When I was a Professor of Political Science and Education at the University of Chicago I lived in the Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood where Ayers and Barak Obama live and I was very familiar with school reform movements in Chicago and served on many civic and educational boards and advisory groups. The charges that the Republican candidates are making seem preposterous to me.

 

When you are on one of these groups, you don't go around investigating what your fellow members did when you were eight years old. If there is a billionaire businessman who committed some kind of fraud decades ago, he is simply looked on as someone who wants to help and is willing to come to a 7:30 AM meeting in the Loop and do something. Boards are not about personal confessions or forgiveness or endorsement of the lives of fellow members. They are about coming together, usually in limited ways, to move some set of issues or programs forward. There are not enough people willing to take on the terrible problems of a weak school system in a city with massive social problems. People with knowledge and skills or money are welcomed. Being on a board with someone has nothing to say about making a personal judgment about the character and history of every other board member. Most people who do this are extremely busy and have very little time to develop any serious personal relationship with any other board member. Membership only implies that one shares some general goals and wants to help with a set of problems or support a civic organization.

 

Bill Ayers reputation was far from radical--that of a good serious mainstream reformer, concerned about things like better teacher training. The project where he and Obama served on the same board was a mainstream effort founded with funds from a leading GOP Nixon appointee and millionaire and, to my mind, was too bureaucratic and too close to the Chicago Public Schools. There was nothing radical about it, though some fine people were involved.

 

This is simply a disgraceful effort to distract voters from the real issues and smear a candidate though guilt by association, a time-tested GOP tactic. I hope people will be sophisticated enough to see right through it. The fact that Bill Ayers did something crazy many years ago has precisely zero relationship to who should be president and they should suspect that those who are desperately trying to fool them about this don't have much to say about solving the country's truly urgent problems.

A year ago, most people thought we'd be facing a presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani; an historic contest because the first woman major party nominee would face off against America's mayor and a 9/11 hero. Even most political scientists thought this would be the case.

 

We find ourselves with only 30 days left in another historic presidential election, however, one with the first major party African American nominee running against a Vietnam War hero and former prisoner of war. And, it's all taking place amidst a global financial crisis of unimagined proportion.

 

In this context, political scientists have done a lot better in terms of analyses about who will win. Of course, we are all interested in the effect that Obama's multi-racial background will have on people's vote choice. Toward this end, as chair of the UCLA Political Science Department's Public Lecture Series, I am hosting seven talks this Thursday and Friday about race and the election. Early results from several contemporary polling projects will be discussed, including the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, which I co-direct.

 

UCLA has a long and strong history of path-breaking research on the topic of race and politics. David Sears (UCLA Psychology and Political Science) redefined the way scholars (and indeed politicos) think about studying race with his concept of Symbolic Racism. Frank Gilliam (UCLA Dean of the School of Public Affairs and Political Science) uncovered the way the images on TV affects people's understanding of race, crime, and politics. Both Sears and Gilliam will speak on Thursday in the California Room of the UCLA Faculty Club.

 

To this distinguished list we bring two methodologists from Stanford University doing cutting edge polling work on this election over the Internet. Doug Rivers is the CEO of YouGov/Polimetrix and a member of the Stanford Political Science Department and a Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Simon Jackman (Stanford University political science and statistics) is my co-principal investigator on the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP), which has been surveying 20,000 people in regular intervals for the last 10 months.

 

Joining this group will be four UCLA political scientists, assistant professor Lorrie Frasure, associate professor Mark Sawyer (Director of UCLA's Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics), and two future UCLA PhDs, Ryan Enos and Michael Tesler.

 

The complete schedule is listed after this post.

