Political Booknotes
Cooper, Jonathan Alter,William Saletan,Thomas Ricks,Thomas Toch,Mickey Kaus,Matthew
Political Booknotes The Great Divide by Jonathan Alter LAST YEAR, AS PART OF THE coverage of President Clinton's race initiative, I traveled to Hot Springs, Ark,, to tape a story for...
...Journalists feel frustrated by the complexity of certain subjects, but especially this one...
...Huffington’s Sam Donaldson yells “Hold on, Mr...
...Abortion laws were created by men and men’s religions, they argue, and can just as easily be overthrown by women...
...The Chechens sometimes were equally vicious...
...Yet each draws its moral confidence from a primordial denial of its adversary’s truth...
...Virtually all students in other developed countries take algebra by the eighth grade, for example, while only a quarter of U.S...
...Not surprisingly, pundits have taken to their hobby horses in the wake of these results, venting their pet peeves with the educational system and trumpeting favorite reform nostrums...
...And yet, the administration still has a propensity to be a little too cute...
...He therefore proposes giving schools financial and other rewards for lifting scores on tests based on such standards...
...They are the “articles of faith” that sustain the war and render it insoluble...
...Huffington’s purpose is too didactic: basically to show that everyone in Washington is mired in a sea of corruption and hollow compromise - everyone, that is, except humble little Arianna/Alice, who (as the book’s setup would have it) arrives for her White House weekend after losing a bet and contributing $300 to the Democratic meets a hideous two-faced creature called The Bipartisan, attends various shakedowns with corporate donors, and worries about a “late-night visit from the Fondler-in-Chief‘ The main voices of wisdom she encounters are Socks (who talks) and, yes, an ancient black servant named Walter, who says things like, ‘You don’t want nothing to do with them Bipartisans, Mrs...
...And while the title of the book focuses on the administration side of the equation, Kurtz scrutinizes both sides of the podium...
...Having been in some ofthose, I think they’re good for all sides...
...He’s got qualities that make him an ideal press secretary...
...The average African-American 12 th-grader reads at the level of the average white eighthgrader, and 40 percent of Hispanic students drop out of school...
...In fact, it was recommended to me by a smart Marine colonel who read the British edition that appeared last year...
...The only strong moment came when I asked a white woman how she would feel if her daughter came home with a black man to marry...
...The president’s proposed national tests in reading and math are a good but flawed idea, Tucker argues, because they don’t peg test questions to a specific set of achievement standards...
...Escalating its involvement as it grew more exasperated with the breakaway republic, Russia in the fall of 1994 sent 40,000 troops to the Chechen border - a move that provoked the interesting charge from Jokhar Dudayev, the Soviet general turned president of Chechnya, that Moscow did indeed head “the evil empire...
...First they were just for the DNC...
...supplement textbooks with paperback “concept books” that explain the key ideas in every core course...
...Then Moscow began supplying the pro-Russian opposition with arms...
...The two studies also should prove instructive to anyone who thinks future wars will be high-tech, lowsweat affairs...
...This book should be read as a companion to the recent Philadelphia Inquirer series on the US...
...I]n an abortion clinic every patient had a right to denial, too: a right to refrain from asking, a right to shut her eyes, a right to select the vocabulary with which she was going to think about what she had decided to do...
...But Widdicombe has drawn the wrong lesson...
...His answer: “I feel it will be Stepchild of Chechnya!’ That grim prediction is one reason this journalistic history of the recent Chechen war has been attracting attention from the U.S...
...We should be willing to endure the hardest part so they don’t have to...
...senator from California...
...When Widdicombe tries to train Freiman in second-trimester abortions, he recoils in revulsion at a severed fetal arm, “suddenly thinking about Nazi Germany...
...How have abortion rights activists rationalized this denial...
...By countering the unreflective ideology of fetal humanity with the equally unreflective ideology of personal autonomy...
...Even Supreme Court Justice Byron White, in his famous dissent from Roe, accuses his colleagues of sanctifymg women’s “convenience, whim, or caprice...
...To those in Benton Harbor, it is proof that because of race even the obvious is never what it seems...
...The Bipartisan smiled and frowned at the same time...
...Joe’s police detective handling the case, Jim Reeves, was doomed from day one in Benton Harbor because of the color of his skin...
