From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

"SHOES, BOOZE AND BUTTERMILK." AS A STUDENT at the University of Mississippi, Dan Goodgame had a professor who loved to relate the theory of supply and demand to those familiar objects of daily life. The lesson stuck, and today Goodgame brings a keen appreciation of the links between theory and reality to his job as TIME's national economic correspondent. "Economics is inextricable from politics," says Goodgame, who reported on Bill Clinton's sweeping economic program for this week's cover articles. "You can't really understand one without the other."

Goodgame, who earned a master's degree in international relations as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, is well equipped for the task. He moved to the economics beat in January, after spending four years covering George Bush's White House.

On his new beat, Dan has been startled to see top members of the Clinton economic team struggling with a kind of technoshock. "One told me he feels less well-informed today than at any other time in the past 10 years," Goodgame says. "People came from offices filled with banks of screens that flashed news and stock quotes from around the world. Now they're stuck with antique computers in a place where people still walk wire-service stories around by hand."

Dan sniffs out news much faster than that: he sketched the shape of Clinton's program just a few days after the Inauguration. He realized Clinton would shy away from taxing the carbon content of fuel, for example, after asking the President's advisers whether they were willing to run afoul of Senate Appropriations chairman Robert Byrd, the powerful West Virginia Democrat whose state mines carbon-rich coal. "If you go over the options yourself and think about the difficulty of getting anything through Congress, you can see what questions to ask, and what's likely to happen," Goodgame says. "That's the connection between politics and economics."

Goodgame uses the same common-sense method to analyze the Clinton plan's chances of being passed. "Hardly anything a President does goes through Congress the way it is presented," he notes. "The question is whether Clinton will be able to use the bully pulpit to preserve the essentials of his plan. He's been a very good salesman so far." As the economic drama unfolds in Washington, we are delighted to have Dan covering all the acts.