 

There has been a lot of myth circulating about the effect Obama's race is likely to have on his vote share, including a recently released AP/YAHOO poll conducted by an institute at Stanford University that found the drain on Obama's vote share to be an unusually large 6 percentage points. Few of us believe this will be the case. Larry Bartels (Princeton University) estimates the effect to be more like 3 points. Whatever the truth will be, one thing is known with certainty. If Obama underperforms, the polls going into the election, regardless of what the truth is, the media will blame it on his race and American's racial prejudices. That's the easy story. As scholars of politics, it is our responsibility to be ready to demonstrate why that is or is not what happened so that we don't end up with another "it's moral values" frame as we did after the media misread the exit polling results during the 2004 election.

 

At this meeting, seven scholars will present and discuss their current research and thoughts about how race and culture interact in this historic election. Please join us; the talks are open to the public and the press. All take place in the California Room of the UCLA Faculty Club.

 

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9

 

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10

Candidates should change their minds about important public policy issues as they learn things about the effectiveness of existing policies. Few do - probably because we award stability and "stick-with-it-ness." We think this signals strength and fortitude or a deep knowledge of what will really work. All of this is to say that I'm all for candidates learning - and ultimately changing their positions on important issues. In fact, as a researcher and scholar, I applaud it.

 

With great ease on Thursday night, Sarah Palin changed her position on gay equality. On Thursday night, Palin said "No one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed .".

 

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. My colleague and friend Tim Groseclose described it as a great moment for Anthony Downs, an economist who modeled party behavior in terms of the median voter theorem. In Downs's world, party positions on issues converge to the position of the median voter as candidates compete for votes. In Downs's world, parties care about winning elections, not about policies. Somehow, I don't think that's true for McCain/Palin.

 

But, it made me curious, so I looked. What is the position of the median American on gay equality? The National Election Study (NES) asks Americans to rate the LGBT population on a "feeling thermometer" (a tool that asks people to represent their warm or cold feeling for a group or a person by rating them on a 0 to 100 point scale. The first rating for homosexuals (the NES wording, not mine) comes in 1984, when the average ranking was 30 (rather cold). Today, with the same wording, the average temperature is about 50 - a decidedly neutral feeling. Coincidentally, the proportion of people who rate gays and lesbians at zero (the coldest possible rating) has declined steadily over the last 25 years, reaching a contemporary low of about 11 percent (down from 25 percent in the 1980s).

 

What is even more striking is the increase in support among Americans in support of equal employment rights for gay and lesbian applicants. The NES shows that in 1977 only 55 percent of the population thought gay and lesbian job applicants should be treated equally. Today, there is overwhelming support for this proposition: over 90 percent of the population supports employment non-discrimination for the LGBT population. Further evidence from Gallup shows that 79 percent of Americans think "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" should be repealed and 63 percent support changing existing federal hate crimes legislation to include crimes against lesbian and gay people.

 

Hmm . so the candidates of both parties have a way to go before converging to the median.

So, I assume Palin was describing the McCain administration's position on gay equality as she did because she knows that public sentiment on this issue is lopsided and the majority is on the other side from she and McCain. Most people favor extending civil rights equality to same-sex couples (and indeed all non-married but committed couples). But the instrumental nature of Palin's change in position on this issue bothered me. The problem was, I didn't actually believe Palin. In fact, just last year, Palin told Newsweek magazine that she would support expanding Alaska's anti-gay constitutional amendment to ban benefits for gay couples--a stark contrast to her newly adopted gay-equality position announced on Thursday.

 

Palin plainly told Newsweek in 2007 that she would pursue an amendment to the state constitution if that were what it took to deny same-sex couples the benefits that legally married couples enjoy. No equality there.

 

To be clear, we are talking about things like allowing the life-long best friend and partner of a dying person to be allowed to enter the ICU of a hospital to visit his or her partner who is fighting for life. Anyone who has ever sat by the side of a hospital bed and watched someone they deeply care about die knows how hard it is to get through these days. Anyone who has ever been sick in the hospital knows how difficult it is to deal with being unwell, with the inability to sleep, and with the slow passage of time through the hours and days. To deny people the chance to be together at the ends of their lives seems cruel and insensitive to me. To be frank, I don't understand it at all.