...Not that it matters...
...That’s the troubling finding of a big international study of students’ math and science skills conducted over the past couple of years...
...If you ain’t bleeding,” says one detective, “you ain’t gonna make it on the list” of those who get police help...
...Ultimately, this determination to oversimplify makes pro-life and prochoice activists oddly compatible...
...It was good...
...That’s the thesis underlying the school reform movement of the past 15 years, and it’s the core belief of the new book Standarkfor Our Schools, by Marc Tucker and Judy Codding...
...She paused, sighed, and said evenly to the camera: “I’d pray...
...We don’t have any money: she pleads later, in a panic...
...She asks him how they will pay the rent...
...And hence the bitterness and violence that ensued when the nation failed to rise up...
...The author usually novelizes the story as best he can with vivid characters and a tidy, satisfymg ending If certain players won’t be interviewed, he writes around them...
...The humanity of the unborn baby - a phrase whose very vocabulary seemed to underscore its internal logic - had been relegated in a single morning to the status of opinion,” Gorney writes...
...But he returns, often lyrically, to this case as a totem of two towns...
...he fights for the press within the administration...
...myth becomes truth...
...It’s true, as the White House argues, that the truth is not something you can easily release to the press...
...In contrast to many in the school reform world, Tucker has both a capacity for the fine grain of individual reforms and a big-picture sense of how the many parts of an educational system fit together...
...Joe’s and the whites who live there...
...Michael Freiman, the clinic’s senior physician, pays little attention to the fetuses he vacuums out, other than to notice that at a glance, they look “like something a doctor was supposed to take out...
...Arianna's World by Mickey Kaus A RIANNA HUFFINGTON IS A SOCial climber who married oil heir Michael Huffington, insinuated herself into the inner circles of the national Republican party, and then got divorced from her husband after he lost his bid to become a U.S...
...If Gen...
...This ideology of autonomy begins as a medical credo...
...Socks is an appealing, fully developed character, and the meeting with the monstrous Bipartisan has a genuine Carroll-like quality...
...A Russian sergeant told the authors, “The (Chechen) fighters aren’t scared to move around and we are, that is the difference...
...Judy Widdicombe chastises pro-lifers for supposing that moral ambiguity “could be wished away by a simple act of will,” yet she commits the same fallacy, by treating the fetus as a human life only when the woman wishes to see it that way...
...In recent years, a number of similar books have been written as powerful narratives...
...Pro-lifers constantly invoke the crude catch phrase “abortion on demand” to brush aside women’s various reasons for ending their pregnancies...
...narrow the mission of high schools to rigorous instruction in core subjects, leaving vocational education and other work of traditional “comprehensive high schools” to other institutions...
...She explains to Gorney that she and her husband “looked at what the quality of our life was like...
...But the simplest and most important lesson to be drawn from the Third International Math and Science Study is that expectations are a lot lower and the curricula much less rigorous in US...
...But it remains to be seen whether the pobtical center will prevail against both the left and the right on the standards issue...
...By day the tank column was swarmed by civilian protesters...
...Stories of those who succeed in closing racial gaps might not alleviate the bleakness of Kotlowitz’s vision, but they could help him use his human touch to reach yet deeper into the heart of America...
...When everything is a scandal, nothing is...
...Unfortunately, she is also charming and witty (at least if you don’t work for her) and seems to genuinely care about political ideas...
...And then there’s the press corps - afraid always of getting scooped on the latest scandal...
...A nurse at the clinic confesses that during second-trimester abortions, she never looks at the extracted fetal parts...
...But he’s not willing, as his opponents are, to leave the question unanswered...
...Media Cynics by Matthew Cooper FIRST, THE CAVEATS, I COVERED the White House full time from 1993 to 1996 and I’m friendly with many of the people in this book, including the author...
...Ml that solemnity, that blinding moral certainty, it must grow tiresome after a while,” Gorney writes...
...military is in for a rough time...
...She and Lee have been ousted from their movements, not for their zeal, but for tempering that zeal in heretical pursuit of political compromise...
...Tucker arguably has been the most influential school reformer in the nation over the past decade and a half, though he has received far less recognition than such peers as Theodore Sizer, Ernest Boyer, and Albert Shanker...
...If not, it’s unlikely that the rankings of US...
