Kristol on the Elections

The offices of the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, are nestled behind a single door at the corner of the fifth floor of a nondescript office building across the street from National Geographic's Explorer Hall in Washington DC. The office décor was modern, pleasant and interchangeable with any small business. The only features to distinguish these offices from any other modern office were the magazine covers papering the walls. Young twenty-somethings, the only visible employees, hustled about their duties while sipping coffee, and munching on candy. Since The Weekly Standard is published, as its name implies, weekly, it did not exude the smell of deadline desperation of a daily paper. There was not very much ambient noise for such a creative enterprise. Rather an easy friendliness filled the offices.

William Kristol is the editor of this small (Most issues are about 40 pages.) magazine. Kristol has contributed his political commentary to the television show This Week and to PBS television. Television provides a false sense of intimacy. When I went to visit Editor William Kristol in his office at The Weekly Standard, I felt like I knew him, and in an intellectual way I did. Kristol was shorter and grayer than I expected, but had an aura of approachability. With open-collared casualness and harried cordiality, Mr. Kristol greeted me and inquired about Suite101.

Despite the exchanged pleasantries, Kristol was clearly pressed for time and wanted to get right to the interview. There were three themes I intended to cover, the presidential race, several national issues, and finally the magazine. He suggested we invert the order so that if he was called away we would at least cover the magazine. Clearly, he wanted to use the interview for magazine publicity. In Part 1, we explore with Mr. Kristol the progress of his magazine and his handicapping of the 2000 presidential race.

There are many national publications a Conservative can write for, from National Review, to Commentary magazine, to the American Spectator. What niche, I asked, was Kristol trying to fill with The Weekly Standard? Kristol explained that in 1994, flush with the unprecedented Republican control of Congress and the dawning of a new political era, there was room for a "Washington-based weekly magazine, that was opinion and also reporting."

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