Palin tip-toed around her true positions on this issue and then, when pressed to be clear by the moderator, she plainly and obviously answered a different question. One after another, her answers to these questions were instrumental to the point of offending me. Perhaps it was her self-congratulatory, immodest smile that slipped to her face as she recognized that she was "besting" Gwen Ifill by completely ignoring her direct question. Clever.

 

Perhaps Palin hedged because she is embarrassed by her true positions. If so, good for her, she should be. More likely, she was trying not to offend the majority of the American population who support gay equality because she wants to be the next vice president of the United States. I realize politicians do things like this with some regularity, but the manner in which she did it and the nature of this issue affected me in a way that makes it hard for me to write it off as "typical campaigning." On sensitive moral and cultural issues involving civil rights, it seems to me that American candidates need to be thoughtful, honest, and sensitive in their rhetoric and presentation.

 

Unfortunately for Palin, the past is the best predictor of the future, and smart, efficient voters understand that the best indicator of what a politician is likely to do in office is what they have already done in office.

 

No wonder Palin wants us to stop thinking about the past. Her's is quite unattractive.

I became reacquainted with the seductiveness of Washington, D.C. last week when I journeyed east for several events. It has been decades since I lived there, but it still remains an extraordinary fascinating city for me. For political junkies and scholars, there is no better place for a rush than the political center of the world's most powerful nation. Whether in the hotel, in a bar or on the road, talk of the upcoming election easily crept into most conversations, and the House's initial rejection of the bailout bill added to the chatter.

 

Of course, similar discussions occur regularly in other parts of the country, but not with the same frequency, intensity and first-hand insights. The dominance of the political culture is manifested in other ways. Like Los Angeles with its Hollywood stars, D.C. has its share of celebrity sighting, but in the form of spotting elected politicians and high-level appointees. I confess that I was absolutely thrilled that a former congressman came to a meeting, and better, we had a chance to talk!

 

The built environment is a symbolic reminder of D.C.'s role as a keeper of America's history and identity. It was surreal to jog up the Mall to the Capitol, back to the Washington Monument, around the Tidal Basin, up the Lincoln Memorial, and along the Reflection Pool. These landmarks echo the distant past as well as more recent events associated with notables such as Wilbur Mills and Martin Luther King. Some claim that life inside the beltway is unreal, but in my opinion, it is just different, very unique by necessity because it is the national capital.

 

Even in the middle of an economic crisis where the federal government's potency looks problematic, there is an unwavering belief that the decisions made in Washington profoundly affect people and their lives. Those actions do really matter, and the direction for the next few years will hinge on November's outcome.

 

During the short stay in D.C., I felt a longing to be a part of that world. If I were asked to serve by the next administration or a public interest group, the offer certainly would be enticing. Regardless of the election results, one should be there, semi-permanently or occasionally, to influence major public policies.

In the past two weeks, the major candidates have said very little in the way of specifics regarding healthcare.  The financial crises that have been rocking the country and the focus on foreign affairs in the first presidential debate moved discussions far away from issues regarding healthcare.  However, with the upcoming second presidential debate to focus on domestic issues, discussions regarding healthcare have reemerged.  Although California is solidly in the Democratic camp, Obama campaign ads on healthcare have started to air.  I have not as yet seen any McCain ads here.

 

The details of the candidates' proposals and their parties' platforms are not fully detailed, but the McCain outline is worrisome, which proposes to tax employer health benefits (as income) and to provide vouchers to families for health insurance.  McCain has identified an area of healthcare coverage that is a residual of World War II benefits, when wartime wage controls were in place and companies extended healthcare benefits in lieu of pay increases.  Granted that these benefits are not the way that we might want them to be implemented now, but his solution quite misses the mark in the number of ways.  In a nutshell, he is proposing to dismantle the current employment-based healthcare system in favor of individuals purchasing health insurance subsidized by vouchers.

