Magazine

Nearly a decade ago, just before Al Gore joined Bill Clinton on the 1992 ticket, I happened to spend a day with the young senator back home in Tennessee. I was a reporter for The Chattanooga Times and had been assigned to do a “day in the life” piece on Gore; we spent most of […]

When John F. Kennedy, Jr. spiralled into the North Atlantic last year, there was some surprise in the press and public that he was allowed to go up into the moonless haze without the instrument training that might have allowed him to save himself and the unfortunate Bessette sisters. But the world of private flying […]

There is a sentence in Paul Weiler’s Leveling the Playing Field that telegraphs his pitch. Weiler is talking about the goal of his proposals to reform professional sports. “Just as we know from other areas of institutional governance,” he writes, “sports leagues have to be designed in a fashion that not only fairly distributes the […]

We make most everything by tearing stuff apart. To make paper, we plant trees, chop them down, and send the wood through our mills. To make spoons, we yank iron up out of the earth, drop it into blast furnaces to make steel, and then mold and shape it at extreme temperatures. But what if […]

Thirty-nine members of the Ohio House–Davidson included–will be forced out this year, when the eight-year term limits that voters imposed on members of the state House and Senate in 1992 finally ripen. A full third of the members who would have been termed out this year have already left, snatching the first attractive opportunities to […]

For a veteran of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign, watching the 2000 edition of George W. Bush is like watching a cheesy cable-movie version of a great novel. The basics are there, but it’s a pale imitation of the real thing. From the moment he secured the nomination, in a ruthless, vicious, amoral butchering of John […]

How can voter interest and participation be increased? Many reformers look to the twenty-first century’s panacea to solve this problem: the Internet. Online technology has already proven its value in politics: 95 percent of gubernatorial candidates and 72 percent of Senate candidates from the two major parties ran Websites in 1998. More recently, Sen. John […]

How bad is it? No one can put a precise number on lost tax revenue. But it’s bad, and getting worse. Even the IRS, which doesn’t like to acknowledge this problem for fear it will only encourage more taxpayers to cheat, admitted in 1999 that the “tax gap,” its euphemism for fraud and error, is […]

For a veteran of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign, watching the 2000 edition of George W. Bush is like watching a cheesy cable-movie version of a great novel. The basics are there, but it’s a pale imitation of the real thing. From the moment he secured the nomination, in a ruthless, vicious, amoral butchering of John […]