25 years ago
April 2000
“[Bill] Clinton never actually won a majority of votes in either of his presidential campaigns, despite a roaring economy and an incompetent campaign by Bob Dole in 1996. The majority of voters who opted against Clinton’s reelection weren’t necessarily ready to give him an automatic pass on his problems so as not to rock the financial boat. He had to work hard to survive his various scandals. The question remains: What did Clinton do? The answer is deceptively simple: Clinton ignored traditional Washington wisdom for dealing with exploding scandal and instead used the capital’s notorious scandal machine against itself. Scandal is unlikely ever to be the same. Bill Clinton’s long-sought Legacy turns out to be a guide on how to rise from the dead.”
Charles Paul Freund
“Secrets of the Clinton Spectacle”
“There is something palpably strange about this year’s presidential race. It is nearly free of issues. It looks more like a high school student council contest than a choice of historical moment. Candidates dutifully introduce ideas, following the scripts of their predecessors—universal health care if you’re a Democrat, big tax cuts if you’re a Republican—but voters mostly yawn, interested in personalities, not policies. John McCain may claim his supporters are excited about campaign finance reform, but exit polls say they like his story and his style.”
Virginia Postrel
“The In-Box Presidency”
30 years ago
April 1995
“The fashion across the political spectrum, from the tree-huggers at the Sierra Club to Rush Limbaugh’s pugnacious ‘ditto-heads,’ is to hammer away at immigrants. They steal our jobs. They use up our national resources. They dilute our culture. The timid few who demur are almost universally scorned as ivory-tower knuckleheads who mistake poetry for policy. They aren’t out there in the real world. They don’t ‘focus on the immigration influx in practice, as opposed to libertarian theory,’ as National Review acidly puts it. But if there’s anyone who’s neglecting the real world, it’s the people who want to cut immigration.”
Glenn Garvin
“No Fruits, No Shirts, No Service”
45 years ago
April 1980
“With sugar prices escalating rapidly since 1972, illegal brewing has fallen off dramatically. In 1972 BATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms] raided nearly 3,000 stills; by 1978 the number had fallen to a mere 381. Clearly, the public—and Congress—would not find its alcohol-controlling functions very important any more. But if BATF could build up an impressive arrest record in the area of firearms…. And it looks like that is exactly what this government agency proceeded to do during the 1970s, often using questionable and outright illegal tactics, often to carry out lengthy investigations, appropriate the property, and make highly publicized numbers of arrests—not of criminals or even would-be criminals, but of law-abiding citizens.”
John Lewis
“American Gestapo”
“Americans are naturally concerned about threats to their energy supplies; energy is vital to operate our factories, ship our goods, grow our food, heat our homes, and power our vehicles. So it may be understandable that many people are so quick to back military action to prevent the loss of oil imports. But why do we import 50 percent of our oil? As recently as 1971 the figure was only 15 percent. But in that year Richard Nixon gave us wage and price controls. Several disastrous years later, controls were removed—from everything but oil.”
Robert Poole
“War for Oil?”
50 years ago
April 1975
“Although certain totalitarian governments require citizens to vote, what justification can there be in a free society for imposing a duty on individuals to vote? The notion of such a duty is plainly repugnant to political freedom. The insidious effects of voting for the lesser of two evils and selecting a major candidate merely out of a mistaken sense of ‘duty’ are twofold: It not only helps elect a candidate that voters themselves, by definition, perceive as evil—since the lesser of two evils is in itself evil—but also, by enlarging the turnout, it allows the winning candidate to claim a ‘mandate’ from the voters.”
Manuel Klausner
“Voter Independence and the ‘Duty to Vote’ Myth”
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