Volume 6, Issue 2

In some respects the public's reaction to the performance of the Bush presidency is similar to public reactions to the performance of previous presidents: President Bush had an early-term ``honeymoon," albeit a brief one. The public has ``rallied" in reaction to international crises. Those who rallied were mostly opposition partisans and political independents. Where President Bush's support scores have differed from those of his predecessors is in their duration and intensity. The rallying of public support, after 9/11, reached an unprecedented height, but no other president has fallen so precipitously and maintained such a low level of public approval. The growth in fatalities in Iraq accounts for much of the decline.

How effective was the George W. Bush administration in using the levers of Washington governance to attain its goals? By late in Bush's presidency, his administration had received a reputation as less than competent due to their mismanagement of the response to Hurricane Katrina and the occupation of Iraq. Despite these "headline" reversals, a closer look at the evidence reveals an administration that often was quite effective in pursuing its goals with the federal bureaucracy, Congress and federal courts. The administration consistently pushed for expanded executive power consistent with its embrace of a unitary executive interpretation of their Constitutional power. Yet the hierarchical, managerial and partisan style of the administration proved self-limiting, as it increased partisan rancor in Washington and provided only a narrow margin for error that vanished after the 2006 elections.

The enthusiasm for organization-building we observe today in the Democratic Party finds its roots in the 1990s. As the Democrats' competitive standing declined, their approach to their party organization began to change. With a newfound desire to recapture the majority, Democratic Party leaders began to make sustained investments in their party organization for the first time in over forty years. However, while new electoral uncertainties created new incentives for party building, translating those incentives into change at an organizational level happened only gradually, in a piecemeal fashion. Tracing the efforts of Democratic Party leaders from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, this article argues that party building is a collective, cumulative process that takes time, resources, and persistent attention.

This essay analyzes the rise and fall of the New Democrats as a faction within the Democratic Party; it treats their emergence in the 1980's, their ideological underpinnings, and some of their political and policy accomplishments. The decline of the New Democrats in the 21st century is explained by examining four factors: (1) the character of their ideas, (2) the rise of partisan polarization, (3) the challenges of minority party status, and (4) the emergence of a reenergized "progressive" coalition on their left flank. The aim here is to shed light on the important subject of the rise and fall of factions in American party politics.

This article presents a new method of measuring the ideological orientation of the American electorate, using four variables found in the American National Elections Studies. The measure is tested for validity by examining its relation to a list of fundamental beliefs that we would expect a liberal and a conservative to hold. The proportions of liberals, conservatives and middle-of-the-roaders among the electorate over the past several decades are delineated. Both ideological orientation and party identification are then examined to determine the extent to which both of these predispositions coexist among the electorate. As of 2004, only 7.4 percent of potential voters were found to be both strong conservatives and strong Republicans, while 3.2 percent were strong liberals and strong Democrats. The majority of the electorate had neither strong predisposition. This majority should not be considered middle-of-the-roaders since they have little or no cognizance of the liberal-conservative continuum. The implications of these findings for party and candidate strategies, as well as for the assumption that voters need an ideological orientation in order to make sophisticated decisions, are discussed.

This paper examines the potential for strategic Republican crossover voting in the March 4, 2008 Democratic primaries. Some observers note that conservative media figures encouraged Republicans to raid the Democratic primary in order to weaken the Democratic Party's chances in the November election. Analysis of exit poll data from 38 states suggests that Republicans may have been voting strategically in Democratic primaries, but there is little evidence that March 4th was unusual in the scope of strategic behavior.

The annual local elections in Britain are closely scrutinised for the clues they offer about the current state of public opinion. The 2008 contests attracted particular attention. The governing Labour party recorded its worst local election performance for 40 years; the Conservative opposition its best since John Major's electoral honeymoon in 1992. These elections, and other evidence, appear to have shifted the political narrative so that a Conservative victory at the next general election (due before mid-2010) is now seen as increasingly possible.

Using data from a new and representative sample of American college and university professors, this paper develops an empirical definition of ``political correctness," explores its distribution in the university setting, and examines its implications for university life. I demonstrate that the politically correct (PC) are more common in elite institutions, even though the un-PC are disproportionally among the academic ``stars" at such institutions. Additionally, the PC are more prevalent in the humanities and social sciences (except notably political science) and among the baby-boomer generation, in contrast to more recent cohorts of scholars. The critical manifestations of PC as a concept suggests that it has more to do with perceptions of material discrimination than it does with social sensitivity or moral relativism. Most importantly, while the PC—those most closely wedded to conceptions of what I call ``ascriptive justice"—are more willing than others to reveal their political commitments in the classroom and to let their passions guide their choice of research topics, there is strong support for academic freedom and no evidence of political intolerance in the group.

Robert Maranto comments on Professor Simmons' article, suggesting that it makes a significant contribution, but also suffers from occasionally muddled analyses and from questions not asked.

Solon Simmons replies to Robert Maranto's comments about his article on political correctness in the academy.

The author of Law and Order replies to the reviewer's comments about his book.

Review of Michael Flamm's Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. Flamm provides a fresh take on the conservative ascendancy but is misleading about the role of race.

Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War and John Harwood and Gerald F. Seib's Pennsylvania Avenue each attempt to explain what the authors see as the gridlock and polarization that characterize contemporary American politics. Brownstein's historical approach provides much needed perspective, while Harwood and Seib's elite interviews offer an inside glimpse on how deals get done (or not) in Washington.