National Journal articles from April 2000

National Journal archives from April 2000

TRIUMPHANTLY, AMERICA'S LEFT BETRAYS ITSELF (AGAIN).
April 1, 2000... Post-Reagan, post-Gingrich, post-McCain, post-everything, the American conservative movement is a wreck. Only the American progressive movement can save it. Conservatives, fear not. Help is on the way. American conservatives have been...

Why Issues Matter.
April 1, 2000... A CANDIDATE'S STAND ON ISSUES SHAPES HOW HE'S PERCEIVED, AND PERCEPTIONS SHAPE VOTING DECISIONS. Patrice Boyes, a land-use and environmental attorney in Gainesville, Fla., had hoped she would get the chance to cast her vote for Sen. John...

Abortion.
April 1, 2000... Abortion will almost certainly be a factor in the 2000 presidential election, especially among Republican voters, who have deep differences of opinion. Abortion is a particularly polarizing issue, fraught with emotional associations. It would...

Campaign Finance Reform.
April 1, 2000... So now the presidential race is down to two major-party candidates--for the sake of argument, let's call them Born Again (D) and Born Again (R). These two men, paragons of politics-as-usual, secured their respective parties' nominations with...

Defense.
April 1, 2000... Tanks don't handle like Ferraris; aircraft carriers take forever to turn around Pentagon bureaucracy often is immovable, especially by such ephemeral animals as Presidents. Making major changes to the armed forces is politically thankless and...

Economy.
April 1, 2000... Times sure have changed. In 1992, Bill Clinton rode a wave of public discontent about the U.S. economy all the way to the White House. His promise to focus "like a laser beam" on America's economic problems won a plurality of voters in a...

Education.
April 1, 2000... The challenge for George W. Bush and Al Gore on education will be to try to win the perception battle over whose plan is more likely to improve public schools. And to succeed, they'll have to do it in concrete terms that distinguish their plans...

Environment.
April 1, 2000... It is taken as fact in environmental circles that one of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's worst political fears is that Houston will have code-red air quality problems this summer. Ever since Houston overtook Los Angeles last year as the smog...

Foreign Policy.
April 1, 2000... In the broadest outlines, the distance between Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush on foreign policy issues is small. Both men are committed free-traders and internationalists. Neither has shown an instinct for the...

Gun Control.
April 1, 2000... Perhaps not since the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson called for gun control in the aftermath of the assassinations of John F. and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., has the issue hint such urgency in the political arena. A string...

Health Care.
April 1, 2000... Al Gore and George W. Bush have, settled into a pattern on health care issues: Gore attacks and Bush defends. Gore has made health care and the uninsured a central theme of his campaign, whereas Bush has spoken on the subject only in small...

Medicare.
April 1, 2000... The debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush on broad health reform issues hasn't really hit its stride. (Although Gore has a plan to address the growing ranks of the uninsured, Bush has yet to address the issue in detail.) But on the issue of...

Social Security.
April 1, 2000... Social Security reform may not be the poison for politicians it once was, but it could still prove to be pretty toxic. Sure, baby boomers, Generation X-ers, and all the little IPOers now coming of political age are probably aware that the...

Supreme Court.
April 1, 2000... The U.S. Supreme Court's recent 5-4 decisions on such hot-button issues as gun control and tobacco regulation underscore the split among the Justices on the nation's highest court. With four of the nine Justices over age 65, the next President...

Taxes.
April 1, 2000... In this era of federal surpluses, how much--not whether--to cut taxes will be the key question in the presidential campaign, Many Republicans who supported the presidential bid of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in polls that they would rather...

Technology.
April 1, 2000... Presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush are wooing the Internet industry with dollars and sense. Both the Vice President and the Texas governor promise trade agreements, tax breaks, and deregulation efforts worth billions of dollars....

Trade.
April 1, 2000... Al Gore and George W. Bush differ more on cowboy boot style than they do on issues of trade and international economics. Both men are avowed free-traders, they support granting China permanent normal trade relations as part of Beijing's joining...

THE THEORY OF INOCULATION.
April 1, 2000... The contempt for President Clinton continues to run deep among congressional Republicans, but that hasn't stopped them from shamelessly stealing a page--or even a chapter--from his political playbook. Clinton has scored big political...

PIVOTAL EVENTS IN CONGRESS.(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2000... MARCH 27-30 House Refuses to Close Books on Fiscal '00 The House spent nays this week debating a $13 billion add-on to the current year's budget, even though the Senate has no intention of taking up the bill. On March 30, the House...