...The answer, she concludes, is: “Where had he not learned it...
...There’s a good bit with a statuelike Al Gore stashed in a catacomb-like Great Hall of the Vice-presidents...
...eighth-graders are slightly above average in science and below average m math...
...In “St...
...Over time, this becomes a political credo...
...Although the book is disjointed and padded in parts, Kotlowitz succeeds in making his frustration in finding the truth about Eric’s death serve as a metaphor for our larger frustrations about race...
...When Lee and Widdicombe are finally discarded by their colleagues, Widdicombe muses on the irony of their common fate...
...It’s not quite a lie, but it’s pretty close...
...A meeting of governors and CEO’s convened by Gov...
...the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, who delivers a lecture on the real meaning of leadership...
...The papers aren’t always easy to find, the memories of individual actors sometimes conflict...
...The 12 th-grade results, released only a few weeks ago to front-page coverage in the major dailies, explode the conventional wisdom that our top students are as good as those of our economic competitors: US...
...It also takes some gall for the just-divorced Hufhgton, a sometime follower of guru John-Roger, to ask whether Bill and Hillary are “really married” and to make fun of the president for consorting with “self-esteem counselors...
...Every crime, every conversation, ends up being just another game of blind-man-and-the-elephant...
...Benton Harbor has a population of 12,000, 92 percent black...
...And a few states, notably New York and Maryland, are phasing in tough endofcourse high school exams that should make a difference...
...Truth becomes myth...
...Months later Chechen fighters roared back out of their mountain retreats...
...And we decided,” on that basis, to get an abortion...
...The town went 25 years without a homicide...
...That’s my secret...
...The progress in race relations is real, but stops short of profound...
...Judy had been known to hold private procedure-room baptisms, when she thought a patient might be comforted by the ritual,” Gorney writes...
...The authors claim that at one point, Grozny was hit with the heaviest artillery bombardment since World War 11, which seems an overstatement in light of the firepower used in the Iran-Iraq War...
...I make America feel good about being selfish...
...On the Buddhist temple affair, only under duress did Gore aides come up with the slippery phrase that it was a “finance-related event” - which, as my colleague Walter Shapiro jokes, is like calling a stick-up a wallet-andwatch related event...
...Abortion is “a woman’s right,” Betty Friedan declares in 1969, and “technicalities” such as the nature of the fetus are “irrelevant...
...Russia responded ferociously...
...At one time, the U.S...
...By the standards of modern-day non-fiction thrillers, the new book is a failure...
...Confronted with questions about the personhood of the embryo, and with the competing claim that women are entitled to judge the morality of abortion for themselves, pro-lifers respond with dismissal and denial...
...It seems like a small matter but it’s a telling instance of the administration’s larger difficulties with the truth...
...As is true of almost any issue that one explores in depth, it’s a complicated story...
...It’s a dark photo montage of the American dilemma, vintage 1990s...
...There are no villains and no saints...
...Just as importantly, he has the coalition-building instincts of a politician: He has raised millions of dollars of public and private monies to fund major reform projects that involve not only thousands of teachers but also dozens of governors...
...Programmed to Fail by Thomas Toch THE LONGER AMERICAN KIDS stay in school, the further they fall behind their counterparts in other industrialized countries...
...She has become disenchanted with pro-choice activists who find “exhilaration in the combat” and “don’t know how to do anything else...
...They, too, must now be denied...
...It’s not that the press should treat Clinton’s proposals with reflexive acceptance...
...that night it was smashed by the rocket-propelled grenades of Chechen fighters...
...Mutually Assured Denial by William Denial ROE V. WADE TURNED 25 THIS year, and its anniversary passed in the usual manner...
...But in the modern knowledge-based economy workers increasingly need the sort of rigorous education that was once largely reserved for the gifted and the privileged...
...But Alex Kotlowitz, author of the highly acclaimed There Are No Children Here, a wrenching account of the lives of two African-American boys in a Chicago housing project, is game to try again...
...The linchpin of school improvement, Tucker argues, is national standards...
...students do so...
...Both works should be required as cautionary reading for policymakers and pundits prone to underestimating the difficulty of intervening in the cities of the Third World, whether Baghdad, Mogadishu, or Grozny...
