At bottom, the euphoria with which the public has welcomed Bill Clinton to Washington—and which, if the polls are right, has substantially survived his rocky first few weeks—is a euphoria at the reinvention of government. Euphoria just that a government …
Bill Clinton had planned some remarks for the evening of Neil Kinnock’s anticipated victory in the British elections this spring—doubtless something about the global rejection of Thatcherism and Reaganism. He never delivered that speech, of course, but his private, unplanned …
Whatever the ultimate outcome of the 1992 presidential campaign, the terrain on which the campaign is being conducted differs greatly from that of any recent election—and in ways that should favor the Democrats. This first post–cold war election takes place …
In 1984, Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall authored The New Politics of Inequality, a groundbreaking work that is still the single best study of Reagan-age politics and that established Edsall as one of the nation’s foremost political analysts. The New …
By the usual standards of American politics, the evening was a smashing success. This spring’s fundraising dinner for the Democratic National Committee brought several thousand lobbyists, major donors, and other fixtures of the permanent government to the Washington Hilton. The …
It’s not the populist moment yet—not because the elements aren’t there, but in large part because the Democrats don’t know how to put them together. The 1990 election results point to a voter revolt in which neither the left nor …
This is the bystander administration, the peripheral presidency. As the world is redefined, the United States has largely absented itself from the recreation. Washington, where government is less inclined to action than at any time since the 1920s, has virtually …
One of the differences between the two political parties over the past ten years is that the Republican presidential candidates forget many things; the Democrats only one. On a range of questions small and large—the date of Pearl Harbor Day, …
In Ronald Reagan’s America, Bob Kuttner has emerged as the Great Refuter. In The Life of the Party, Kuttner bemoans the paucity of Reagan Age journalists attempting to “influence the mainstream debate from the left.” Kuttner is the preeminent exception …
This should be the Democratic moment. Well before October’s crash, the Reagan administration had shuddered to an overdue halt, its own agenda unenactable and its viable agenda—arms control, last year’s tax reform— lifted without acknowledgement from the center. The much-ballyhooed …
As Charles Krauthammer recounts in this collection of his essays, he came to the New Republic in the late 1970s because, “uniquely among intellectual organs, the New Republic was trying to rescue liberalism from its drift toward defeatist isolationism, and …
The breakthrough for the CIO and industrial unionism came at Flint, Michigan, in the winter of 1936-37. On December 30, 1936, United Auto Workers militants sat in at General Motors’ Fisher Body plants One and Two. Several weeks later, throwing …
“It’s been a good convention,” said Machinist President William Winpisinger, who four years earlier had walked out on the last night of the Democratic National Convention rather than support the Carter ticket. “The Democrats have had their spirit restored. They’ve …
In July 1983 Marty Manley, one of a number of able young staffers laid off by the decimated International Association of Machinists, traveled to Washington to meet with Paul Jensen, labor liaison of the Mondale campaign. Manley had come to …
The choice confronting California voters in November’s gubernatorial election was between Jarvis hip and Jarvis square. Both unconventional Jerry Brown and bland Evelle Younger, the Republican challenger, ran a campaign of cutbacks each proclaiming his commitment to a constitutional “spending …
