The American Prospect articles from July 2008

The American Prospect archives from July 2008

The year of passion.(PROSPECTS)
July 1, 2008... NOW THAT BARACK OBAMA HAS SECURED HIS PARTY'S presidential nomination, it is a good moment to assess the extraordinary and improbable thing that the Democrats have done. It was not intuitively obvious, particularly to those who saw the...

Correspondence.(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Following the publication of Mark Schmitt's "Can Identity Politics Save the Right" (June 2008), our Web editors solicited responses to the article from three leading conservative thinkers. The following are excerpts...

From the executive editor.(Correspondence)
July 1, 2008... HILLARY CLINTON MADE HISTORY OVER THE PAST year--just not quite enough of it to win the Democratic nomination for president. In the wake of her campaign's end, the Prospect looks at what it will take for women to make broader gains within the...

Beyond branding.(Up Front)
July 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THIS IS NOT A GOOD TIME FOR THE REPUBLICANS. They're behind in the polls, behind in fundraising, and lashed to a president who's about as popular as a disease. And so it has become popular in Republican ranks to...

The question: what could Bush possibly do to improve his approval ratings before he leaves office?(George W. Bush)(Quotation)
July 1, 2008... "Build time machine, travel to Palm Beach 2000, fix butterfly ballot, concede, make daring citizen's arrest to foil 9-11 plot." --David Halperin, former speechwriter for Bill Clinton and Howard Dean "Write a tell-all, 'insider'...

Parody.('What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception', 'Stuff Happens: How Known Unknowns Led to You-Know-What Human Events')(Book review)
July 1, 2008... "Clearly, I had allowed myself to be deceived." --Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception MORE TELL-ALL RELEASES FOR 2008 AND 2009 Stuff Happens: How Known Unknowns Led To...

On our own.(THE OUT YEARS)(Rick Perlstein)(Interview)
July 1, 2008... INTERVIEWING RICK PERLSTEIN, AUTHOR OF THE mega-book Nixonland, Mark Hemingway of National Review lamented recently that "liberal or popular historians don't seem to be very interested in conservative history and ideology." Perlstein...

Our CEOs, their foreign agents.(COMMENT)(chief executive officers)
July 1, 2008... IN DECEMBER 2004, IBM ANNOUNCED THE SALE OF ITS personal computer division to China's Lenovo. The announcement came as a surprise in Washington but was old news in Beijing. As IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano later told The New York Times, the deal...

Strength in numbers.(women in Congress)
July 1, 2008... In 1992, the much-vaunted "Year of the Woman" when 27 women were elected to Congress, Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland said, "Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus. We're...

Woman versus machine.
July 1, 2008... The story is a legend in Chicago politics and machine politics generally. In the middle of the last century, a young University of Chicago student named Abner Mikva--later a leading liberal congressman, then a federal judge, then Bill Clinton's...

By invitation only.(women in politics)
July 1, 2008... It's never easy, amid the chaos and colliding variables of a campaign, to determine which factors really decide a close election. Politicians have their theories, though. As this year's primary season drew to a close, Hillary Clinton began...

Seven Democratic women to watch.(Kathleen Sebelius, Jennifer Brunner, Donna Edwards, Amy Klobuchar, Lisa Madigan, Karen Bass, Hilda L. Solis)
July 1, 2008... As Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign ground to a halt, many women (and men) lamented that it was the last chance in their lifetimes to vote for a woman for president. And some of that pessimism is warranted. Four out of the last five...

Janet Napolitano and the new third way: Arizona's governor has contained Republicans, reinvigorated Democrats, and provided a new model for progressive politics in the West.
July 1, 2008... By all accounts, Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona agonized over the decision of whom to endorse in this year's presidential primary. Sure, the choice was fraught for most Democratic politicians who built their careers during the 1990s. But not...

Continental drift: as Europe suffers the effects of a financial crisis made in the USA, its left opposition parties are surprisingly stymied. For many Europeans, the hope for change is Barack Obama.(Viewpoint essay)
July 1, 2008... I am on the road in Europe looking for the global opposition party. For three decades, the global governing party has imposed its program of market fundamentalism: Dismantle all barriers to flows of goods, services, and money. Deregulate and...

America's AIDS apartheid: the domestic HIV/AIDS epidemic is increasingly black and Southern--and spiraling out of control.
July 1, 2008... The hope in Tracy's voice was contagious. He had just come out of Alabama's state prison system and was looking forward to starting over. He'd gotten some part-time work and secured a comfortable, if sparsely furnished apartment. He was a...