 

The idea of vouchers is based on the premise that there is a competitive market for health plans for individuals in this country and that individuals will make the correct choices regarding purchasing health insurance.  In fact, the market for non-employee-based healthcare is a bit of a joke.  Ask someone over the age of 40 who has tried to purchase health insurance lately.  The average cost per person for healthcare nationally is in the range of $4,000.  Individual plans would be higher.  As a group, individuals are far harder to insure than a group employed by a single employer.  People who are employed at large firms tend be healthier and thus provide a much lower risk pool than the group of individuals who seek insurance from the community.  Self-employed and unemployed individuals who seek insurance tend to be sicker because they include a mix of persons who are healthier and a group who are sicker (e.g. too sick to work full-time).

 

The second issue is the idea that dollars given over to healthcare benefits would be used by individuals on healthcare if these dollars were (1) taxed and (2) redistributed to individuals to spend as they wish.  The greater likelihood is that some would decide to not purchase health insurance, chancing that they are either too healthy to get sick or need a physician or that they need those precious dollars for other uses.  In tough economic times, basic healthcare can become a luxury.  The choice to redistribute healthcare benefits would likely increase disparities in healthcare coverage based upon income and financial resources.

 

Both campaigns propose to reduce the problem that "pre-existing" conditions have on individuals seeking healthcare insurance.  Ever since insurers dropped community ratings and generated different rates for different individuals, groups of individuals have become "uninsurable."  This would be a topic for an entire other entry, but needless to say, even grouping such individuals (as McCain proposes) would not lead to an improvement in their ability to gain health insurance.

 

I would count the McCain proposal as unreasonable at best.  It does not realistically propose to increase healthcare to more people.  It does not propose to decrease costs to individuals or to the system as a whole.  It does not create a market for individuals to purchase healthcare insurance, nor does it set realistic standards that might govern such purchasing (if we got that far).  The only way to make progress in this area is to identify the principals that will ensure solutions.  This means pragmatism over ideology.  I am not sure that the Republican Party is ready to embrace mandating healthcare coverage for everyone.  In contrast, the Obama proposal makes modifications that would ensure an incremental increase in healthcare coverage.  I prefer half a slice to nothing at all.

I was asked a couple of times this summer, "What happened to Reverend Wright?" I explained to them that the McCain campaign was probably waiting until October to reintroduce Obama's former pastor to the American people. I figured that their strategists were holding back so as not to wear out the shelf life of Wright's inflammatory remarks before Election Day. Judging from both Sarah Palin's reintroduction of Obama's much more dubious association with Bill Ayers last week, and the Obama Campaign's new preemptive ads warning about Republican efforts to distract voters from the issues, it looks like it's only a matter of time before Wright's "God bless America? No, no, no, goddamn America!" finds its way into ads by or on behalf of John McCain.

 

A number of factors, however, make trotting out Wright this late in the game a tough sell. Reverend Wright should have been the gift that keeps on giving to the McCain Campaign. Indeed, he is the perfect vehicle to make the argument that Obama is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Who is Barack Obama, after all, they could ask? He's really a Trojan horse who will let Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Phleger and any other person you can think of who stokes stereotypical white fears of black radicalism into the White House. This was an easier narrative to try to sell the public in the summer, though, when many were still forming their impressions of Obama. The problem with pushing these associations now is that Senator Obama comes off as an eminently reasonable person searching for common ground in the debates. It's obviously harder for the McCain campaign, then, to portray Obama as a fire-breathing radical during a debate season where they're simultaneously mocking him for agreeing so often with his opponent.