HOUSE-SENATE COMMITTEE ACTION.(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2000... OVERVIEW The Senate Finance Committee this week went shopping for some expensive wedding presents for married taxpayers, while the Senate Budget Committee picked out its own $150 billion worth of tax cut baubles as it crafted the annual budget...

Hill People.
April 1, 2000... Senate Chris Casey and Jeremy Dorin have gone digital. Armed with laptops, cell phones, and well-honed computer skills, the two former Senate committee staffers are on a mission to help Democratic candidates, officeholders, and...

READING, WRITING, AND CYBERSNOOPING.
April 1, 2000... Internet users have learned a dismaying lesson. Once online, every click you make, someone is watching you. Prying eyes can check out financial data and medical records. Now consumer activists are complaining that corporate cyber-snoops have...

FROM THE K STREET CORRIDOR.
April 1, 2000... The Data Diggers' Hired Help Internet companies are serious about fighting legislative efforts that would severely restrict their access to electronic databases. The NetCoalition.com, a group of 10 Internet service providers that includes...

THE SHANDWICK SURPRISE.
April 1, 2000... Michael Petruzzello should be quaffing champagne. In the public relations world, where growth is god and rainmakers are canonized, Petruzzello deserves at least a round of toasts. As CEO of Shandwick North America, he has produced a torrent of...

People.
April 1, 2000... At the Bar It was "OK, grab your jacket, let's go," said Antilla Trotter. It was his first day as an associate and a lobbyist for the Washington-based law firm of Sher & Blackwell, and he was already bustling off to a meeting on Capitol...

GET THE VATICAN OUT OF THE U.N.! HUH?(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2000... In acreage, the Vatican is about the size of the average golf course. The historic city-state occupies a minute 0.2 square miles of prime Roman real estate, and is home to maybe a thousand people. Of course, within the Vatican's walls reside...

THE ARMY IS ON TRIAL BY ITS OWN.
April 1, 2000... WEST POINT, N.Y.--The apprentice warriors here at the U.S. Military Academy are not the least bit defensive as they answer question after question about why they chose to be different; why they volunteered to spend their college years in the...

WE'RE IN THE MONEY.
April 1, 2000... Accepting his Academy Award for best supporting actor last week, Michael Caine made a little joke: "Tom Cruise, if you'd won this, your price would have gone down so fast. Have you any idea how much supporting actors get paid?" A little later,...

Hotline Extra.
April 1, 2000... Rep. John R. Kasich of Ohio might be a leading candidate in the 2000 Republican veepstakes race. Or the retiring congressman could become a CNN cameraman. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss,, said this about his choice for the Republican...

HERE'S WHAT CANDIDATES LOOK FOR IN A MATE.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... The big parlor game these days is to guess whom Al Gore and George W. Bush will pick to be their running mates. Countless articles over the next four months will be devoted to the subject, as will innumerable hours of airtime. The irony is that...

BUT THEY ARE WHAT THEY ARE.(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... So far, the 2000 presidential campaign has not been characterized by much subtlety. On the contrary, the two candidates left standing have been particularly shameless. Now that the nominations have been settled, we are supposed to accept the...

Poll Track.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
April 1, 2000... Issue Spotlight QUESTIONING CLINTON'S AIM President Clinton's proposals to put safety locks on guns and require tighter restrictions on licensing and gun show sales are being met with some skepticism, according to a poll by Zogby...

A CAMPAIGN ISSUE NAMED ELIAN.
April 1, 2000... Elian Gonzalez is not supposed to be a red-hot political issue--he's a 6-year-old boy, for goodness' sake. But he is. And Florida is not supposed to be a hotly contested state--it's got a governor named Bush, for goodness' sake. But it could...

Corrections.(Correction Notice)
April 8, 2000... An article on the campaign strategy of congressional Republicans (NJ, 4/1/2000, p. 1053) incorrectly reported that Rep. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., was elected in 1998 with the help of the Religious Right. In fact, DeMint won despite the Religious...

Educational Adequacy, Now.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... What should we do to help poor children who attend underperforming schools? This question is a real challenge to people of conscience, but vouchers--the quick-and-easy answer you often hear--would not solve the problem. There is plenty of...