...President,” after a news conference, and then when the president actually stops to answer, doesn’t have a question...
...Gorney cites several forums in which they have denied that abortion differs morally from contraception...
...Two decades later, defending a St...
...Moving the war southward into the mountains of the Chechen countryside, Russian forces committed a variety of atrocities, from burning villages to terrorizing prisoners by throwing them from hovering helicopters...
...Against those who presume to bend women’s wills to the law, prochoicers resolve to bend the law to women’s wills...
...Beyond that, the story was far too superficial, even for television...
...Her substantive complaint is that neither party cares about “what’s happening to the poorest Americans...
...This was a decision we made: that was how she would describe her abortion...
...Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and IBM’s Lou Gerstner two years ago has resulted in the creation of an organization that’s helping to introduce new standards in the states...
...This book is a blueprint for the changes in the educational system that Tucker believes are needed to achieve his holy grail of high expectations for all students...
...Even so, to the Russians the war seemed all but won...
...Louis abortion clinic before the Supreme Court, he again dismisses this proposition as an “emotional label.’’ For the clinic’s medical staff, such denial requires greater effort...
...How are we going to buy the milk...
...I ended up disappointed in the story that aired...
...Joe’s...
...These steps are remarkable in a nation where the mention of centralized standards and tests would have been heresy only a decade ago...
...And yet the cumulative effect of the FBI files, Johnny Chung, the coffees, Charlie Trie, the Webb Hubbell affair, Larry Lawrence’s Arlington burial, the Gore fundraising calls, and so on is slightly ludicrous...
...Charles Krulak, the commandant of the Marine Corps, likes to ask, ‘%e we going to have Son of Desert Storm or the Stepchild of Chechnya...
...In 1994, it had the highest per capita murder rate in the U.S...
...Judging from the acknowledgments, Huffington had a lot of help, though one of those she thanks, her friend Harry Shearer, can’t have had that much to do with this project...
...That said, this is a solid read buttressed by a terrific amount of reporting...
...Each side finds the war exhilarating...
...Widdicombe even manages to fashion this denial into a positive ethic...
...Confederate flags are available...
...Not surprisingly, Tucker takes pains to promote his own organization’s new standards and tests...
...Kurtz has delved deeply into White House-press relations in the Clinton era...
...By the end of the month, ‘Moscow had agreed to recognize Chechen independence, and Russian troops again withdrew...
...Oops...
...secondary schools than in those of other industrialized nations...
...When an attractive county clerk dances with a black man at a party, she is teased and scorned as “Nicole,” as in Nicole Brown Simpson...
...They have nowhere to go but up...
...That question beckoned Washington Post reporter Cynthia Gorney to Missouri nine years ago...
...After Roe, when pro-lifers propose to make abortion illegal again, Widdicombe reasons that this is folly because it won’t “change women’s minds...
...My wife, who used to work for the Clintons, gets a couple of mentions in here...
...Take Mike McCurry...
...The most troubling pattern Gorney reveals is the activists’ inability to recognize, much less examine, their premises...
...It’s a rich and beautifully told story, spanning three decades in the lives of Missouri’s most influential abortion activists...
...And your perspective - myth or truth, truth or myth - is shaped by which side of the river you live on,” he writes...
...Widdicombe’s marriage collapses, and she weeps as she realizes that her personal life has become “withered and wrong,” with “no person left over once the workday was finished, no real inside Judy at all...
...Hence, too, the naive assumption among pro-lifers that they could rally the nation against Roe simply by “explaining” what abortion and Roe entailed...
...The press never sorts out what’s important from what’s merely new...
...Some whites call the place “Benton Harlem...
...Interestmgly, as Kurtz points out, the American people know better...
...Afterward, says Gomey, Widdicombe mourned briefly, “[blut she never wavered when she talked about it...
...This time his subject is the mysterious death of Eric McGinniss, a 16-year old black kid who was last seen alive in a white neighborhood and ended up drowning in a river between the towns of St...
...There is in St...
...No wonder the public has tuned out the scandal and is willing to give Clinton a pass - at least for now - on the Monica Lewinsky matter...
...Her answer, Articles ofFaith, isn’t a treatise or manifesto...
...Zealots, Judy thought to herself with a small lurch of recognition: crusaders, martyrs, pigheaded people, we make useful leaders but exhausting colleagues, we know we can see what is right...