 

The other major factor working against the effectiveness of bringing back Reverend Wright is the financial crisis. I alluded in an earlier post to how Obama needs to deactivate the impact of racial resentment on voting behavior. The blockbuster intensity of the economic crisis was probably much more successful in accomplishing this task than anything Obama could have done himself. For the attention on the economy undoubtedly altered America's voting ingredients by making economic evaluations a more important factor in their decision making. The upshot of activating economic considerations is deactivating others--likely racial resentment. In the same sense, a heightened economic role also militates against renewed attention to Reverend Wright priming patriotism and racial resentment--attitudes which unlike the economy advantage McCain.

 

So expect Reverend Wright to reappear shortly, and expect his reemergence to carry the news cycle for a couple of days. But I doubt that this alone will give McCain the juice he needs to stage a comeback.

If you type "racial minorities mortgage meltdown" into Google, you will find a host of stories about how government pressure on banks to provide equal opportunity caused the financial crisis in this country.

 

This may or may not be true. I have not done the research to judge. But the manner in which the story has been propagated demonstrates an appalling racism by members of the political Right.

 

The claim is some variant on this: the Clinton administration pressured banks to make unwise loans to African-Americans and, sometimes, Latinos. The banks made the loans out of fear of retribution by the government. The accumulated inability of racial minorities to repay the loans caused the insolvency we now see in the banking sector and all of America has been left to pay the consequences. Sometimes the stories say it is the fault of "African-Americans", sometimes they say "Blacks", sometimes "minorities", sometimes "inner-city people", sometimes "Jesse Jackson", sometimes "Barack Obama", sometimes "community organizers". Rush Limbaugh said that the mortgage meltdown has happened because liberals will never allow white people to be forgiven for slavery.

 

I will state again that I don't know if this accusation, in any general way, is true. Like most political scare tactics, there might be a grain of truth in it somewhere. However, it strikes me as dubious to claim that Wall Street banks, which were by most accounts reveling in their prosperity, were operating under coercion.

 

But the truth of the claim is insignificant in comparison to what it reveals about the continued use of race-baiting as a political tactic. The right-wing websites that post this material cannot verify these claims and neither can the right-wing radio hosts that are talking about it (and there are a lot of them). However, it serves a political purpose, whether intentionally or not, because it connects the Democratic Party to Blacks and it raises the classic GOP boogie-man of inner-city government-dependent Blacks.

 

Political scientists term this type of racial appeal "implicit racism" to distinguish it from the explicitly racist appeals that were once commonplace in American political discourse (and not just in the South). Republicans sometimes seem to take offense at the idea that the Republican Party has used racist appeals. To deny this is as ridiculous as to claim that the Democratic Party never did. You don't have to be a political scientist to know that Republican politicians leveraged racial appeals to win votes in past campaigns. Kevin Phillips, a Nixon aide, wrote an entire book describing how the GOP would gain from Democratic association with the "Negro". Lee Atwater was a top political advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He was indirectly responsible for the racially tinted Willy Horton commercial used by Bush to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988. Atwater admitted that GOP strategists, after the 1960's, replaced racial slurs with codewords that appealed to the sentiment that Blacks were burdensome to the nation's economy and educational systems. When racial slurs became unacceptable campaigns were simply forced to adopt a new terminology that appealed to the same sentiments among a, not insignificant, portion of white voters. There is political science evidence, though it is controversial, that suggests that these appeals increase resentment towards African-Americans as a group and increases support for the politicians that use these tactics.

 

The suggestion that African-Americans caused the nation's economic ills has the potential to activate the same fears and prejudices. I don't know where the claim first emerged and I do not know to what extent it is propagated through conscious effort by people aware of its consequences. What I do know is that a disturbing number of public figures are wiling to repeat the accusations uncritically and that they are willing to do so demonstrates how racist and racially polarizing politics are in the United States. It is difficult to find any other reason that public conservatives would be so willing to repeat these accusations other than that the accusations are targeted at Blacks, a constituency of the Democratic party. If the story were about rural whites causing the mortgage meltdown, I guarantee that Sean Hannity would find something else to talk about. I also find it difficult to believe that intelligent and well-educated public figures are not aware of the historical pattern into which these appeals fit and the types of resentments that they are likely to feed.

