population: 106,818), he…
The California governor's race -- with two millionaires, Democrats Al Checchi and Jane Harman, and two statewide officials, Democrat Gray Davis and Republican Dan Lungren, contending -- is easily the most important election this year. For one thing, it is the Democrats' best chance of picking up a…
AT STAKE IN THE MONICA LEWINSKY affair is no less than the balance of forces in American politics. If the alleged events are conclusively proven -- even if the scandal results merely in the airing of more and more unpalatable facts about Bill Clinton -- there is a strong possibility that the whole…
Robert Vincent Remini
"IT HAPPENED AROUND 1991: Everything changed." The speaker is a young Argentinian investment banker, talking over coffee at La Biela, a restaurant across the park from the Recoleta Cemetery where Eva Peron is buried, incongruously, amid the leading families of Buenos Aires. The words are almost…
For conservatives, the 1997 elections could hardly have turned out better. Conservative Republicans won a sweeping victory in Virginia, hardline mayor Rudolph Giuliani was handsomely reelected in Democratic New York City, and Republican right-to-lifer Vito Fossella carried the New York 13th…
America is changing more rapidly and more for the better than almost anyone in Washington yet realizes. The evidence is there, in plain sight, in publicly reported statistics whose import almost no one seems to realize. What the numbers tell us is this: The crime rate and the welfare rolls are…
THE FIGHT OVER THE 2000 CENSUS is a fight between the Republicans and the Democrats over statistics. It reached the high level of national politics when the Republicans added a provision to the disaster-relief bill in June barring the use of "sampling" -- estimating the total population from an…
Which party prevailed in the 1996 congressional elections? It's not as silly a question as it sounds. The facts tell us one thing; the actions of people in and around politics tell us another. The numbers make it plain that the Republicans won. In the House of Representatives, Republicans took 227…
Many Republicans are taking it for granted that they will make big gains in the congressional election in 1998. The president's party, they like to say, usually loses big in elections in his sixth year. Speaker Newt Gingrich likes to quantify it: The party out of power, he says, has gained an…
ELECTION YEAR 1996 IS LOOKING very much like election year 1972, when most voters decided to return an incumbent president to office despite doubts about his honesty and trustworthiness. Will a Nixon-like victory for Bill Clinton be followed by the aftermath of the November 1972 landslide -- the…
The heart seems to have gone out of the defenders of the mainline media against charges of leftward bias. Where it was formerly asserted with vigor that the great organs of print and broadcast press were pictures of objectivity, now it is conceded that journalism just seems to attract people who…
POLL RESULTS ARE THE SHEET MUSIC of politics; to hear the melody you have to listen to voters talking. The poll numbers have shown Bill Clinton far ahead of Bob Dole, with Ross Perot picking up some votes from both when he's included. The polls tend to suggest the election is over.
I WENT TO ITALY A WEEK BEFORE the April 21 election hoping to observe a politics different from ours. Instead, I was struck again and again by the similarities. Begin with campaign tactics. The leaders of the winning center4eft Ulivo coalition rolled into their final rally April 18 in il pullman --…