Starr speaks The full text of independent counsel Kenneth Starr's House Judiciary Committee testimony A dozen questions Congress should ask Kenneth Starr By David Talbot, Murray Waas and Joan Walsh A L S O +T O D A Y Reply to C.D. Ellison By David Horowitz It's time for blacks to have a two-party system,   T A B L E+T A L K J.C. Watts, Congress' only African-American Republican, takes the No. 4 spot in the House? Share your reactions in the Politics area of Table Talk   R E C E N T L Y Toppling Saddam By Frank Smyth Clinton wants a new government in Baghdad, but he and the Iraqi opposition are unlikely to be up to the task (11/18/98) Brother on brother By Murray Waas Whitewater witness David Hale attempted to suborn perjury by his own brother by asking him to falsely corroborate illegal acts by President Clinton (11/17/98) The mark of Cain: a tale of two brothers By Murray Waas Though they traveled the same path from the family dirt farm through law school, the Hale brothers turned out different as night and day (11/17/98) The whaling that wasn't By David Neiwert Environmentalists and Indians clash over whether gray whales matter more than native culture and treaty rights (11/16/98) Paula Jones lawsuit settled A Salon Staff Report Clinton coughs up $850,000, but no apologies (11/16/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.
		------Same Old Party New leadership can't mend the rifts among Republicans in Congress. BY JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL Will new House Speaker Bob Livingston's gentlemanly leadership save the Republican Party from itself? Don't bet on it. Livingston may throw fewer tantrums than Newt Gingrich. And Democrats may miss the impetuosity that made Gingrich such an easy target of ridicule. But the GOP's problems have never been about Newt's personality or the tactics he pursued. Republicans have given wildly conflicting explanations for what went wrong with the party this year and led to its losses on Election Day. There's near-consensus that the party made a mistake by trusting the Monica Lewinsky scandal to rally anti-Clinton voters, and that it should have zeroed in on key issues like Social Security, tax cuts, education and health-care reform. But while some saw the election as requiring a new "compassionate conservatism" that recognizes the need for compromise, reaches out to minorities and shows voters how much Republicans care about their problems, others insist the party stumbled on Election Day because it failed to put forward a strong conservative agenda and thus its core voters didn't turn out. Those explanations point in opposite directions. And that's the heart of the Republicans' problem. The fact is that Republicans never recovered from the government shutdown of 1995. The shutdown wasn't just a public relations disaster. It exposed a basic cleavage in the Republican Party, and the party has been in a state of functional paralysis ever since. There are many ways to parse the Republican divisions. At one pole of the party, approximately 40 moderate Republicans, mostly from the Northeast, envision a centrist party based on a judicious cultivation of regional interests, prudent fiscal policy and a moderate cultural message. At the other pole is the group of roughly 70 conservative die-hards (who dub themselves the Conservative Action Team) who thought the GOP should force another government shutdown in the recent budget battle. The 95 House Republicans who voted to make Oklahoma's Steve Largent majority leader -- meaning they thought Dick Armey wasn't conservative enough -- might be described as the Die-hard Caucus. Put most simply, there's a split between the party's reactionaries and its reformists. The reactionaries as a group can be traced, with relative continuity, to the first half of this century: vitriolic opponents of the New Deal, McCarthyite anti-Communists who oppose the secularism of American society, the internationalism of its foreign policy, and not just "welfare" but the entirety of the welfare state. The reformists are a different breed. For them, the language of conservatism has operated less as a consuming ideology and more as a rhetoric of discontent -- discontent with the way the welfare state works, but not necessarily with its goals. Most still believe that the government should support education, ensure basic health and safety and protect programs like Social Security and Medicare. The government shutdown in 1995 pulled these two groups apart. As long as the conservative movement was united in opposition to the welfare state, it could cover over the differences between its reformist and reactionary elements. And voters responded well to generalities about rolling back government excess and attacking its manifest inefficiencies. But when they saw what conservative ideologues tried to do in 1995 they got scared. And support for Republicans plummeted. N E X T+P A G E+| GOP focus on Lewinsky was no accident