 

I would also guess that most of the people that uncritically accept these claims do so because it fits with their prejudicial stereotypes about racial minorities as unscrupulous public burdens. That people are more willing to accept information that fits with their already held attitudes is very well established by political science and psychology research. This is not unique to conservatives, thus for many liberals every time President Bush misspeaks, it is, unfairly, evidence of his stupidity. But in this case, the claims are supporting attitudes of dangerous racial stereotypes. That intelligent people, that surely put a great deal of thought into how to persuade, would repeat these stories is quite disturbing. That such a large portion of the American public will surely accept them, whether accurate or not, demonstrates a tremendous ill in our society.

It is a testament to how impoverished the discussion in this political season is that we have spent so much time talking about the term "experience." The media led by the Republicans have continually conflated "experienced" with "qualified." They are not one and the same and it is dangerous to suggest that they are. This is why we can debate the experience of Sarah Palin or John McCain versus Barack Obama and Joe Biden without talking about the broader issue of qualifications.

 

First of all there is no experience alone that qualifies one to be President. If it was military experience we would regularly elect former generals, if it were foreign policy experience Condi Rice or Colin Powell would have been the Republican nominee and if it were the economy we would generally select either the Secretary of Labor or the Treasury Secretary depending upon which way we leaned politically. If it were serving as Vice President each party would have drafted Dick Cheney and Al Gore to run against one another. Additionally, there is nothing about being a governor, a P.O.W., a community organizer, a mayor of a small town, a State Senator or a U.S. Senator that provides one with the clear experience to do a job whose scope and responsibility are beyond any of our comprehension. There is no single resume item that makes someone a better President than someone else.

 

But why have so many governors been elected to the US Presidency? Doesn't executive experience matter? The fact is that it is easier for Governors to get elected than Senators or others because the job does not include hundreds if not thousands of votes on complicated issues that make fodder for negative campaign commercials. Remember John Kerry's "I voted for it, before I voted against it." That is a quandary common for legislators. If Hillary Clinton had been Governor of New York rather than Senator she would not have had to vote on Iraq and would have likely been the nominee. Governors have the advantage of managing a relatively small bureaucracy, having the line item veto, and also being forced to balance the budget by statute in most cases. Unlike Governors Mayors are responsible for things like crime and poor service delivery. The job leaves few opportunities for error and lots of opportunity to take credit for things. It is perfect for a run for the Presidency.

 

But if executive experience were the litmus test as Republicans have now suggested why was Rudy Giuliani not selected as either the nominee or the vice-President? New York City is a larger and more complex than Alaska, has a larger armed force (the NYPD) , and more direct foreign policy issues (i.e. the UN, trade issues, immigration etc.), including counter terrorism than the state of Alaska. By that logic we should have had a match up of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles versus Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York or maybe Richard J. Daley of Chicago versus Rudy Giuliani to emphasize the Irish versus Italian old machine war. None of those people were serious contenders and the one who did run got a whopping one delegate.

 

So if not experience what does matter? I argue a general sense of qualifications matters that can't be reduced to any single concept like experience. Over the campaign we get to know someone, their character, if they share our beliefs, if their policy programs make sense given our challenges and most of all we get a sense of their intelligence, judgment, vision and ability to communicate ideas or deal with complex issues. We also might judge based on ideology, which is of course legitimate and how most make their decisions.

 

Thus, experience is only one and perhaps the least important factor for a President, but it seems to be the only one we are talking about. An example is, George W. Bush is one of the most experienced people around in terms of the Presidency. If we could, would we re-elect him? Would we elect Dick Cheney? Of course not, they have proven that they are not good at the job. They have made multiple errors in judgment and execution. Despite their "experience" their performance has been poor, and we all know it. But that's not the choice. We also understand the performance of the Republican Party in the last 12 years has been generally poor on issues of war and peace, the economy and ethics. So why are we stuck with this "experience" meme?

