Political Discourse

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Having anointed its new leaders this week, Indonesia now finds itself facing the even more daunting task of redefining and reconstructing a nation whose institutions, politics, economy and sense of purpose had been bankrupted by the long rule of former President Suharto.On Wednesday the national assembly elected a new president, Abdurrahman Wahid, ending the 17-month transitional leadership of B. J. Habibie, who took the first steps to liberate political discourse, freeing the press and setting in motion a freewheeling electoral process.

WE NEED leaders with moral character. But we don't know what moral character is.To listen to the current yammer, you'd think that moral character consisted of abstaining from sex. Or that it involved saying the words moral character and families and children repeatedly.But think about Americans who actually possessed great moral character: Martin Luther King Jr., Henry David Thoreau, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X. Here's what these folks had in common: Passion.They held deep convictions. They felt their messages were urgent and delivered them with a sense of urgency.

*TC Almost certainly, Paul Taylor has been asked more than any other soul alive whether he has ever committed adultery.He is not asked because of any suspicions along those lines. He is asked -- usually in jest -- because he himself once and famously posed that question himself. It helped end the presidential candidacy of Gary Hart in 1987.It did not, though, as some seem to think, also ultimately lead to the end of Paul Taylor's career in journalism. "Sometimes it's been portrayed as the thing that made me go sour on political coverage, which is not quite right," Taylor says.

We are a nation deeply divided. Healing these divisions requires honest and open talk something our political system seems increasingly incapable of providing.It now seems that the ugly political season of 1994 may never end, as Republicans and new Democrats hover like vultures around the recently interred body of the old New Deal coalition. Already, politicians are climbing over political rivals, seeking to pre-empt each other's bids for their party's presidentia l nomination.This political maneuvering serves mean ambition, not the public good, and shows how governance itself has become a seamless election contest.

Bill Brock last ran for the U.S. Senate in 1976 in a failed attempt to keep his seat from Tennessee. Now, a generation later, he is seeking the same job in his adopted state of Maryland.Despite a gilded resume that includes the chairmanship of the national Republican Party, a recent poll found that most voters here have never heard of him.Between now and the Sept. 13 primary, Mr. Brock will traverse the state trying to introduce himself. He will emphasize his broad experience from his days as a congressman in the 1960s to his role as U.S. trade representative and secretary of labor in the Reagan White House.

Washington -- IT SEEMS the self-proclaimed Christian right followers can dish it out, but they can't take it.They have called President Clinton every name in the book.The Rev. Jerry Falwell is selling videotapes that -- without a shred of evidence -- accuse the president of murdering political opponents back in Arkansas.The Christian Coalition has said Mr. Clinton's inauguration was "a repudiation of our forefathers' covenant with God."They have strayed far from traditional religious issues to proclaim the "Christian" position on matters like health care reform.

Pamela Snowhite Davis smokes marijuana. And she doesn't care who knows it."I puff hemp," she says. "If the Department of Justice down to the cop on the street can't relate to that, then I'm sorry."Definitely, the law-enforcement community in Carroll County has had trouble relating to that.Davis, an outspoken advocate for the legalization of marijuana, has been arrested twice on drug charges -- the first for less than an ounce of marijuana in her bedroom, the second for marijuana seeds displayed in her Westminster clothing store.

Vancouver, British Columbia -- MY FATHER is that most ambiguous of figures in the current U.S. political discourse -- a Canadian physician.Depending on one's political perspective, he may be envisioned either as Marcus Welby brushing a tobacco mote from a glen-plaid jacket or as Lenin's zombie reincarnate, calculating the demise of MetLife amid the Alps of British Columbia.Neither perception is, of course, true.Dad, 60-something, is Dad. He is a general practitioner of the old school, mending broken femurs, delivering triplets and dealing with neighbors whose thumbs have been slammed in door jambs and swollen to the size of golf balls.

UNCENSORED images of the Kurdish tragedy have diminished the euphoria many Americans felt after the victory over Iraq. Nonetheless, Republican strategists looking toward the 1992 elections plan to exploit that triumph to retain the White House and recapture the Senate.They are not likely to be entirely successful. But the goal already is creating a tone that bodes ill for the political battles ahead. If you thought 1988 was a dirty campaign, you ain't seen nothing.Willie Horton and the flag were the essential features of the GOP's 1988 strategy.

Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow; its force depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. But argument is like an arrow from a cross bow, which has equal force no matter who draws it. - Robert BoyleLately I have had a number of rather heated political conversations with myself in the privacy of my own head. Sometimes I talk outloud to find out what it is I am thinking. It's like a small boy turning his pockets inside out to see exactly what is in them. One begins to find all sorts of musings - personal property that somehow remained unaccounted for in the general neural inventory.

I haven't read Robert Novak's column in 10 years. Back in 1998, he made a comment on CNN - what it was is not material here - that I considered beyond the pale. I decided I could henceforth do without his opinions and insights. He impressed me as a distinctly disagreeable man. And that was well before he outed CIA operative Valerie Plame. When the news broke recently that Mr. Novak had a brain tumor and would retire, I was not made prostrate by grief. What I felt was that whisper of common mortality, that sense of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God one usually feels when tragedy strikes someone who is known to you, but not too closely.

New housing adds to rebirth of Allegany Co. Here's a suggestion for Dan Rodricks, the presumably well-meaning columnist who recently recommended the state should attempt to block one of the first steps in Allegany County's long-awaited growth. Please, get out here and do some homework before you presume to understand our needs and opportunities ("Builder's plan sprawls beyond good reason," Sept. 5). Allegany County has become one of Maryland's most desirable places to live, work and visit.

During this fall's polarized presidential election season, Howard County police staked out a 4-foot-by-8-foot Bush-Cheney sign on U.S. 40 after similar placards had been vandalized. Within an hour, they arrested an Ellicott City man for striking down the sign and cutting holes in it. Cory Robert Cooke, 33, who told police he was tired of seeing the huge sign, pleaded guilty yesterday in Howard District Court to malicious destruction of property valued at less than $500. His arrest, one of three in Howard for defacing political signs, came during a rash of such incidents in the county before last month's election.

What has become rewarded in political discourse is the extremity of viewpoint. People like the conflict. Conflict baby! It sells. Crossfire! Hardball! Shut up! You shut up! -- Jon Stewart of The Daily Show

The mainstream electronic media, still bruised from making bad calls in the 2000 election, ceded the dirty work to the new kid yesterday, allowing Internet news sites and Web logs to rule political reporting for much of the day - for better or worse. By early afternoon, online bloggers had started listing early, and sometimes questionable, exit poll information that showed Kerry leading Bush in the three key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. And by early evening, before most polls closed and the networks resumed reporting, a few blogs and news Web sites were calling the race for Kerry.

The mainstream electronic media, still bruised from making bad calls in the 2000 election, ceded the dirty work to the new kid yesterday, allowing Internet news sites and Web logs to rule political reporting for much of the day - for better or worse. By early afternoon, online bloggers had started listing early, and sometimes questionable, exit poll information that showed Sen. John Kerry leading President Bush in the three key swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. By early evening, before most polls closed and the TV networks resumed reporting, a few blogs and news Web sites had called the race for Kerry.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - With luck I'll be out of here before the wolves get me. It's been that kind of week. I left the relatively placid environs of Massachusetts - if you don't count the Red Sox - for a trip on assorted bankrupt airlines through assorted undecided states. Here in what is ominously called "ground zero" of this campaign, the airwaves are so full of ads that I am tempted to end every conversation with an Ohioan by saying, "I'm Ellen Goodman and I approve this message." Ads to the right.

WHAT'S WRONG with the following conversation? "I want freedom to dream." "You protest too much." "It's the truth." What's wrong is that it contains certain keywords -- freedom, protest, truth -- that China's Internet nannies are trying to block in transmissions via the nation's most widely used instant-messaging service. Hackers recently obtained a copy of the government filtering program covertly installed on Chinese users' computers when they sign up for the IM service; it also blocks keywords in e-mail and phone text messages from those computers.

MANY POINT TO members of my generation and ridicule us for our political apathy. To a degree, they're right. We are obsessed with money. Music videos on MTV reinforce this image, one in which all value is placed on wealth and conspicuous consumption. But there are more fundamental reasons why activism and political discourse seem to be lacking in my generation. A sentence from the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society puts it best: "But apathy is not simply an attitude; it is a product of social institutions, and of the structure and organization of higher education itself."

PRESIDENT BUSH declared last week that the military phase of the battle to end Saddam Hussein's tyranny was "one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001, and still goes on." Obviously, the United States won the war against the Iraqi dictatorship, but will it win the war afterward? The war that America - alongside the United Nations - ought to face in the Arab world today is a war against regional oppression, injustice, dogmatism and madness. Winning this war does not require military troops.