Liberal

MARK MAUER, associate director of the Sentencing Project, is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal with a dyed-in-the-wool liberal approach to crime. Take, for example, how he thinks judges should handle a drug offender who disdains treatment after being sentenced to it instead of jail time."

WASHINGTON -- Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone's decision not to seek the Democratic presidential nomination does not quite rise to the level of bombshell news. The scrappy liberal of the old school always seemed at best the longest of long shots. But his candidacy would have contributed a worthwhile dimension to the 2000 race, if only as a voice of conscience prodding others in his party.Mr. Wellstone's politics obviously are a throwback to New Deal days whose vigorous espousal of activist government has been brushed aside by the New Democrat positioning of President Clinton.

WASHINGTON -- One of the great and anti-democratic goals of American liberalism is to make public matters so complicated that the public despairs and transfers the matter at hand over to the liberal bureaucrats. Another of the great and anti-democratic goals of American liberalism is to stand on both sides of every issue. Again, confusing the public is the liberal's desired end, all the better to control the public.On the matter of improved education, the Clintonian liberal stands four square for educational standards.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- Actor Warren Beatty sketched out the script for a liberal presidential campaign last night -- but did not say whether he would play the leading role himself.Before a huge turnout of reporters and Southern California liberal activists, Beatty offered few clues on whether he intends to launch a long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.Instead, he called for sweeping campaign finance reform, lashed President Clinton's record, and portrayed both of the current contenders for the Democratic nomination as cautious centrists in thrall to large contributors.

LOSER by a landslide, Barry Goldwater nevertheless has had a greater impact on American politics than any of the winning presidential candidates of the past half-century. A grandiose notion, perhaps, but consider:Since he won the GOP nomination in 1964, liberal Republicans of the once-dominant Eastern establishment have become extinct; conservative ideology is triumphant as the country moves rightward; the GOP lock on the South has led to the Republican capture of Congress, and Democrats, having given up on the welfare state loathed by Goldwater, cannot seem to find White House winners outside the old Confederacy.

WASHINGTON -- There was abundant self-congratulation here the other day at the Democratic Leadership Council's annual meeting. The assembled "New Democrats" boasted that their focus on a middle-road "third way" between liberalism and conservatism had been resoundingly endorsed in the Nov. 3 elections.Largely dodging discussion of the threatened impeachment of the No. 1 "New Democrat," speaker after speaker credited Democratic candidates' emphasis on moderate, innovative approaches to education, welfare, Social Security and health-care reform as the key to their success.

MADISON, Wis. -- Is there a place left in the world for the left-leaning press? Here, in this university town and state capital, liberal intellectuals are still keeping the faith at the Progressive, a monthly magazine nearing its 90th birthday.The candles are still burning, too, at the Nation, the New York weekly that finds itself at the last stop on the left side of the political spectrum now that the New Republic, once a champion of liberal causes, has shifted dramatically to the right.

For years, conservatives have painted a picture of the Washington press corps as a group of liberal crusaders bent on bashing corporations, bloating government and socializing health care.This caricature is utterly deflated by a new survey of journalists. It turns out that on a wide range of economic issues, Washington journalists are more conservative - not more liberal - than the general public.Take the charge that journalists are anti-business. The recent survey asked them a simple question: Do "a few large companies" have "too much power"?

NEW YORK -- In 1984 Walter Mondale, trailing Ronald Reagan, chose as his running mate an Italian-American Catholic woman. Mr. Reagan carried Italian-Americans, Catholics and women. Mr. Mondale carried Minnesota and Washington, D.C. Geraldine Ferraro carried on.For several years the former three-term congresswoman from Queens represented "the left" on CNN's "Crossfire." Now she is favored to win the nomination to run against Sen. Al D'Amato, who was re-elected in 1992.She is a liberal. He seems to stand foursquare for whatever this morning's focus group endorsed.

THE FIRST THING Zoran Djindjic did after becoming mayor of Belgrade by a majority of the city assembly was to restore the independence of a television station Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had municipalized and incorporated into his Socialist (formerly Communist) propaganda machine. Under its former directors, Studio B is once again telling two million viewers the straight news and views of all parties. It is beholden to none, not even the Zajedno (Together) coalition that re-established it.This is one of the causes that precipitated months of street demonstrations.

WASHINGTON -- When Congress gives President Barack Obama more funds later this month for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, only one Maryland lawmaker is expected to dissent: Democratic Rep. Donna F. Edwards. Edwards believes the president is taking the U.S. in the wrong direction in Afghanistan. She argues that Obama has no plan for winning and no strategy for getting out. Congress "failed" its responsibility to challenge President George W. Bush's policies in Iraq, Edwards said in an interview.

Washington - Barack Obama won the presidency just last month, and some supporters think he's already forgotten why. In the view of his critics on the left, Obama - once rated the most liberal member of the Senate - is reinventing himself as a pragmatic moderate as he prepares to take office and making foolish decisions in an effort to broaden his appeal. These critics reacted sharply when he selected a gay-marriage opponent, the Rev. Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, to give the invocation at the inauguration.

America is a center-right nation. This is the argument being peddled by conservatives, ranging from Michael Gerson to Karl Rove, who seem to be in denial after Barack Obama's election, which will give Democrats control over the entire federal government. They also have majorities among state governors and state legislatures. Never mind that Mr. Obama's victory margin was larger than George W. Bush's in 2004. Ignore the new Democratic congressional majorities, larger than any the Republicans could boast earlier this decade.

It's hard to think of anything less liberal than a liberal with power. The people who peddle themselves as conservatives without being conservative in any real sense whatsoever are bad enough, I admit, what with their insistence that we shield ourselves from terrorists bent on harming us by waging perpetual war in Eurasia while establishing a surveillance state here at home. Who could possibly object to something called the USA PATRIOT Act? Perhaps you've forgotten that some genius figured out that titling the proposed law as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act would yield the soul-stirring acronym used to sell the bill as something necessary.

WASHINGTON -- When she launched her first campaign against Rep. Albert R. Wynn two years ago, Donna Edwards was a liberal activist little known outside progressive circles. Wynn, a veteran of more than two decades in Annapolis and Washington, raised more than twice as much money as Edwards and enjoyed the support of the Maryland political establishment. But Edwards began a drumbeat of criticism against Wynn's votes on bankruptcy, the estate tax and the war in Iraq - and came within a few thousand votes of beating him in the Democratic primary election for the 4th Congressional District.

Sometimes, the term "liberal" has a positive connotation. To liberate is to set free. A liberal education gives one a broad cultural background. But in Republican primaries, using the L-word is tantamount to calling your opponent a disease-ridden, ferret-faced goon - only the latter is a much nicer way of saying it. Presidential front-runners John McCain, the hawkish anti-abortion U.S. senator from Arizona, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney actively...

The greatest triumph that conservatives ever achieved is to make liberals embarrassed to call themselves "liberal." That thought came to mind as I watched Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton rhetorically wriggle her way, as so many liberals do, right out of using the "L-word" to describe herself. During the CNN/YouTube debate by Democratic presidential candidates, the New York Democrat was asked, "How would you define the word `liberal' and would you use this word to describe yourself?" Briefly, she showed off her knowledge of the word's various meanings over the past, oh, century or two. She pointed out how the word used to mean that "you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual."

The Archdiocese of Baltimore, the mother ship of American Catholicism and, for more than a century, a refuge for progressive Catholic thinking, has a new archbishop - Edwin Frederick O'Brien, a man who has made no secret of his concerns about gays in the priesthood and one who has spent much of his career ministering to the tradition-oriented U.S. military services. So the question arises: Are Maryland's liberal Catholics likely to feel less comfortable with their new leader? The answer, some liberals and conservatives in the archdiocese agree, is that most Catholics are likely to continue to peacefully coexist here, regardless of ongoing debates within the church over practices and politics.

In March, for the first time in the nation's history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun-control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable. There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists - thanks largely to the work over the past 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

For Americans of a certain age, the death last week of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. marked the passing of the last eloquent articulator of America's 20th-century liberal dream, following the departure last May of his good friend John Kenneth Galbraith, a like-minded economist. A distinguished scholar, Schlesinger painted vast portions of the nation's history with vivid award-winning portraits of populist leaders from Andrew Jackson to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Robert F. Kennedy. In a post-World War II era when Americans were suspicious of liberals with Communist leanings, Schlesinger articulated a muscular anti-Communist version of liberalism as a founder of Americans for Democratic Action.