Special Issue: Election 2004

There is an old saw of political forecasting: “it’s the economy, stupid.” Bill Clinton popularized it in his campaign to unseat George H. W. Bush and it seemed to work, despite Bush’s swift and apparently painless victory in the Gulf War (in retrospect it was not nearly as smooth as was initially reported). According to…

What are “fellow travelers”? Once upon a time, during the 1920s and 1930s, the epithet referred to left-wing intellectuals who, while not members of the communist party, were sympathetic to its political project. No preening right-winger or proud moderate will let anyone on the left ever forget how writers like Lion Feuchtwanger, Romain Rolland, Lincoln…

During a media age, image and spectacle are of crucial importance in presidential campaigns. Media events like party conventions and daily photo opportunities are concocted to project positive images of the candidates and to construct daily messages to sell the candidate to the public. These events are supplemented by a full range of media advertising…

It almost goes without saying that one experiences a profound sense of bewilderment with each reading of the polls for the 2004 Presidential election. The statistical dead heat may have come as little surprise to some, but the unshakable anxiety that it invokes in those on the left is unquestionable, and the reasons are obvious.…

Campaigning with a running mate who has made his lament about the existence of “two America’s” his political trademark, John Kerry promises to create real opportunities for ordinary Americans. But a careful reading of the 2004 platform suggests just how much further the Democratic Party has to go before it has a credible response to…

When the smoke from the 2004 election clears many Americans hope John Kerry will be president and big foreign policy changes will result. Unfortunately these hopes are not likely and here are two reasons why: first, the interest group generated pressures that set broad parameters for policy tend to remain constant no matter who occupies…

Why second thoughts on intervention now?  As we shall argue, the prospect of regime change in the U.S. does not just raise hopes for a different way of thinking about American policies toward the rest of the world; it also could affect, and ought to affect, the entire way we think about the nature and…

It is hard to imagine a worse, more reactionary and destructive, Presidency than that of George W. Bush, whose nearly four years in office has been marred by one failure after another. The Iraq debacle, costing (as of mid-September 2004) more than 1000 American and up to 30,000 Iraqi lives and proving more bloody by…

“For centuries there have been powerful voices to condemn homosexual conduct as immoral, but this Court’s obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate its own moral code.” Supreme Court, Lawrence v. Texas (2003) “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither…