Ezra Klein points to a new ABC/WaPo poll showing a solid majority support “a law that requires all Americans to have health insurance, either getting it from work, buying it on their own, or through eligibility for Medicare or Medicaid.” Further, the same poll finds a third of those who oppose would switch sides “if the government gave financial assistance in getting health insurance to people with incomes below about 40-thousand dollars for an individual, and below 88-thousand dollars for a family of four.”

Kevin Drum is intrigued and guesses the phenomenon likely pretty common.

I’m pretty sure you could quote a couple of lines from Jabberwocky, ask an “in that case” followup question, and get a fair number of people to change their minds.  So what I’d like to know is: what’s the average flip rate?

He thinks figuring this out would be a useful project for political scientists, adding yet another data point to Dan Drezner’s suspicion that those of our ilk are becoming more policy-relevant.

I’m sure Kevin’s right that there’s a flip factor.  Partly, people just want to seem agreeable and reasonable.  Mostly, though, adding a lot of caveats just makes poll questions more confusing.

And the ones Ezra cites above are, frankly, pretty damned confusing.  The initial question is beyond double barreled, throwing so many things into the pot that I’m surprised they found 41% to oppose.  A “law that requires all Americans to have health insurance” sounds pretty good on the surface and talk about the employer or Medicare paying for it obscures the actual policy choice.  If, on the other hand, the question were phrased, “Would you support or oppose a law forcing Americans who do not have health insurance through their employer or the government to pay for it out of their own pocket or go to jail?” support would go down tremendously!

Similarly, if the follow-up were phrased, “Would you be willing to pay more in taxes so individuals making under $40,000 a year — or  $88,000 for families– could get free health insurance from the government?” I’m guessing it wouldn’t do so well.

Yet another rehash of the factoid that “states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006″ causes John Sides to commit social science.

Welcome to another episode of “The Ecological Fallacy”! Once again: you cannot infer the behavior of individuals — Democrats and Republicans — from data at an aggregate level, such as states.

What happens when we look at individual-level data? Blow’s story falls apart.

See the post for a discussion of methodology and coding.  Here’s what the results look like graphically:

About 29% of Democrats, 30% of independents, and 26% of Republicans are or have been divorced or separated.

About 19% of Democrats, 19% of independents, and 15% of Republicans admit to having an extramarital affair.

If anything, Republicans are slightly less likely than both Democrats and independents to get divorced or mess around. This is the opposite of what Blow suggests — which, yet again, reveals the problems of using aggregate data to make individual-level inferences.

Adding some additional controls for “age, sex, race, educational attainment, and year of survey” he finds “Republicans are 2 percentage points less likely to be or have been divorced. They are 4 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair.”  He admits that there may be factors that he’s not considering that would make the differences even smaller.  The bottom line, though, is right:

But I think the basic finding is likely robust: partisanship has a very weak relationship with either divorce or infidelity, and the relationships that do exist suggest that Republicans are less, not more, likely to get divorced or be unfaithful. Those, like Blow, who want to decry Republican “hypocrisy” on issues of family and sexuality may want to focus their ire on Sanford, Ensign, et al., and not on Republicans in the mass public.

I would have frankly guessed this result even without doing the statistical analysis, just given the unlikelihood that choice of catch-all party would have much to do with something so unrelated.  When one considers that, at the aggregate level, Alabama Democrats are much more like Alabama Republicans than they are to California or Massachussets Democrats, the realization that party preference has little predictive value at the individual level should be obvious.

Megan McArdle calls for an extension of Godwin’s Law that would put an end to “using the word fascist to apply to the current, or indeed previous, administration.”

How is this helpful?  Has clarifying the distinction between fascism and socialism really added to most peoples’ understanding of what the Obama administration is doing?  All this does is drag the specter of Hitler into the conversation.  And the problem with Hitler was not his industrial policy–I mean, okay, fine, Hitler’s industrial policy bad, right, but I could forgive him for that, you know?  The thing that really bothers me about Hitler was the genocide.  And I’m about as sure as I can be that Obama has no plans to round up millions of people, put them in camps, and find various creative ways to torture them to death.

I agree with her conclusion but not her argument.

Last things first: The Final Solution was possible because Nazi Germany was a fascist state and therefore no one dared question Hitler’s orders.  Genocide is, however, not a necessary outgrowth of fascist ideology nor have most genocides been carried out by fascist governments. Benito Mussolini, the Founding Fascist (if you will) wasn’t a mass murderer and Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Omar al-Bashir aren’t fascists. The genocide was what made Hitler evil, not what made him a fascist.

With that out of the way, I completely agree that dubbing American presidents and their policies fascist is not a helpful way to advance the debate.   See, for example, my previous decisions of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and the Obama cult of personality.  While there may be aspects of the Bush or Obama policies that have something akin with Communism or Nazism or Fascism or whathaveyou, those terms have so much extraneous baggage that the discussion invariably strays from the actual thing being criticized.  [As Dave Schuler points out in the comments, there's a name for this: "poisoning the well."]

