■ As presidential election year gets under way, none of the 1992 candidates—except President Bush himself—was a candidate in 1988. On Democratic side, Mario Cuomo (N.Y.) has left the Six Debaters— Jerry Brown (Calif.), Bill Clinton (Ark.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Bob Kerrey (Neb.), Paul Tsongas (Mass.), Doug Wilder (Va.)—to battle it out among themselves. . . . Clinton may now be Democratic frontrunner, so his thoughts on the big issues bear watching. In a speech on foreign policy at Georgetown University December 12, he positioned himself solidly in centrist Sam Nunn camp of Democratic Party. (In fact, he was better than Sen. Nunn in his forthright support of Gulf War.) However, it is reported that his foreign-policy advisors are all refugees from George McGovern and Gary Hart campaigns and from Cyrus Vance wing of Carter Administration. . . . On Republican side, David Duke will not join Pat Buchanan in challenge to President until after New Hampshire. Indeed, political analyst Kevin Phillips says Duke may even support Buchanan in New Hampshire race. (Thanks, pal.) . . . Duke has frightened Texas GOP by threatening to run in its primary this spring. However, Duke failed to get enough signatures on petitions to put him on ballot in Massachusetts, and he has withdrawn from Maryland race, citing lack of money and of campaign workers. Maryland was one of states that George Wallace carried in 1972 Democrat ic primary. . . . George Bush, who says he wants a Republican majority in Congress, has chosen as campaign manager Fred Malek—a Republican operative who has donated big bucks to at least four prominent Democratic candidates: Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Tim Wirth (Colo.), and Chuck Robb (Va.). The Republican Party is an even bigger tent than Lee Atwater thought.
■ In year that saw burial of twentieth century’s most potent political emblem, the hammer and sickle—as Mikhail Gorbachev formally yielded to Boris Yeltsin and became 1991’s best-known “Ghost of History”—Freedom House, for first time in 21 years of surveying political rights worldwide, found a majority of world’s nations ruled by multi-party democracies. Free and Partly Free countries, by Freedom House’s reckoning, cover all of Europe, except for Yugoslavia, and entire Western Hemisphere, except for Cuba and Haiti. Countries split during the cold war stack up this way: East and West Germany, united and Free; North and South Vietnam, united and Not Free; South Korea, Free, and North Korea, Not Free; Taiwan, Partly Free, and China, at 1.15 billion people, the largest collection of Not Free souls on earth. . . . In Vietnam Dr. Nguyen Dan Que—who spent ten years, from 1978 to 1988, in Vietnamese gulag for agitating for human rights—was sentenced to twenty years for “subversive activities against the people’s power”: i.e., signing petition calling on Hanoi to “respect the human, civil, and property rights of the people.” In Washington, Vietnamese-Americans and friends—including author Al Santoli, former Navy Secretary James Webb—are proposing Que for Nobel Peace Prize. . . . Not the European Community nor the United Nations nor anyone else has come any closer to ending civil war in Yugoslavia. White House is hesitating over recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, now being carved up by the Federal—i.e., Serbian—army. Richard Nixon, for one, thinks we should not only take this step but give those two governments weapons to protect their new independence. . . . Canadians are looking to former premier Joe Clark, now constitutional affairs minister in Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government, to save their country from falling apart. A complicated solution to Quebec separatism has been worked out and will soon be presented to Canadians for their approval. Clark’s job will be to persuade Quebec and the rest of Canada that a bad marriage is better than separation or divorce. . . . World Future Society is less sanguine than Clark about Canada’s future. It forecasts secession of Quebec in 1996, with the rest of Canada joining United States by 2010.
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