WHY ALAN GREENSPAN'S JOB IS THE HARDEST IN THE WORLD.
April 8, 2000... Over the next few months, it is safe to predict that Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, will ask himself more than once whether he was crazy to accept another term in that post. The domestic and global economies now...

The House on the Line.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... Political mischief has a way of backfiring sometimes. A decade ago, Georgia's 10-member delegation in the U.S. House had just one Republican. But the state's Democrats, who controlled the governorship and the Legislature, weren't satisfied. So...

THE 50 STATES AT A GLANCE.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... This table shows current partisan control of the governor's offices and legislatures in the 50 states, followed by which party will probably control those offices next year--unless the projected control is uncertain. Next, the table lists the...

Drawing Legal Lines.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... The 1990s witnessed a revolution in the law underlying redistricting. The Supreme Court dramatically limited the ability of states to take race and ethnicity into account when drawing new electoral boundaries, and new rules determined how...

Four States, Countless Scenarios.
April 8, 2000... HOW THE PROCESS OF REDISTRICTING IS PLAYING OUT IN STATES THAT WIN, LOSE AND DRAW. The best way to appreciate the down-and-dirty politics that marks congressional redistricting is to look at the experiences in individual states. Here are...

After Affirmative Action.
April 8, 2000... A LOOK AT HOW ONE UNIVERSITY TRIES TO MAINTAIN ITS ADMISSIONS OF MINORITIES EVEN THOUGH IT CAN NO LONGER EXPLICITLY CONSIDER RACE. SEATTLE--"Since the day I was born, I have been thrown into a world of lies, deceit, abuse, drugs, shelters,...

BEGIN THE ENDGAME.
April 8, 2000... If congressional Republicans really are serious about adjourning early this election year, maybe they should just send the appropriations leaders and Office of Management and Budget Director Jacob "Jack" Lew into a small room right now to begin...

PIVOTAL EVENTS IN CONGRESS.
April 8, 2000... APRIL 3-6 Hastert Sets Late-May Vote on China Now it's official: Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., announced on April 5 that the House will vote during the week of May 22, just before the Memorial Day recess, on legislation granting...

Hot Bills.
April 8, 2000... GAS PRICES House: Referred bills to cut federal gasoline taxes to the Ways and Means Committee. Senate: Passed a budget amendment opposing gasoline tax cuts on April 6, 66-34; floor action is pending on S. 2285. Outlook:...

HOUSE-SENATE COMMITTEE ACTION.
April 8, 2000... BY NATIONAL JOURNAL NEWS SERVICE * OVERVIEW In the spring, a congressman's fancy turns to thoughts of re-election, so members offered a bouquet to taxpayers, plucked some lawless weeds growing on the Internet, and planted the seeds of...

Hill People.
April 8, 2000... Senate In a heartfelt tribute on the Senate floor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., bid farewell last week to Michael McGill, her chief of staff for the past seven years. McGill is moving to the General Services Administration to take up...

GUNS AND TRICKY POLITICS.
April 8, 2000... In the past year or so, Ken Toltz has flown from his suburban Denver home to Washington four times as part of a dogged effort to prove that his political ambitions aren't far-fetched. Toltz, a Democrat making his first bid for Congress, insists...

KIDS, PARENTS, AND GUNS.
April 8, 2000... When a 6-year-old Michigan boy took a loaded gun from underneath the blankets on his uncle's bed and used it to kill Kayla Rolland, a 6-year-old classmate, the tragedy gave President Clinton an opening to push for a federal measure that would...

ONCE MORE TO THE TAPES.(White House e-mail)
April 8, 2000... Computer technology is creating more than just new businesses. It is also creating new opportunities for political investigators, consultants, and press officials. Exhibit A: the charge by House Republicans that the White House hid e-mails from...

ALL PUMPED UP.(oil prices)
April 8, 2000... Motorists may have been grumbling, but Washington's energy lobbyists cheered the news last month that the price of crude oil had soared to a nine-year high of $34 a barrel. The lobbyists, representing both big oil and the renewable-energy...

FROM THE K STREET CORRIDOR.
April 8, 2000... Drug Warriors Pharmaceutical industry lobbyists are scrambling to challenge legislation that Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., plans to introduce that would bar companies from selling prescription drugs at a higher price in the United States...

People.
April 8, 2000... Image Makers Debbie Garrett has joined Quinn Gillespie & Associates, the bipartisan public relations and strategic consulting firm that opened its doors in Washington on Jan. 4. For the past two and a half years, Garrett, 28, has been an...