We should be careful here to differentiate name-calling from the actual substantive argument.  It’s a very different thing to argue that bringing up the idea of nationalizing health care makes you a Marxist/Socialist/Communist than to argue that enacting a given policy will naturally lead down a road to ever-more-powerful government.   So, Friedrick Hayek’s Road to Serfdom is a different than Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism or even Al Franken’s Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

Inspired by an OTB comment thread, Steven Taylor has written two essays questioning the use of the phrase “A Republic, Not a Democracy.”   In Part I: Looking at Terms, he cites the political science literature to show that the terms are interchangable.  Part II: Madison, Republican Government and Federalism, he argues that even the founders wanted democratic institutions — i.e., a nascent form of representative democracy — despite the use of the term Republic throughout the Constitution and other founding documents.

He’s right, of course, on the merits.   I’ve used the phrase myself in casual conversation to mean that we have a limited government rather than one in which the majority has the right to do whatever it wishes.   That’s an important theoretical concept that many Americans seem not to fathom.

Walter Williams, amidst a lot of drivel, captured the essence of that distinction:

John Adams captured the essence of the difference when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.”

[...]

Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.

In recognition that it’s Congress that poses the greatest threat to our liberties, the framers used negative phrases against Congress throughout the Constitution such as: shall not abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, and shall not be violated, nor be denied. In a republican form of government, there is rule of law. All citizens, including government officials, are accountable to the same laws. Government power is limited and decentralized through a system of checks and balances. Government intervenes in civil society to protect its citizens against force and fraud but does not intervene in the cases of peaceable, voluntary exchange.

[...]

John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.” In a word or two, the founders knew that a democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny the colonies suffered under King George III.

The phrase is a popular one, used by paleocons like Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul.

As a matter of political science, however, all polities that empower popular sovereignty employ representative democracy, which filters the passions of the people through elected politicians, with some restrictions on what those leaders can do with their power.   Some, like the United States, put more obstacles in the way of the majority than others, such as the UK.   But there are no “pure” democracies.

Tyler Cowen laments the splitting of the quarterly American Economic Review into multiple, monthly journals.

I don’t intend any criticism of the editors, as it seems (based on a mere perusal) they have done a good job in each case. But the coming of the American Economic Review was for me an event to look forward to. Now it feels like a bunch of journals are crossing my desk and I wish to be done with them. If they are going to expand, I would rather get just one more additional journal. Maybe it’s not actually an advantage that they can publish more articles; somehow they all seem less important and I feel as if the real quantity of research — defined in part by its salience to a broad community — has gone down.

I’ve long felt that way about poli-sci journals.  As ridiculously hard as it is to get published in significant journals, the vast majority of articles in even the most prestigious are of no interest to non-specialists.  That’s fine for highly specialized journals, aimed at a sub-sub-specialty, but makes no sense for flagship journals of an entire discipline.

Legendary political scientist Samuel P. Huntington died on Christmas Eve, Harvard News reports.

Samuel Huntington, Harvard University's Albert J. Weatherhead University Professor. (Jon Chase/Harvard University)

Huntington had retired from active teaching in 2007, following 58 years of scholarly service at Harvard. In a retirement letter to the President of Harvard, he wrote, in part, “It is difficult for me to imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career than teaching here, particularly teaching undergraduates. I have valued every one of the years since 1949.”

[...]

He was the author, co-author, or editor of 17 books and over 90 scholarly articles. His principal areas of research and teaching were American government, democratization, military politics, strategy, and civil-military relations, comparative politics, and political development.

“Sam was the kind of scholar that made Harvard a great university,” said Huntington’s friend of nearly six decades, economist Henry Rosovsky, who is Harvard’s Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Emeritus. “People all over the world studied and debated his ideas. I believe that he was clearly one of the most influential political scientists of the last 50 years.” “Every one of his books had an impact,” said Rosovsky. “These have all become part of our vocabulary.”

[...]

Huntington’s first book, “The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations,” published to great controversy in 1957 and now in its 15th printing, is today still considered a standard title on the topic of how military affairs intersect with the political realm. It was the subject of a West Point symposium last year, on the 50th anniversary of its publication.

[...]

His 1969 book, “Political Order in Changing Societies,” is widely regarded as a landmark analysis of political and economic development in the Third World. It was among Huntington’s most influential books, and a frequently assigned text for graduate students investigating comparative politics, said Dominguez, who is also Antonio Madero Professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics. The book “challenged the orthodoxies of the 1960s in the field of development,” he said. “Huntington showed that the lack of political order and authority were among the most serious debilities the world over. The degree of order, rather than the form of the political regime, mattered most.”