...No president ever held on before, sir...
...Judy Widdicombe, the founder of the St...
...At two places in the final galleys of Lincoln Bedroom, however, Huffington has crossed Shelia Lawrence’s name off the list of Clinton paramours and substituted the names “Monica Lewinsky” and “Kathleen Willey!’ Who says American libel laws have no teeth...
...If Alex Kotlowitz wants to continue with this subject - and let’s hope he does - perhaps his next book might offer a bit of navigational help for those who want to wade across the murky river, or build some bridges over it...
...Countries where achievement is high have clear national standards,” he writes, “and all the links in the chain are tied to the standards...
...Mark Penn, the president’s elusive pollster, found that huge majorities of the American public knew about his proposals for meat inspection, controlling tobacco, and other issues...
...Joseph‘s, about two hours east of Chicago, is a prosperous town of 9,000,95 percent white...
...Tucker also argues, persuasively, that many educators won’t buy into tough standards unless the standards are backed up by tests that have consequences for both students and their teachers...
...As a columnist, she has heavily promoted the unproven rumor that Clinton had an affair with Shelia Lawrence, wife of hotelier Larry Lawrence, whose body had to be exhumed from Arlington Cemetery when it was discovered he’d fabricated a heroic Merchant Marine record...
...Together, they have transcended the dogmas of their faiths...
...At one briefing, he fails to mention what he knows 10 be true - that he had personally coached Texas oilman Truman Arnold on how to respond to press inquiries about whether Arnold had been personally solicited by the president...
...Greetings From the Lincoln Bedroom must have seemed like a good idea: a satirical Lewis Carrollish fantasy in which the droll, idealistic Arianna spends a harrowing weekend in the through-the-looking-glass world of the Clinton White House...
...It was spirit, not numbers, that counted: The authors estimate that at first the Chechens were able to counter the 40,000strong Russian invasion force with only about 1,000 fighter...
...But if the woman doesn’t want to see it that way, Widdicombe helps her deny the humanity of that same fetus...
...They are the bosses here...
...Eric’s death, allegedly at the hands of whites, resonated for years longer than the black-on-black homicides that happen with stunning regularity...
...There is a weak Maya Angelou parody, a “Contract with Corporate America” that reads like an out-take from The Nation, and a brave attempt to find double-entendres in Clinton’s recent State of the Union address, even though rotating teams of White House speechwriters combed Clinton’s text to remove virtually every possible unwanted laugh...
...Neither side is as ideologically narrow as its opponents suppose...
...Didn’t Gingrich and Clinton transform welfare, so far successfully...
...The Lessons of Chechnya by Thomas E. Ricks TALKING ABOUT WHAT SORT OF wars the US...
...By focusing on a few activists and exploring their lives and personalities in detail, Gorney debunks or complicates various preconceptions about the abortion war...
...Then it turned out to be for the ClintonGore re-election campaign as well - an important legal distinction...
...Kotlowitz takes the more honest tack...
...He’s well informed...
...recovered-memory channelers...
...Students are unlikely ever to take the Clinton tests, since the plan has been quashed in Congress by an improbable coalition of conservative Republicans bent on defending “local control” in education and liberal Democrats who worry that higher standards would slow the advancement of minorities...
...There’s the White House, obsessed with controlling the story and containing the damage from the latest scandal...
...Gorney shows that their problem is more basic: They don’t accept the question...
...MATTHEW COOPER, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a national correspondent for Newsweek...
...Each new Clinton initiative - meat inspection, child care, even reaching a balanced budget - is viewed through a political prism of who won and who lost...
...Shucks...
...Looking back over the career of another activist, Gorney wonders where he had learned that abortion was murder...
...The basic segregation facts are staggering...
...If he had, it would have been a lot funnier...
...JONATHAN ALTER, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a columnist for Newsweek and a contributing correspondent for "NBC News...
...Chechnya declared independence in 1991...
...It gets to me,” said one...
...could tolerate a small role for subjects like French and physics in many high schools because we had an industrial economy that required most workers to use their hands rather than their heads...
...While bending the law to women’s wills, abortion practitioners bend the facts as well...
...But just as the galleys went out to reviewers, the Lewinsky scandal broke...
