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Who harassed whom?
The former chief of staff to Sen. Max Baucus claims he sexually harassed her, then fired her, but the senator tells an entirely different story -- that she was relentlessly abusing his staff.
By Susan Crabtree
[09/18/99]

Free Allan Nairn!
An American reporter faces 10 years in a brutal Indonesian jail. His crime: Refusing to turn away from acts of inhumanity. The United States must act -- now.
By Bruce Shapiro
[09/17/99]

When will the GOP court blacks?
African-Americans like George W. Bush, and they're more conservative than ever, but will Republicans be smart enough to recruit them in 2000?
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
[09/17/99]

Surprise: Bush could be the "education president"
A longtime school reformer says the Republican front-runner might be the best hope for low-income and minority students at a time when you can't talk about "poor kids" -- to Democrats.
By Joan Walsh
[09/17/99]

The Teflon governor meets the national media
Bush is glib, none-too-smart and quick to anger, but reporters have yet to tell the truth about him.
By Jerry Politex
[09/16/99]

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My, how times have changed. She may have voted (absentee) in the past two state elections and kept her membership in a downtown Methodist church intact, but Hillary Clinton's days of singing "Arkansas, (You Run Deep in Me)" appear to be over for good.

These days, Clinton seldom visits the state at all. The last time she stopped by was almost a year ago, in October 1998, to speak at the 40th reunion of the Women's Emergency Committee, a group that worked to keep the public schools open following the Central High School segregation crisis in 1957. Her visit was at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and she stayed in town just 24 hours.

When New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani visited Arkansas in July for a media stunt and a low-key fund-raiser, Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee joked that Clinton's probable opponent in next year's Senate run had now visited the state more this year than had the first lady.

Now that the Clintons have signed a contract for a $1.7 million house in a quiet Westchester County, N.Y., hamlet, it appears that at least one of the Clintons is waving goodbye to Arkansas forever.

Hillary Clinton was conspicuously absent in Hope, Ark., last March when the president stood alone in a cold rainstorm for the dedication of his boyhood home. At the time, a glum president said his wife was having back problems and lamented that she wasn't there to share the honor. Less than a week later, however, Hillary's back seemed fine as she traveled to Egypt and was photographed riding a camel.

The first lady skipped an Arkansas visit again last month, when her husband and the vice president kicked off the Gore 2000 fund-raising drive here in Little Rock.

By way of explanation for Clinton's continued absence from her former home state, Marsha Berry, the first lady's White House spokeswoman, told Salon News, "She has had a very busy schedule."

Clinton's mother, Dorothy Rodham, still lives in a Little Rock condominium on a cliff near the Arkansas River. But when mother and daughter want to get together, it's mom who does the traveling these days. Last month, along with Chelsea Clinton, the pair looked at houses in New York, for example.

Meanwhile, Arkansans are now starting to say out loud what they always privately suspected: that Hillary thinks she is too good for Arkansas.

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