His 1991 book, “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century” – another highly influential work – won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and “looked at similar questions from a different perspective, namely, that the form of the political regime – democracy or dictatorship – did matter,” said Dominguez. “The metaphor in his title referred to the cascade of dictator-toppling democracy-creating episodes that peopled the world from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s, and he gave persuasive reasons for this turn of events well before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

If there has been a more influential political scientist in the postwar era, his name escapes me. Dan Drezner, who studied under Huntington, observes,

He might have been the most socially awkward political scientist I ever met — not an easy task given my field.  This awkwardness disappeared in his writing, which was fluid, cogent, and usually disconcerting to accepted wisdom.   This is not to say I always agreed with Huntington — I most certainly did not (here’s me not agreeing with him yet again).  But I will miss pushing back at his ideas.  One could always debate Huntington’s hypotheses, but only fools would dismiss them out of hand.

Quite so.  And one supposes social awkwardness is a key reason he was able to be so productive as a scholar for so long, writing at least one truly impactful book every decade of his long career.

UPDATE:  This passage from a 2001 Robert Kaplan profile is amusing:

The book [Soldier and the State] enraged many of Huntington’s colleagues in Harvard’s Department of Government, and the following year the department denied him tenure. With his close friend Zbigniew Brzezinski (whom Harvard also did not promote), Huntington went off to teach at Columbia University.

Harvard is infamous for passing over outstanding junior professors for promotion, forcing them to go elsewhere for tenure.

While I’ve been busy moving my stuff to Texas, Barack Obama has been inadvertently injecting race into the presidential contest with his statement that he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.” While the historically-inclined might have criticized his remark for lumping Alexander Hamilton in with the motley crew of ex-presidents represented among the now-circulating bills, many voters seem to be more concerned that the comment is racist. As Daniel Larison points out, that doesn’t seem to be the right term:

What I find even more remarkable is the idea that anyone could interpret Obama’s comment as being racist. It is now “racist” to hint that others are going to use a candidate’s race against him? Does that make any sense? Do 53% of likely voters really think Obama making an obvious reference to his race (one so obvious that you have to think your audience morons to deny it) is racist? If so, can we officially declare that the word has no more meaning, or at least that for the most part it is trotted out whenever we want to refer to something as Very Bad? Obama’s remark may be many things, but of all the words I can think of to describe it racist is not among them.

Nonetheless, now the oft-maligned “race card” is now in play, and probably to the disadvantage of the Obama campaign. The political science literature on the topic generally indicates that the best strategy for minority candidates attempting to win a sufficient share of the non-minority vote to win is to downplay race and racially-connected issues as much as possible.

Tellingly, the main stumbling blocks so far (Jeremiah Wright, his travails in the Democratic primaries in Appalachia and weak support in the primaries from Hispanic voters in the southwest, and now with the “dollar bill” remark) for Obama have largely been related to race. And while the McCain campaign and RNC will almost certainly be smart enough not to leave their fingerprints on any overt racial fingerpointing that could damage Obama’s support, it’s virtually guaranteed that the 527s and independent groups will have far fewer scruples in that regard.

Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides have collaborated on a paper, still in late draft stages, entitled “Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics.” A PDF of the working copy is available here.

Henry reports that,

[B]log readers seem to exhibit strong homophily. That is to say, they overwhelmingly choose blogs that are written by people who are roughly in accordance with their political views. Left wingers read left wing blogs, right wingers read right wing blogs, and very few people read both left wing and right wing blogs. Those few people who read both left wing and right wing blogs are considerably more likely to be left wing themselves; interpret this as you like. Furthermore, blog readers are politically very polarized. They tend to clump around either the ‘strong liberal’ or the ‘strong conservative’ pole; there aren’t many blog readers in the center. This contrasts with consumers of various TV news channels, as the figure [thumbnailed at right] illustrates. All of this suggests that blog readership is unlikely to be associated with the kinds of deliberative exchange between different points of view that some political theorists would like to see.

Sides adds,

Only 6% of political blog readers named both left and right blogs. Thus, most blog readers are “carnivores” rather than “omnivores”: they like partisan red meat, as it were. This is the self-segregation that the paper discusses.

I’m clearly an outlier, a right-of-center blogger who not only reads from both sides of the aisle but reads predominantly the other side. I suspect this stems from my tendency to read blogs written by academics and journalists, which skews the choices of quality blogs available to me.  Further, I’ve got numerous commenters from the left, right, and center.

That aside, the results don’t much surprise me.  After all, we’re a polarized polity right now, so it stands to reason that we’d see the same in the blogosphere.  Given that the mass media outlets to which blogs are compared in the chart above are ostensibly “neutral” whereas the blogs are openly biased, it’s remarkable how polarized the audiences of the former are.

Further, as I’ve discussed perhaps ad nasuem in posts over the past five plus years, most blogs are frankly unreadable by those not sympathetic to the point of view of the author.  This holds true even when one excludes the 90-plus percent of political blogs that are unreadable, period.   Few people have an appetite for being rudely insulted on a regular basis, having their intelligence, decency and patriotism questioned.

Thomas Schaller,  the author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South, argues that the notion that Barack Obama has a good chance of winning Southern states because he’ll energize black turnout is based on fallacious reasoning.

The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern electorate: In the 11 states of the former Confederacy, African-Americans were 17.9 percent of the age-eligible population and 17.9 percent of actual voters in 2004, analysis of Census Bureau data shows.

And when socioeconomic status is held constant, black voters go to the polls at higher rates than white voters in the South. In other words, a 40-year-old African-American plumber making $60,000 a year is, on average, more likely to vote than a white man of similar background.

My guess is that this is largely a function of the enormous influence of black churches, which do an amazing job of getting their congregations motivated to vote and have an infrastructure in place to get them to the polls.

The second myth is that Democratic presidential candidates fare better in Southern states that have large numbers of African-Americans. In fact, the reverse is true, because the more blacks there are in a Southern state, the more likely the white voters are to vote Republican.

He cites the case of Mississippi, where Bush beat Kerry by 20 points in 2004, and shows that even a massive increase in black turnout would not do the trick unless he could simultaneously get a 50 percent increase of white voters over Kerry.  Ignoring the Bob Barr factor entirely, Schaller contends the same dynamics hold true in Georgia and North Carolina.

The one reasonable target, then, is the Old Dominion, where “a huge influx of upscale non-Southerners, who have taken over the Washington suburbs of northern Virginia” could make him viable.  This, despite the fact that the “black population in Virginia is, as a percentage, among the lowest in the region.”

Stacy McCain agrees wholeheartedly, except to point out that, “this trend applies generally nationwide. Even in Northern states, the larger the black population, the more heavily the white vote tends to shift toward Republicans.”

Jonathan Martin notes that Schaller isn’t telling us anything that V.O. Key didn’t know in 1949, when he told us “departures from the supposed uniformity of southern politics occur most notably in those states with fewest Negroes and in those sections that are predominantly white.”

Dan Riehl, meanwhile, thinks, “There is a very good chance that the media, liberals and Blacks will be expecting to wake up to the first Black POTUS one November morning, only to be shocked by the result. Think of it as the OJ verdict in reverse.”

Rather than taking the lesson that he might as well just give up on the non-Virginia South, though, Obama and his strategists would be served to double down on their efforts to avoid running as “the Great Black Hope.”  If he runs as “the black candidate” and has surrogates constantly charging “racism” every time he is challenged, he’s going to have a hard time making inroads in any state Kerry didn’t win in 2004.  Then again, all he needs is to peel off 18 Electoral Votes.  Virginia, with its 13, wouldn’t do it.  Ohio, with 20, would.  Or Virginia plus Iowa or New Mexico or Colorado.  Or simply Iowa plus New Mexico plus Colorado.

Schaller’s right, then, that Obama can win the presidency without competing in the South.  But campaigning in such a way as to give himself a chance — or make McCain spend money in — the South will likely help himself in those other states as well.

Thus far, he seems to be doing just that, including making a big play for Evangelicals.

Story via memeorandum. Photo credit: The Trail/AP.

David Broder uses Elvin Lm’s book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency to argue not only that presidential speeches have steadily dumbed down over the years, which we might have guessed, but that this dumbs down public policy, too.

In what must have been a heroic effort, he applied standard techniques of content analysis to state papers of every president from Washington to the second Bush. His tool is something called the Flesch readability score — a measure of the average number of words per sentence and the average number of syllables per word. The higher the Flesch score, the simpler to get the meaning.

Applied to the annual State of the Union addresses, the average score has doubled from the first few presidents to the last few. Those “messages were pitched at a college level through most of the 18th and 19th centuries,” Lim says. “They have now come down to an eighth-grade reading level.” The same trend, but more pronounced, is found in inaugural addresses. Their average sentence length has dropped from 60 words to 20.

Simplification has its advantages, if it serves to increase public comprehension. But it comes with a huge risk: The complexity of real-world choices can be, and often is, lost.

[...]

But the problem Lim sees is more than dumbing down. “As presidents have taken the rhetorical path of least resistance by serving up simplistic sentences to citizens, they have correspondingly offered an easily digestible substantive menu devoid of argument and infused with inspirational platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human-interest appeals.”

These trends, too, are charted by Lim. Basically what has happened, he shows, is that rather than seeking to persuade voters by arguing for their policies, presidents increasingly have sought to build trust by identifying themselves with those voters and their “common sense” view of the world. “Whereas all of the presidents through Woodrow Wilson appealed to ‘common sense’ just 11 times in their recorded papers, presidents since Wilson have done so more than 1,600 times,” he writes.

What’s interesting is that the trend started not long before college education would become a normal aspiration for middle class Americans. A far greater percentage of Americans are have university degrees than in Wilson’s day, let alone Washington’s.

One presumes this is just a manifestation of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.” Early presidents were addressing an educated elite who would hear their speeches in person or read them some time later. Wilson’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, was “the first president to have his inauguration heard on the radio and the first president to make a radio broadcast.” Harry Truman was the first to be sworn in on television. Ronald Reagan was the first president to serve exclusively in the CNN era of 24/7 news coverage. It’s quite natural that politicians speaking to the masses will speak differently than those addressing the elite.

Beyond that, our everyday language is simply less formal than it once was. Even very educated people, such as attorneys and professors, who can produce impenetrable writing in their professional capacity, tend to speak and write on a much less “sophisticated” level in normal discourse. Whether this is a function of our having been “dumbed down” by television or some combination of other factors is beyond my expertise.

The broader point about the impact on public policy is interesting. I suspect, however, that it’s more a reflection of the expansion of suffrage, the vast increase in the scope of government and the resultant rise of interest groups, and the fact that the debate is condensed into 14 second sound bytes more so than the informality of presidential language that has led to demagoguery.

Pat Lang is more cynical than I am, which is quite a feat.

“Levelling” has become the Zeitgeist. Actually it has been the goal of many for a long, long time. The numbers in the study mentioned above illustrate that trend over centuries. “Elitist” has become a term of absolute condemnation. The downward drift in general education is now undeniable. College audiences are now so poorly informed about general culture that even the simplest references to popular literature, film, etc. are greeted by blank stares. Many audiences at college lectures are difficult to talk to because everything one says is “news to them.”

[...]

Today, outside the elites of a few universities, we have little in the way of intellectual life in this country. We also have little in the way of political life. NBC’s Political Director just referred on MTP to the “Republican Brand.” My. My. Marketing rules.

Again, television is partly to blame, as generations of us have been trained to passively absorb information rather than grapple with it in text form. But much of this is overstated. Yes, the average college student is less intellectual than his 1940’s predecessor. Mostly, though, that’s because so many more people are going to college. So, yes, this is a function of “leveling” but not in a sense of aspiring to the lowest common denominator.

Also, the proliferation of choices has destroyed the concept of “general culture.” Once upon a time, everyone read the same books, watched the same movies, and saw the same television shows. With 300 channels and Netflix, that’s largely gone.

Reggie Love was a standout wide receiver and basketball player at Duke that the Dallas Cowboys, for some odd reason, unsuccessfully tried to turn into a pro linebacker. Love was occasionally flat on his back in his college days. He’s landed on his feet, working as the body man for the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

Ashley Parker has an interesting feature story on Love and his relationship with Barack Obama in today’s NYT.

Mr. Love now knows that when it comes to food, Senator Obama “eats pretty much anything, from chicken wings and barbecue and ribs to grilled fish and steamed broccoli.” But when he is campaigning in a small town with limited options, a cheeseburger is always a good bet. (“Cheddar is the cheese of choice,” Mr. Love added.) He knows that “the boss,” as he calls Mr. Obama, likes MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea. He keeps a supply of both on hand.

Except for the cheeseburger, those are some very elitist eating habits.

And he has learned that all campaigns have their superstitions — Senator John McCain has a penchant for heads-up coins — and that Mr. Obama is no exception. That means that Mr. Love and Mr. Obama, for luck, play basketball every primary day.

Mr. Love, 26, is Mr. Obama’s body man, the personal aide who shadows the senator and anticipates everything he needs — and everything he does not need. He is not a bodyguard (security is provided by the Secret Service), but rather the ultimate assistant, rarely more than a body length away from the candidate.

One wonders how this will go over with white working class voters?

Young, eager campaign aides are stock characters in movies and on television, but few have quite the élan of Mr. Love, who, at 6-foot-5, is about three inches taller than the tall candidate, fitter than the fit candidate (he can bench press more than 350 pounds) and cooler than the cool candidate. “There’s no doubt that Reggie is cooler than I am,” Mr. Obama said, laughing, in a phone interview. “I am living vicariously through Reggie.”

But Hillary Clinton is cooler than Reggie. Much cooler. Which is why she should be the nominee.

What a body man does depends on the politician. Senator John Kerry’s aide for his presidential race in 2004 was dubbed “part butler, part buddy.” Bill Clinton’s aide when he was president said their relationship sometimes felt more like that of an old married couple. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has a body woman, the efficient and glamorous Huma Abedin. On NBC’s “The West Wing,” President Josiah Bartlet treated his body man, Charlie Young, like a son.

Mr. Obama said he regarded “my guy, Reggie,” as the kid brother he never had. “But maybe I’m saying that just because he technically could be my son,” the Illinois senator said. “I don’t want to admit my age.”

Mr. Love said he had been hired with “no job description whatsoever.” “It was just like, ‘You just go out there and — Take. Care. Of. Stuff,’ ” Mr. Love said, taking his time with each word. Some of the “stuff” Mr. Love takes care of: When Mr. Obama makes calls to woo superdelegates, Mr. Love is at his side with a briefing book, dialing the numbers. When an outdoor speech ended on a windy day in Noblesville, Ind., he appeared behind Mr. Obama as he shook hands on the rope line. “Jacket?” he asked, a coat draped at the ready over his arm.

When Mr. Obama dropped food on his tie while eating in the car between stops, Mr. Love was ready with a Tide pen. He always carries one, along with ballpoint pens, and has turned himself into a walking dispensary of Sharpies, stationery, protein bars, throat lozenges, water, tea, Advil, Tylenol, Purell and emergency Nicorette, not to mention his ever-present iPhone, BlackBerry and Canon Rebel XT digital camera. (Mr. Love keeps a photo journal of the campaign, and has more than 10,000 pictures so far.)

Compared with the even-tempered and self-controlled Mr. Obama, Mr. Love is raffish, always joking with the Secret Service, offering closed-fist high-fives to members of the news media and making frequent appearances in the daily pool reports. At a V.F.W. hall in Indiana, he helped out when the senator did not want a second Budweiser, taking it off Mr. Obama’s hands.

Somehow, that’s not surprising.

When Mr. Obama hits a rough patch in the campaign, Mr. Love is sympathetic. In college, embarrassing pictures of an inebriated Mr. Love from a fraternity house party surfaced on the Internet. “You make mistakes and you learn from them, and you try to use them to make you a better person,” he said. After graduating with a degree in political science and public policy, Mr. Love had summer try-outs with the Green Bay Packers in 2004 and the Dallas Cowboys in 2005 before being cut.

Which is how, in 2006, after applying for an internship on Capitol Hill, Mr. Love ended up interviewing with Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s communications director, for a position in Mr. Obama’s Senate office. “It’s the only time I’ve ever interviewed somebody whose work experience included the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Indeed. It sounds like a good fit. In some ways, it’s strange to go from star athlete at a prestigious university to 26-year-old gopher. But the job’s really about a lot more than that. It’s a stressful, high pressure gig and the spotlight of college athletics is as good a preparation as any.

Washington University in St. Louis’ awarding of an honorary doctorate to Phyllis Schlafly was met by protest from several students, faculty members, and invited guests.

Margaret Bush Wilson, a retired civil rights attorney, volunteered to introduce Schlafly as faculty and students were calling on the university to rescind the degree. Wilson said after the ceremony that while she does not agree with many of Schlafly’s views, she is a strong advocate of free speech. “Vigorous, free-flowing debate is the cornerstone of our American life,” Wilson said at today’s ceremony. One of this country’s great virtues is that people don’t have to agree with one another, she added.

“It is Phyllis Schlafly’s persona — not her politics or views — which is being recognized here today,” she said. Wilson noted that Schlafly is a national leader of the conservative movement, author of more than 20 books, a fearless debater, and twice a graduate of Washington U.

Some applauded while Schlafly was hooded. But about a third of the graduating students draped in the school’s green and black robes turned their backs to her, along with some faculty members sitting on the stage behind her. Many family members in the audience also took part. Three faculty members made the extra point of walking off the stage and then turning their backs from the audience.

One of the protesters was Darla Dale, an assistant dean and a faculty marshal at the ceremony. Dale said she decided to participate after making sure the protest was intended to remain respectful. Dale said she strongly disagrees with Schlafly’s views on the role of women in society as well as with her work to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. And students encouraged her to join them. “It felt good,” Dale said of turning her back.

Marshall Thompson, a Ph.D. graduate in political science, said he thought the white armbands should have sufficed for protesters to show their dissent. But he thought the turning of backs was “a bit overboard.” “It’s not the right way to voice your displeasure,” he said.

Despite the protest, Schlafly said afterwards that she was touched by the university’s decision to grant her the degree. “It’s the highest honor a university can give to anyone,” she said. As for her detractors, she said, “I’m not sure they’re mature enough to graduate.”

Indeed.

Schlafly was an honored guest of the university and should have been treated as such. She was chosen to receive an honorary doctorate by a committee — one that included student representatives — set up to make those decisions.

Graduation ceremonies should be occasions of quiet dignity, not childish stunts. They are also, however, supposed to be a time to honor the accomplishments of the graduates and to serve as a rite of passage into the next phase of their life. Choosing that moment to present an award to a controversial figure is inappropriate, too.

Schlafly is undeniably accomplished but it was quite predictable that this presentation would generate widespread opposition. She was on the losing side of a long, divisive cultural battle and her ideas now seem strangely out of touch with today’s society and, certainly, a modern university. She’s a distinguished alumna of the school, to be sure, but its leaders chose a poor time to honor her.

A new study finds that, while college professors are overwhelmingly liberal, that fact does not have much impact on the politics of their students.

A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and says that it’s true that the professoriate leans left. But the study — notably by one Republican professor and one Democratic professor — finds no evidence of indoctrination. Despite students being educated by liberal professors, their politics change only marginally in their undergraduate years, and that deflates the idea that cadres of tenured radicals are somehow corrupting America’s youth — or scaring them into adopting new political views.

