The Washington Monthly

Democrats made huge gains this election, largely because voters rejected the administration’s policy in Iraq. But even before the electorate took its frustration over the war out on the president’s party, Congress recognized the need for a new direction. In March, House Republicans -- led by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and supported by such senior GOP figures as Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) -- asked James Baker and Lee Hamilton to form the Iraq Study Group.

Back in 1994, legend has it, a Republican Revolution captured Washington. Revolution was surely the right word, featuring as it did a leader who would have ordered his portrait painted onto the façade of public buildings, except for the fact that he wanted public buildings torn down. Like any good revolution, it came with a manifesto, a pseudo-intellectual vanguard, a taste for theatrics, absurd promises, and a quick slide into decadence and corruption.

It’s a brilliant strategy as long as it works. But eventually, it will become apparent that the normal rules of the game were there for a reason. Without a broad mandate, power alone was not enough to get Bush’s Social Security plan moving. It wasn’t enough to permanently resolve the distinctions between social and economic conservatives that constitute the majority. And it won’t be enough to prevent the crackup that will soon finish off the era of Republican dominance.

Last fall, after President Bush nominated his White House counsel, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, the conservative blog Redstate.com explained the vehement opposition to the choice. It was not so much doubts about Miers’s conservatism, but the very fact that she could win confirmation without a fight: “[The White House] does not understand how badly some of us want the final showdown with the Dems.”

Manliness

by Harvey C. Mansfield

Publisher: Yale University Press $27.50

Cool off, Pilgrim. When I got me this here book of yours on manliness, I was spectin' some fine words on a subject close to my heart. Heard tell you were just about the most book-smart man ever wrote on the subject.

Just an hour from San Francisco, on the road to Fresno, a rancher has sheared a giant cross, and the words "Jesus Saves," into a grassy hillside. A little farther south, a National Rifle Association banner billows from a long truck bed, parked by the side of Route 99 until harvest time. Away from California's big cities and the cool Pacific coast lies a flat, fertile landscape that's politically more like Indiana than Marin County. Here, in California's Central Valley, U.S. citizens and illegal, undocumented immigrants have lived in a kind of awkward partnership for decades.

I was terrified when the mailman showed up, straining under the weight of Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis's new book. The paper galleys clock in at four pounds and the title is imposingly simple: The Cold War. Likely the country's most esteemed historian of this particular topic, Gaddis has already churned out the following works: Origins of the Cold War, Rethinking Cold War History, and Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. What could be new and fresh in this volume?

What's most provocative in this year's crop of books about renewing the Democratic Party is what's missing. The old sectarian fights about ideology, between the Democratic Leadership Council and labor-left factions, seem to have disappeared. None of the four books reviewed here makes the argument that the Democratic Party is in a substantive way out of line ideologically. None argues that the party needs to move as a bloc to the left, right, or center.

Sometime in the late '80s, the CEO of the drug company GlaxoSmithKline realized he had a problem. Glaxo's lead drug at the time was Zantac, which accounted for one-third of the company's bottom line and was also the world's bestselling ulcer medicine. Zantac had to stay the world's bestselling ulcer medicine for another few years while Glaxo scientists searched for replacements because the drug was slated to lose its patent protection in 1997.

A generation or more ago, it would have been impossible to envision the life of the American worker as it is lived today. A flood of women into the workforce has fundamentally changed the face of employment, largely for the better. Families are better able to increase their household income, and companies have benefited from the ability to tap female talent. But at home, working Americans have a dwindling amount of time to spend with their families.