The pre-adjournment wrangling in Congress over health care, energy and other legislation is shaped, at least in part, by a basic piece of conventional wisdom: Get it done now, for the built-in realities of any election year will make it impossible for Congress to do much legislatively in 2004. You hear it all over town …
Continue reading “2004 Has 50-50 Chance of Being a Productive Year for Congress”
You can’t help but marvel at White House efforts to stop the controversy over its mistaken claim, as the President declared in his State of the Union speech, that Iraq “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” As a communications official from the Clinton Administration, which was known for its share of controversy, I can’t …
Continue reading “Evaluating the White House’s Crisis PR Conundrum”
Many Democrats hope the 2004 election will unfold along the lines of the 1992 election, when their party regained the White House – despite then-President Bush’s Persian Gulf War success – by focusing on domestic affairs. It’s an appealing notion. It’s also wrong. The home-front-over-war-front approach didn’t work in the 2002 midterm elections, and it …
In the late 1980s, some scholars argued that America was in decline. Our economy, they argued, soon would be unable to support our far-flung military commitments, forcing us to scale back. They were wrong. Like everyone else, they simply did not anticipate the Soviet Union’s collapse, which left America as the world’s undisputed military colossus. …
Continue reading “Exploding Deficits Imperil U.S. World Commitments”
A mere one-seat change in the U.S. Senate would dramatically transform the world of public affairs in Washington. For the last year, divided government has blocked many major initiatives from passage. With Republicans running the House and Democrats enjoying a one-vote majority in the Senate, President Bush and Congress have failed this year to enact …
The upcoming elections will do more than determine the makeup of Congress, statehouses and city councils. They surely will generate another round of hand-wringing about low voter turnout and, in turn, the sorry state of American democracy. In fact, the hand-wringing has already begun. A recent op-ed in The Boston Globe by Thomas Patterson, a …
Continue reading “Voting Isn’t the Be-All, End-All of American Democracy”
With Congress engaged in partisan warfare over whether to raise the federal debt limit, jeopardizing the government’s ability to pay its bills in the coming days, lawmakers should take a much bolder step: Scrap the debt limit altogether. The debt limit is worse than useless. It’s dangerous. It creates the risk that Washington will default …