The study’s authors — Gordon Hewitt of Hamilton College and Mack Mariani of Xavier University, in Ohio — write that they believe too much time has been spent debating the proper methodologies for testing whether there is a political imbalance on college faculties. If the danger of such an imbalance is that it is hurting students, the key question is whether the imbalance leads to an otherwise unexplainable shift in student political attitudes.

[...]

The scholars find some self-selection, with students who enter college as conservative slightly more likely to be found at relatively conservative institutions, and so forth. But over all, they found only slight shifts in political leanings (albeit to the left) during the students’ four years. The analysis also found explanations other than faculty ideology — gender and wealth, for example — that correlate with the modest political shifts that took place. Whether the students attended a college that was more liberal or conservative did not correlate with the shift — which it would have had liberal professors been engaged in indoctrination, the authors write.

Even with the slight shift to the left of students, the authors write, college students graduate with a smaller share of people identifying as “far left” than does the 18-24 year old cohort of the U.S. population.

This finding comports with my own experience, both as a student and as a professor. Even attending a state school in the Deep South, my political science and history professors were predominantly (but not exclusively) liberal. But debating them tended to reinforce my conservative leanings. Years later, teaching political science courses to predominantly conservative students, I oftentimes found myself taking a Devil’s Advocate stance simply to force them to challenge their own preconceptions. (Which, on reflection, made me wonder if my own profs hadn’t done the same thing.)

Another thing to keep in mind is that politics simply is a non-factor in most college courses. Even now, when I imagine campus politics, like that in the country as a whole, is more polarized than at any time since the Vietnam era, there’s likely not much political talk in the math, science, engineering, and foreign languages courses.

A funny thing, though. Look at the actual results published in the study:

The changes here strike me as more than “slight shifts.” The number of students self-identifying as “far left” more than doubles while the “far right” cohort drops nearly a third. There’s a ten percent drop in conservatives and a 25 percent jump in liberals. That’s hardly insignificant.

The report above claims that the researchers “found explanations other than faculty ideology — gender and wealth, for example” to explains these shifts. Without seeing the statistical analysis, I can’t evaluate that claim except to say that it’s implausible. Presumably, after all, the cohort’s gender remained relatively constant. And students tend not to have significant changes in their financial status during their college years.

It is, though, interesting that there are significantly more self-identified “far left” and “far right” ideologues in the non-college sample. Whether this reflects self-selection (perhaps extremists are less likely to want a college education), the ameliorating effects of college (exposure to analytical techniques and opposing viewpoints tends to blur black-and-white thinking), caution (educated people are more likely to want to appear reasonable) or some other factor would be worth examining.

Image: Huhboy via Google

Ronald Kessler reported in a Sunday evening column for Newsmax that Barack Obama attended a controversial Jeremiah Wright sermon.

The Obama campaign has told members of the press that Senator Obama was not in church on the day cited, July 22, because he had a speech he gave in Miami at 1:30 PM. Our writer, Jim Davis, says he attended several services at Senator Obama’s church during the month of July, including July 22. The church holds services three times every Sunday at 7:30 and 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Central time. While both the early morning and evening service allowed Sen. Obama to attend the service and still give a speech in Miami, Mr. Davis stands by his story that during one of the services he attended during the month of July, Senator Obama was present and sat through the sermon given by Rev. Wright as described in the story. Mr. Davis said Secret Service were also present in the church during Senator Obama’s attendance. Mr. Davis’ story was first published on Newsmax on August 9, 2007. Shortly before publication, Mr. Davis contacted the press office of Sen. Obama several times for comment about the Senator’s attendance and Rev. Wright’s comments during his sermon. The Senator’s office declined to comment.

It turns out that Obama was on his way to Miami that morning. So, Kessler’s source was either feeding him a bald faced lie that would soon be discovered or was simply confused on the dates. Perhaps Wright said something similar on July 15 or July 29?

At any rate, Bill Kristol seized upon this example for a column filed, presumably, a couple of hours later and published in this morning’s NYT.

Ronald Kessler, a journalist who has written about Wright’s ministry, claims that Obama was in fact in the pews at Trinity last July 22. That’s when Wright blamed the “arrogance” of the “United States of White America” for much of the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks. In any case, given the apparent frequency of such statements in Wright’s preaching and their centrality to his worldview, the pretense that over all these years Obama had no idea that Wright was saying such things is hard to sustain.

Marc Ambinder quickly discovered the discrepancy and Matt Yglesias, John Cole, Hilzoy, Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall, Steve Benen, and others quickly jumped on this to demonstrate that Kristol is a lousy journalist and that the NYT should be ashamed for having him on their roster.