The white stuff: what does an extremely popular new blog about white culture tell us about race in America?(MEDIA)
July 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THEY LIKE RUNNING MARATHONS and eating sushi, venerating Jon Stewart and bragging about not owning a TV. They talk endlessly about HBO's The Wire and dance self-consciously to '80s music. They're into "irony" and...

Partisans' progress.(Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... UNEQUAL DEMOCRACY: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE NEW GILDED AGE BY LARRY M. BARTELS, Princeton University Press, 325 pages, $29.95 THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION is shaping up to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Americans to break...

Freedom's future online.(The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET AND HOW TO STOP IT BY JONATHAN ZITTRAIN, Yale University Press, 352 pages, $30.00 THE DELIRIUM AND DELUSIONS that surrounded computing and the Internet in the 1990s have given way to a sentiment just as...

Make it personal.(Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout, 2d ed.)(Book review)
July 1, 2008... GET OUT THE VOTE: HOW TO INCREASE VOTER TURNOUT (SECOND EDITION) BY DONALD P. GREEN AND ALAN S. GERBER, Brookings Institution Press, 225 pages, $]8.95 THE LATE ALAN BARON, SOMETIME political consultant and full-time political wag, used to...

All the young bankers.(THE CLOSER)
July 1, 2008... WHY DOES GERMANY HAVE AN ENGINEERING shortage while U.S. engineers are forced into "sales"? If our engineers didn't go into sales, they'd be unemployed. It also puzzles me how, in 2008, German industry, with an ever higher euro, keeps...

Media and madness: for better and worse, the news media and entertainment industry shape public opinion about mental illness.(Viewpoint essay)
July 1, 2008... On April 16, 2007, a South Korean student named Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and then turned the gun on himself at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in the deadliest shooting rampage in American history. Within hours after the...

A professor's story: going public after tenure.
July 1, 2008... When I was diagnosed with cancer, my dearest friend, Steve, flew across the country to be with me. I opened my apartment door, and he smiled and reached for a hug. Looking over my shoulder past our embrace, he remarked on the many bouquets I'd...

Combat fatigue: as returning veterans suffer post-traumatic stress disorder in record numbers, a controversial new drug is being tested that would dampen their memories.(propranolol)
July 1, 2008... Barry Roma, a postal worker and a disabled Vietnam veteran, tells people not to be afraid of him. He is joking, sort of. He knows how veterans--and postal workers--are seen by many people, and luckily he has a sense of humor. By night, he works...

A worthy diversion: Pennsylvania has developed a model program to keep offenders with mental illness out of the criminal-justice system.
July 1, 2008... One night last winter, Sally Judson was arrested for prostitution and disorderly conduct. She was also charged with resisting arrest and possession of drugs and drug paraphernalia. Judson, who has schizophrenia as well as a heroin addiction, is...

Finding funding: states should link mental-health funding to dedicated revenue sources independent of the political whims of legislators. Here are some creative examples.(Rusty Selix Jr., AB2034)
July 1, 2008... Longtime mental-health advocate Rusty Selix Jr. believed in 1999 that California had found the key to ending chronic homelessness among people with serious mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major and severe...

Programs that work: clubhouses and ACT are proven successes. So why aren't they better known or funded?(Assertive Community Treatment)
July 1, 2008... Nehemiah Surratt delivers the mail every morning at the Dow Jones office near Times Square in Manhattan. He sorts the incoming mail, transports it to the various departments, and picks up outgoing documents. In the afternoon, Surratt takes...

Follow the money: how shortsighted funding and reimbursement warps mental-health care in America.
July 1, 2008... It may seem arcane, but the reimbursement and spending priorities of government health agencies can literally have life and death consequences for people with mental illness. Just ask the family of Carolyn Howard, who was bludgeoned to death in...

Mind reading: technological advances catapult mental health to the forefront of ethics debates.
July 1, 2008... For too long, mental health has been a policy and ethical backwater. While mountains of articles have been written on the ethics of cloning human beings (hugely unlikely to happen anytime soon), the morality of using genetically engineered...

Pushing parity: Congress is poised to end insurance discrimination against people with mental illnesses.
July 1, 2008... During my 14 years in Congress, I've had the opportunity to meet incredible people and hear amazing stories of triumph, heroism, and bravery. While these remarkable stories may grab a headline in the morning's paper or a brief spot on the...

What's needed next: a new federal Office of Mental Health Policy.(THE POLITICS OF MENTAL ILLNESS)
July 1, 2008... In 1963, President Kennedy challenged the nation to transform the lives of people with mental illnesses. The Kennedy family had first-hand experience with the pain of mental disabilities and their treatments. The president's sister Rosemary...