...They fmd the personhood of the fetus obvious - like the color of the sky, as one activist puts it - and assign the burden of proof to those who doubt it...
...News & World Report...
...And finally: “To those in Benton Harbor, it is proof that race blinds their neighbors to the obvious...
...licensed astrologers...
...When Widdicombe becomes pregnant, she resorts to the same denial...
...Hence the shock among pro-lifers when the Supreme Court declared in Roe that it “need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins” because philosophers, theologians, and medical experts couldn’t agree on an answer...
...Russia disputed that claim, but President Boris Yeltsin at first said there would be no military response, and in fact Russian troops were withdrawn from the area in 1992...
...If 1 looked,” she explains, “I would never be able to work there again...
...The reality, of course, is that local control and high standards have proven to be mutually exclusive in most American communities, and the notion that higher expectations would leave minority students less well off educationally simply isn’t compelling...
...I pull up in parking lots and hear car door locks clicking...
...When Susman, the pro-choice attorney, first encounters the proposition that the fetus is a person, he finds it legally incomprehensible...
...It goes without saying in Benton Harbor that Eric McGinniss was murdered, whatever the facts.The white St...
...kids ended up tied for last on a special test of physics and advanced math...
...He and Codding, a former high school principal, leave no part of the system unexamined: Abandon middle schools, they urge, and replace them with more personal elementary schools that run through the eighth grade...
...Pro-lifers stand accused of failing to prove that it is...
...The deepest stories - the ones in the marrow of the nation - are always the hardest to convey...
...military even before being published in the US...
...But he also understands the subtleties of black politics, which is much less monolithic than many whites imagine...
...What Huffington left out is also interesting...
...THOMAS E. RICKS, The Wall Street Journal's Pentagon correspondent, is the author of Making the Corps...
...B furious gun battle lit up the pitch-black tunnel as half a dozen rifles opened up,” sending bullets ricocheting along the walls and ceiling of the sewer...
...At the same time, what unifies many blacks in Benton Harbor is a willingness to assume the worst about St...
...is likely to face in the coming decades, Gen...
...The serious student of racial problems won’t learn much, but The Other Side of the River is an evocative reminder of the essential messiness and emotional confusion of life in this country...
...According to le authors, 27,000 civhans were Gled in the process, many of them ethnic Russians who, unlike the Chechens, had no relatives in outlying villages to whom they could flee...
...Is the fetus a human being...
...Joe’s avoid like the plague is the town directly across the river...
...I’m sorry...
...What’s especially disheartening is the abject cynicism of the press...
...schools can be traced to his writings, from the breaking of the vice grip of public-education bureaucracies through “site-based management” of schools, to the linking of teacher pay to performance through a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the establishment of national curriculum standards and tests, both of which he has drafted through his non-profit National Center for Education and the Economy and affiliated organizations...
...Still, even a straight shooter like McCurry can wander into the gray zone...
...A doctor, she suggests, has a duty to comfort his patient by concealing the moral and physical ugliness of the abortion...
...Anti-abortion pioneers Jack and Barbara Willke, creators of a popular slide show depicting fetal development, privately advise their comrades, ‘We will not show visuals under six weeks because we feel that if we do, the audience may change their minds from their conviction that this is human life...
...Every writerly doubt, every failed lead, every source who stiffs him is grist for his layered tale of racial myth and countermyth...
...Many Catholics were unprepared to think of this as a question...
...But the Alice-in-Wonderland format lets Alice/Arianna win all the imaginary arguments without ever having to defend her own proposed nostrums, which appear to be a “charitable tax credit” and “school choice for inner-city kids...
...In their zeal for the war, Gorney’s chief protagonists lose touch with their humanity...
...Army’s disastrous firefight in Somalia in October 1993...
...Upon being hauled away from a clinic entrance in handcuffs, a pro-life demonstrator exults, “The first time you try to prevent [an abortion] is an experience you’ll never forget...
...with 21 homicides, triple the rate of Chicago and New York...
...Krulak is correct and we face encounters like the Chechen War, the U.S...
...THOMAS TOCH is a senior wrter at U.S...
...And I get a pat on the back for a scandal scooplet - getting the White House to reveal that it had long known about Dick Morris’ second mistress, the one with whom he had a child...