LOCAL TAXES MAKE THE GARDEN STATE GREENER.
April 8, 2000... Every spring in Hopewell, N.J., you'll see something that few people in the eastern United States ever get a chance to see--100-year-old chestnut trees, with their pyramid-shaped white flowers in full and flagrant bloom. In the 1880s, a...

SURF CITY.(surfing Internet and other media)
April 8, 2000... MEDIA Around the corner from our office, there's a funny little shop where they sell only the most discretionary goods: lottery tickets, snack foods, juice, cigarettes, and the sundry fruits of the dying old media. The aisles and walls are...

Poll Track.
April 8, 2000... * White House 2000 A STATE SAMPLER In New Jersey, Vice President Al Gore has a double-digit lead over Texas Gov. George W. Bush--50 percent to 37 percent. New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman was out on the stump with Bush last week,...

The Cutting Edge.(political and economic policy)
April 8, 2000... The Whole-Hog Sales Tax Steve Forbes hawked a flat tax to supplant the graduated income tax. Others have proposed a value-added tax, levied at every stage of a good's production, or the creation of private Social Security accounts to...

SEATTLE II.
April 8, 2000... The battle over the future of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank moves out of the think tanks, down Capitol Hill, and (if the unrest in Seattle is a reliable guide) into the streets of Washington on April 16 and 17. Thousands of...

IN SOUTH CAROLINA, OLD MEETS NEW.
April 8, 2000... GREENVILLE, S.C.--They call it the South Carolina miracle--a decade-long industrial spree that has brought factories and corporate headquarters to the 1-85 corridor that links Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta. The rebirth--driven by transplanted...

Verbatim.(interview with Representative James A. Traficant, Jr.)(Interview)
April 8, 2000... Excerpts from Paula Zahn's April 3 interview on Fox with Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., D-Ohio. Paola Zahn: Although the U.S. Attorney's office refuses to neither confirm nor deny any details of an investigation, a grand jury has reportedly...

Survey Says.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... Women voters are getting more and more attention from candidates, pollsters, and journalists. Various polls track women's concerns, involvement, and knowledge of political issues. In the past week alone, CNN, the Associated Press, and several...

Reality Check.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... In the category of little fibs that candidates use to burnish their records, Al Gore has trotted out a chestnut used for years to good effect by President Clinton. To somehow quantify the Clinton-Gore record of success in boosting American...

Grilling Hillary.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... RuffPAC Produced by Gemini Productions Two 30-second ads You'd better be tough if you're gonna make it in the Big Apple. That's what Hillary Rodham Clinton is learning with each new day of her Senate campaign. Now she's faced with a...

Hotline Extra.
April 8, 2000... But What About Those Gas Prices? The Veepstakes watch continues. Recently, some top California Latinos and other Democrats "from other key states" said they will urge Vice President Al Gore to choose Energy Secretary Bill Richardson as his...

THIS YEAR, VOTERS WANT CONTINUITY AND CHANGE.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... Most presidential elections turn on the question of change vs. continuity. In times of trouble, the message that resonates with voters is invariably "It's time for a change." But when things are going well, the winning message is some variation...

IS MCCAIN'S CRUSADE ALREADY A FOOTNOTE?(Senator John McCain)
April 8, 2000... Will this be the year Congress enacts serious campaign finance law reforms? The climate for change certainly seems favorable, judging from the near-deification of one of the reform movement's most prominent advocates, Sen. John McCain of...

AL'S SWERVES ARE LOSING TRACTION.(Brief Article)
April 8, 2000... "I think the Vice President would say anything to get elected," George W. Bush asserted last month. The Republican governor of Texas did not pull that charge out of thin air. Virtually everything Vice President Al Gore--Bush's last-standing...

Corrections.
April 15, 2000... A recent article--"Why Bauer Is With McCain" (3/4/2000, p. 724)--identified Colorado activist James C. Dobson with the honorific "Rev." He's not one.

Letters.
April 15, 2000... THE COELHO INQUIRY Bill Hogan's free-lance article, "The Coelho Case,"[3/25/00, p. 954], contains factual errors and misleading allegations about my client, Mark Johnson, executive director of the Census Monitoring Board and former deputy...

WHY BILL CLINTON SHOULD NOT BE INDICTED.
April 15, 2000... "President Clinton is not `above the law.' His conduct should not be excused, nor will it. The President can be criminally prosecuted, especially once he leaves office. In other words, his acts may not be `removable' wrongs, but they could be...

OF COPS AND COLOR: DOES AFFIRMATIVE ACTION KILL?
April 15, 2000... When I visited John Lott in his Yale office in January, he hardly looked the part of a hellion. A tall, thin, not especially descript man of 41, he evinces all the charisma of, say, a statistical economist who holds a research position in a law...

The '80s vs. the '90s.
April 15, 2000... WHICH DECADE DID YOU LIKE BETTER, THE '80S OR THE '90S? YOUR ANSWER MAY SAY A LOT ABOUT WHICH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE YOU'LL SUPPORT. Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, emulating the President they are seeking to replace,...

Making Dad Matter.
April 15, 2000... AS THE DEBATE ON DEADBEAT DADS INTENSIFIES, AN INNOVATIVE FLORIDA PROGRAM GETS SURPRISING RESULTS. TAMPA, Fla.--Tucked along a side road in a run-down industrial section in the northeast part of town, National Fisheries strikes first-time...

The Grand Tour.(Statistical Data Included)
April 15, 2000... CANDIDATES MAKE THE ROUNDS IN WASHINGTON, SEEKING CASH, CREDIBILITY, AND MEDIA BUZZ. Inside the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's palatial headquarters across Lafayette Square from the White House, Felix Grucci and Jeff Flake are dressed as if...

HATCH SINGS THE BLUES.
April 15, 2000... In the classic film On the Waterfront, Terry Malloy--a dreamer of prize-fighting glory played by Marlon Brando--mutters that memorable line: "I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody..." With those few words, Malloy summed up the...

PIVOTAL EVENTS IN CONGRESS.
April 15, 2000... APRIL 10-13 Budget OK'd, Spending Squeeze Looms Before heading off on their recesses, the House and Senate on April 13 approved the conference report on the fiscal 2001 budget resolution, thus setting the stage for contentious debate...

HOUSE-SENATE COMMITTEE ACTION.
April 15, 2000... APRIL 10-13 Don't Tell Greenspan: A $40,000 Minimum Wage * TECHNOLOGY A House panel had a novel twist this week on the money mania that has swept the new dot-com economy: a $40,000 minimum wage. But American workers need not...

Hot Bills.
April 15, 2000... PATIENTS' RIGHTS House: Approved a bipartisan patients' rights bill (H.R. 2723) on Oct. 7, 1999, 275-151, then merged it with an insurance access bill (H.R. 2990). Senate: Approved S. 1344 with narrower reforms favored by health...

Hill People.(Brief Article)
April 15, 2000... House For weeks, Americans have been mailing (or failing to mail) their census 2000 forms back to the Census Bureau. But not everyone is sticking around for the results: Timothy J. Maney, the chief investigator for the House Government...

LOOKING FOR TUBE TIME.
April 15, 2000... White House officials have not granted The Washington Post an exclusive interview with President Clinton since January 1997. The New York Times hasn't had a wide-ranging session with him since December 1997. USA Today--a favorite of Clinton's...

POVERTY ON THE LINE.
April 15, 2000... Few statistics are more important to the country, to the government, and to millions of low-income Americans than the number that defines the national poverty level--currently $17,050 for a family of four. That level sets the eligibility...

KOSOVO MAY BE NATO'S LAST HURRAH.
April 15, 2000... NATO may never again mount another military offensive, because the Kosovo operation was so "ugly." So says a four-star military officer who should know: retired Navy Adm. Leighton W. Smith Jr. He ran military operations in Bosnia in 1996, and...

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTIN FRONT.(David Westin, head of ABC News)
April 15, 2000... Will Leonardo appear on ABC interviewing the President? Will David Westin keep his job? Is this finally the death of journalism? And can you stand the tension? We're in week three of Leonardo, and here in the media clubhouse, we're still...

RAISING CANE WON'T HELP SUGAR GROWERS.
April 15, 2000... The federal sugar program--whose supporters have long touted it as the sweetest of American farm policies because its import barriers and price supports didn't cost taxpayers a cent--is turning sour. Domestic sugar producers are pressing...

THE GENE TEAM.(genetically engineered foods)
April 15, 2000... When seven biofood giants in early April launched a $50 million education campaign touting the benefits of genetically modified foods, their drugmaking brethren in biotechnology cheered. For months, executives at Amgen, Genentech, and other...