 

We are stuck with experience because the McCain campaign wants you to ignore that despite relative inexperience, Senator Barack Obama is highly qualified to be President. He has consistently shown judgment, intelligence, and an ability to communicate complex issues and ideas to the American people that matches those of some of our best Presidents. We are asked to dismiss his array of experiences and obvious intelligence as either "elitism" or to use Palin's terms a "journey of personal discovery." They want to keep this going because the simple fact is their ideas are old, stale and proven failures. It is important to describe some set of resume items as legitimate "experience,"while dismissing others all the while avoiding a discussion of ideas, issues, vision and the broader notion of qualifications.

 

For Republicans thinking about our toughest most difficult issues in a serious fashion with some of the best minds in America and the world is not a qualification for being President but a negative. Turning down high paying jobs to bring old style small-scale democracy to people that no one cares about while working as a community organizer is sneered and scoffed at. Being able to communicate complex ideas, policies and a notion of America future in a way that inspires both Americans but also our allies is decried as "celebrity" and not a core aspect of leadership. Spending 18 months running one of the best and most organized campaigns anyone has observed while talking on all comers in tough forums including hostile ones like Fox News and having to explain everything from whether he drinks beer to what his neighbors were doing when he was 8 years old, is seen as an exercise in self-indulgence and egoism.

 

That's the trick. Take the opponents strengths and present them as weaknesses. The "experience" talk distracts the fact that a member of a political party that is seeking a third term in office and has been in Washington for 26 years and supports verbatim the policies of the sitting president and the party, should essentially almost be dismissed out of hand and as a serious candidate except for those who are hard core ideologues. Senator John McCain also wants to deflect from the fact that his own experiences and those of his own Vice-Presidential choice don't mean that they automatically have the intelligence, ideas, judgment, temperament and vision to solve problems like the failing economy. In fact, the ideas presented at the Republican National Convention represent more of the same but are carefully branded under "change," "maverick" and "experience."

 

So now we are debating if Governor Palin has more or less "experience" than Senator Obama while distracting from the broader and more important question; are her and the Presidential nominee "qualified" or more qualified than the Obama/Biden ticket. That we can only know through the debates, through the crucible of the campaign and when Palin takes tough questions from the media as Senators Obama, McCain and Biden have done for almost 18 months. She must face the press and also the press must deeply and serious investigate her performance in office and record not her "experience." There is a big difference between assessing someone's "performance" and "record" versus arguments about which resume items constitute "experience" and which don't.

 

Only President Bill Clinton has gotten it right and the media did not even understand it. President Bill Clinton was thought to be insulting Obama when he stated in an interview for ABC News, "You can argue that nobody is ready to be president," Mr Clinton told ABC News. "You can argue that even if you've been vice-president for eight years, that no one can be fully ready for the pressures of the office." Clinton was right the job is so singular, and so much pressure, that it is only the crucible of the campaign itself and our sense of the candidate's judgment, intelligence, sensitivity, skill, leadership, ideas and plans of the individual candidates can give us a glimpse of the answer. So why don't we move beyond the dueling resume talk of "experience" vs. lack of experience. But it will certainly be hard, the press as swallowed this meme uncritically hook line and sinker. So much so, even democrats despite knowing better go on shows and debate experience rather than qualifications.

Readers may have noticed a dip in blog postings this week. The reason: with the start of fall quarter classes, this Category 5 election has come whirling onto campus.

 

The excitement is palpable: On Monday, my "Introduction to Public Policy" course was packed. Pens scribbled. Eyes were wide open. Students even sat in the front row. In this election of elections, where more people watched the convention speeches than the Oscars, reaching that inner political junkie in students has never been easier. It's making sense of the political world outside that has never been harder.

 

So I've decided to experiment a little.