...Indeed, this has been the rhetorical strategy of the whole .abortion rights movement: to transform the issue from abortion to “choice,” thereby competing with prolifers to control, as Gorney puts it, “the one-word distillation of the morally complex...
...Cynics might say so...
...MICKEY KAUS writes the Chatterbox" column for Slate magazine...
...The same has been true of various articles about race that I’ve written for Newsweek over the years...
...First, the veep only remembered making a few fundraising calls...
...Johannesburg,” as some blacks across the river call it, a police officer still talks about “coon hunting...
...For all the White House woes, the press, I think, actually comes off looking worse here...
...12th-graders outperform only Cyprus and South Africa among 21 nations in a test of general math and science knowledge...
...And once again, average Americans stared at their television sets and wondered: Who are these people, and why are they so obsessed with this issue...
...Then it turned out to be 46 calls...
...Joseph a tacit understanding that anything goes - working with blacks, golfing with blacks, drinking with blacks, even occasionally voting for blacks - but not bedding down with them,” Kotlowitz writes...
...Nothing in Lmcoln Bedroom is as good as Shearer’s imaginary visions of Clinton and Gingrich on his weekly public radio program “L,e Show...
...Just look at the Al Gore imbroglio...
...In August 1996 they recaptured the remains of Grozny from 12,000 undertrained and demoralized Russian troops...
...Huffington mocks Clinton, but she really seems to despise Gingrich, who is portrayed as an obese, unprincipled egomaniac...
...It was McCurry who lobbied for reporters to spend more time with Clinton in small, off-the-record sessions - something that Clinton had resisted and continues somewhat inexplicably to believe, despite his considerable charms, is a waste of his time...
...Tough universal standards are particularly important in the US., he points out, because many local educators - in sharp contrast to their counterparts in Asia - believe that natural talent rather than hard work is the defining factor in student achievement...
...These dueling denials predate the abortion war, but have been greatly reinforced by it...
...They sanitize the moral reality of abortion...
...National Committee...
...No, they were there to implore factory workers to stop making abortion suction machines...
...That, and her willingness to trash fellow Republicans, has increased her value as a member of the punditoentertainment complex even as her serious political ambitions grow evermore unrealistic...
...The one place residents of St...
...She goes to a seance with the Red Queen (Hillary...
...Sam Lee, the most thoughtful of the pro-lifers featured in the book, is willing to entertain and refute alternative answers .to the question of when life begins...
...Huffington...
...Is that a triumph of propaganda...
...Did she want to know it had “brain and heart function,” or the “presence of external members...
...Lee becomes so preoccupied with saving babies that he quits his job without consulting his wife, who is at home taking care of his own baby...
...Most blacks simply steer clear of St...
...I tend to think it’s the people making a judgment about the quality of their lives and the quality of their leaders’ policies...
...Seeking a quick resolution through intimidation, he sent a tank brigade and attack jets into the Chechen capital of Grozny in an illconsidered show of force that actually permitted the Chechens to display their own guerrilla-like military prowess...
...It lurches constantly from scandal to scandal, treating each new revelation as if it’s earth shattering...
...give financial incentives to schools that raise student achievement...
...Backs to the wall, the Chechens responded in mid-1995 with what is generally called terrorism, but what contemporary military theorists analyze as an “asymmetrical response”: They drove north into a Russian town and took hostage some 1,200 people in a hospital, spectacularly humiliating a Russian government that thought it had resolved the Chechen problem...
...With impressive speed, Huffington has turned out a revised Monicafied version, heavily overloaded with lame oral sex jokes, but at least not totally obsolete...
...At least when former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote a picaresque novel in which he was always the hero, it had some clear correspondence to his actual political battles...
...Lee has soured on the “repellent” anger of Randall Terry, the “self-absorption” of prolife purists, and the indecency of a prolife lobby that expects him, as its full-time advocate, “to solicit donations in order to buy groceries for his family...
...HLIIL it’s not just following the polls...
...What has been less noticed, until now, is the corresponding schizophrenia of abortion rights advocates...
...I’ll go now.’’) There may even be a profound insight in the political pointers Huffington has Clinton give Gingrich: ‘You make America feel bad about being selfish...
...WILLIAM SALETAN is a co,imnist for Slate magazine...