Isn’t this criticism misplaced? Kristol didn’t make up a fact; he cites the “claims” of a fellow journalist. Do journalists — especially opinion columnists — routinely fact check reports made by other journalists, especially if they trust said journalist’s reputation? Especially given a tight deadline? (Now, Brendan Nyhan has a point about whether one should cite Newsmax as an authoritative source. But I don’t know Kessler’s work that well and he could be an exception.*)

Kristol was using a late-breaking “fact” to buttress a conclusion that’s blindingly obvious. Of course Obama knew the type of rhetoric Wright was spouting. I seem to be in a decided minority in not being particularly excited about that fact but it’s simply inconceivable that Obama attended the man’s church for two decades and had no clue that he spouted paranoid, anti-White Establishment rhetoric on a regular basis. Obama’s denials on this score are positively Clintonian. If ever there were a case of the cover-up being worse than the crime, this is it.

Several of those above observe that, despite Ambinder’s post coming out at 7:15 this morning, the Times hadn’t bothered to correct it several hours later. As of noon Eastern, it still hasn’t. But speedy correction of factual errors is a blog thing, not an MSM thing. And that’s doubly true of opinion pieces.

*UPDATE: He would appear to be. While I won’t vouch for his work at Newsmax, he has had a distinguished career. According to his WikiPedia entry,

Kessler has won sixteen journalism awards, including:

* Two George Polk Awards, one for national reporting and one for community service.
* The Sigma Delta Chi Award for business and financial reporting given by the Society of Professional Journalists.
* The Public Affairs Reporting Award from the American Political Science Association
* The Sevellon Brown Memorial Award from the Associated Press.
* The Washingtonian of the Year award from Washingtonian magazine.

This guy doesn’t sound like a hack whose every word should be doubted.

Dennis Prager, who apparently hasn’t been on a college campus in a few decades, compiles a handy dandy list of questions to ask in selecting a college for your kids.

1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible?

If so, why attend such a college?

I’ve attended and/or taught at a total of seven institutions of higher learning. All, except for the United States Military Academy, were state schools in the Southeast. None of them required Bible reading. Nor, come to think of it, was it absolutely certain that you’d be required to read Shakespeare or a Federalist Paper.

Why on earth would reading a book of the Bible be required as part of a university education? An understanding of the role of religion in history, sure. Learning about the centuries-long struggle to define the proper roles of church and state, absolutely. Knowing how the 10 Commandments fit into the evolution of our legal system would certainly come into play. But college isn’t Sunday School.

I read plenty of Shakespeare in both college and high school and have seen several of his plays performed since. But most universities that I was associated with allow B.A. students to chose between two semesters of either American or British Literature. Those choosing the former, obviously, could escape forced exposure to the Bard.

I’ve got three degrees in political science and have read and taught both the Federalist and the Anti-Federalist Papers. I honestly don’t remember, though, whether, say, Federalist 10 was part of the core curriculum when I was an undergrad. Nor, really, is it immediately obvious why it should be.

In many of the schools I was associated with, a political science class was not absolutely mandated; it was merely one of several social sciences/humanities offerings from which students had to pick several courses. An American National Government survey course was a requirement for certain students at Troy State when I taught there and both Steven Taylor and I required some selections from the Federalist Papers. I’m not entirely sure we would have been remiss, though, had we just taught the principles and eschewed the primary source reading. We didn’t, for example, require reading Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws even though we taught about checks and balances.

The rest of Prager’s list is equally misguided. He asks such questions as, “In the political science, English, sociology, anthropology and history departments — or any other liberal arts department — what is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the professors?” Or, “What are the names of the speakers invited and paid with college funds to speak last year at the college?” Or, most hilariously, “Can my child live in a same-sex dorm and are the bathrooms co-ed?”

The list’s core flaw is that it begins with the common — and yet obviously absurd — premise that decent, hardworking folks send their kids off to college only to have their values assaulted by hippie, dope smoking, Communist professors who hate America.

Not only is that not the case but it wouldn’t matter if it were.

Yes, the professoriate is, on average, less religious and more likely to vote Democrat than the median American. But there’s plenty of diversity on campus. At most institutions, there are plenty of professors who vote Republican, go to church, and enjoy the company of the opposite sex. With rare exception, professors simply teach their subject matter without any interest in converting students to their worldview.

Moreover, most of us survive college with our values intact. Most conservative intellectuals, business leaders, and even preachers managed to spend four years with liberal college professors and still learn learn something. If anything, they come away with a better understanding of their own position after being exposed to other ways of thinking. Hell, that’s what college is supposed to be about.

Frankly, if you want your kids to be steeped in the Bible, I wouldn’t advise waiting until sending them off to college. It’s a little late at that point.

Instead of Prager’s questions, parents would be better served to ask things like:

• What is the ratio of required courses taught by full-time professors rather than graduate students or adjuncts?

• How strongly is the Writing Across the Curriculum program integrated into the institution’s philosophy?

• Are courses in statistics and logical analysis required or at least available?

Mostly, though, a college education is what the students make of it. Parents need to make sure their kids are intellectually, emotionally, and socially ready for higher education and should guide them to choosing schools that will fit their personalities. Not everyone will thrive on a large campus, for example.

Via Leonard Pierce, who fisks some other portions from the left flank.

Images: AllPosters and College Candy via Google