 

We're doing some statistically dubious but instructive polling of our own. Why aren't younger voters proportionately represented in the election polling? "How many of you only have cell phones and no land lines?" I asked the class. About 125 of 134 hands shot up.

 

What are the political dynamics explaining House inaction on the bailout? Instead of lecturing, we pretended. My students played members of Congress. I played an angry constituent.

 

"Why won't you guys pass this bill?" I demanded. Some said that they were fiscal conservatives and philosophically opposed. Others said they were Republicans, but the president's historic low approval ratings had taken away his "juice." One said far more constituents opposed the plan, raising the issue of whether the House vote actually revealed responsive politics at work.

 

Another said the plan might not work - bringing to life the classic and powerful role that uncertainty plays in policy choices. And then, as if on cue, one student in the back raised his hand. "The ideal solution," he said," is for everyone else to vote yes so the bill passes, but for me to vote no, so I can avoid blame if it goes badly." I couldn't have explained electoral incentives and collective action problems better

The "Bradley effect" or "Bradley-Wilder effect" immediately became part of the popular political vernacular after this year's New Hampshire primary. These terms describe the phenomenon whereby black candidates--most notably Tom Bradley, Douglas Wilder and David Dinkins--perform significantly poorer at the ballot box then in pre-election polls. The gap is thought to result from white voters telling pollsters (especially African-American interviewers) they are willing to vote for black candidates, but then voting their racial prejudices behind the curtain. When Barack Obama lost in spite of his large leads in all the polls, political commentators assumed this process had once again reared its ugly head.

 

A new study out of Harvard by Daniel J. Hopkins (forthcoming), however, suggests that the Bradley effect is a thing of the past. His key finding is that there was a significant disparity between the poll numbers and actual vote tallies of African-Americans seeking statewide offices before the mid 1990s, but that black candidates' vote shares are in line with what we'd expect from the polls since then. Perhaps more importantly, Hopkins's analysis of the 2008 primary indicates that Barack Obama slightly outperformed his poll numbers.

 

If there is one thing I've learned in studying the impact of race in this election, though, it's that it's often difficult to make predictions from applying extant racial voting literature. The novelty of Obama's general election campaign simply makes it hard to say a priori whether this unbiased trend Hopkins documents will continue into November or if it will activate considerations that originally produced the Bradley effect in the 1980s.

 

Yet even if some respondents are merely supporting Obama in the polls for social desirability purposes, there is a real chance that this Bradley effect could be offset by the cell phone effect. As many know, almost all national surveys are conducted on landline respondents only. Despite the fact that roughly 15 percent of the population and about one-third of 18-24 year olds are thought to only be reachable by cell phone, their absence up until very recently did not introduce discernable bias into polling numbers. Prior to this summer, earlier comparisons of landline and cell phone respondents by Pew Research Center, for example, "indicate that when data from both the landline and cell samples are combined and weighted to match the U.S. population on selected demographic measures, the results for key political measures (such as presidential approval, Iraq policy, presidential primary voter preference, and party affiliation) are virtually identical to those from the landline survey alone." Or in other words, no bias existed because cell-onlies and landliners from the same demographic groupings have similarly distributed opinions.

 

Last week, however, Pew released its third comparative study of the summer showing that similarly situated landliners and cell-onlies substantially differ in their rates of support for Obama Cell only respondents under thirty, for instance, favor Obama over McCain by 35 percentage points, compared to only a 13 point Obama edge for landliners in this age group. As a result, adding in cell-phone responders with their parallel landline surveys increases aggregate support for Obama by 2 to 3 points.

 

Pew's cell-only samples were unfortunately conducted on sample sizes much smaller than typical surveys. This necessarily limits the statistical confidence we can put in these results. Nevertheless, we should be much more confident in this evidence of under-support in polls for Obama then the endless media speculation about over-support due to a Bradley effect that may very well no longer exist.