...We know from his earlier book that Kotlowitz has a rare ability to get black kids to talk honestly, and he uses it here...
...Three months later, the Russians took Groznv...
...Kotlowitz’s reporting ranges across many compelling sub-themes, from racially charged school-board politics to the details of an autopsy on a drowning victim...
...students in international studies will budge...
...Once again, abortion activists staged rallies, vilified their opponents, and congratulated themselves on their heroism...
...And when pro-lifers propose to require clinics to give women information about their fetuses, Widdicombe resolves to thwart this policy: Did the woman want information about the physical appearance of the fetus she was about to abort...
...It doesn’t give away too much to say that the resolution, the “payoff,” leaves more than a little to be desired...
...He tells her he can’t do the procedure, but she refuses to accept his refusal...
...We’re here for the women,” she cries...
...President Yeltsin is the villain of this book...
...I admit I laughed out loud once, but only once - I don’t want to say at what...
...One example: At one point in this book, a group of Chechen fighters moving through a dark sewer en route to an ambush run smack into a group of Russian commandos...
...To add insult to injury, Asian nations, whose students routinely turn in world-beating performances in math and science, sat out the 12thgrade study...
...fourth-graders end up near the top of the global pile in science and above average in math...
...Louis clinic and the heroine of the book, figures that a nurse’s job is to help each pregnant woman “have the baby or not have the baby,” depending on which result the woman wants...
...replace elementary generalist teachers with science teachers and other specialists...
...In one passage, Gorney describes how three activists made their way to California: “On their drive west they slept in campgrounds and ate fruit and cheese from grocery stores, and when they reached San Francisco they laid out their sleeping bags on the apartment floor of a woman named Sunshine, who lived near the Zen Center, was married to a Buddhist taxi driver, and knew some of the sit-in protesters from the Trident missile demonstrations...
...And I’m not alone...
...The feeling is mutual...
...While Kotlowitz bends over backward to be sensitive to the suspicions of the black community, it’s impossible to escape the psychological projection at play...
...If facts are inconvenient, as they were in John Berendt’s In the Garden of Good and Evil, he sometimes simply changes them...
...Joseph and Benton Harbor, Michigan...
...Gorney explains how Freiman, like other doctors, turned against the abortion laws of the 1960s as he witnessed the gore, pain, and peril that women were willing to endure to end crisis pregnancies, by their own hands if necessary...
...Political Booknotes The Great Divide by Jonathan Alter LAST YEAR, AS PART OF THE coverage of President Clinton's race initiative, I traveled to Hot Springs, Ark,, to tape a story for “NBC Nightly News” on race relations in the president’s hometown...
...The book ends with a nauseating sitcom-like moment of sanctimony when poor Arianna is chased back to her room by a horrifymg mob only to be rescued by (yes, again...
...Which isn’t to say Huffington has lost all her charm...
...But the idea of exploring whether a program would actually work or not is beyond the ken of the White House press corps...
...Now comes the tragic mistake...
...Purposely permitted by the Chechens to penetrate to the center of the city, the Russian Maikop Brigade was first surrounded and then destroyed...
...The Missouri comb.itants defy the usual stereotypes - that pro-choicers are irreligious, sexually permissive, or politically radical, and that pro-lifers are hostile to welfare, sex, birth control, and women’s equality...
...Were the activists there to defend abortion rights...
...So mine isn’t, in the traditional book-review sense, an objective view...
...Even if the press treated each new announcement with kneejerk disdain, Clinton was engaged in “a second conversation” with the public...
...In between there are lots of semen-stained dresses, kneepads, and, oddly, urine jokes...
...One would like to believe she is deeply evil...
...As Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, the two young British reporters who co-authored this account, tell it, “The conflict in Chechnya started imperceptibly...
...Many of the most significant reforms now in place in US...
...In this way, by defending her decision as an act, Widdicombe avoids having to defend its content...
...Ross Perot was right when, as head of a Texas school reform commission in the 1980s, he railed against 12-coach football teams and electric cleat cleaners, deriding high schools in America as “places dedicated to play...
...The good news is that moderates in both parties are embracing the idea of tougher standards linked to tougher tests...
...Such ideas and others in the book are sound, if not always original to Tucker...
Vol. 30 • April 1998 • No. 4
