Such are the musings of a
Democratic Party intelligentsia convinced that it will not be out of power for
much longer. Indeed, if party strategists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira are to be
believed, a political realignment is already underway - one in which “the
emerging Democratic majority” is about to supplant the Republican majority that
emerged in 1968 with the election of Richard Nixon and reached its apex in the
1980s under Ronald Reagan.
Read the entire article 
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Dems Snub Indies, Lose recall, Page 9, by Phyllis Goldberg
IT DON’T MEAN A THING IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT “SWING”
Disregarding the pundits, the
Democratic Party politicos, and the late night TV hosts who got some laughs out
of it, California’s voters took their right to recall very seriously,
turning out in record numbers last October to depose a sitting governor for the
first time in the state’s history.
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UNPOPULAR PARTNERSHIPS (Bloomberg's Dilemna), Page 12, by Jackie Salit
Michael Bloomberg is a man of
supreme self-confidence. Some call it arrogance. There are important
differences between the two, but with Bloomberg they sometimes bleed together -
making him formidable and oddly vulnerable at the same time.
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Karp's Corner, Page 22
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INDEPENDENTS AT THE GATES, Page 26, by Harry Kresky
Are the Courts Ready to Limit the Power of the Parties?
In the architecture of our federal system, the
judiciary - the only unelected branch of government - was designed to be the
most conservative, guarding our fundamental values against erosion from the
shifting tides of popular opinion. And yet it is the courts, whose relationship
to the American people is not mediated by parties (unlike the president and the
Congress), that are sometimes more “in touch” with the broader social
environment; particularly in the decades since World War II, federal judges
have often acted in advance of the executive and legislative branches.
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How the Democratic Party Sabotaged an Independent Movement to Beat Bush, Page 33, by Jackie Salit
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A NOTE ON RORTY, Page 42, by Fred Newman
The trouble with
“philosophical pragmatists” (“what is true is what works” - which virtually
every contemporary pragmatist denies is the definition) is that you never quite
know who they’re working for. Richard Rorty, America’s most popular philosophical
pragmatist - though surely not one of our best philosophers (the recently
deceased Donald Davidson is my candidate for the head of that very small
grouping) - is, perhaps, the cleverest.
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