Today is Opening Day for me. Counting occasional summer sessions, it’s about my 70th first day of class as a college professor. I still get excited, still get nervous. I don’t play competitive sports anymore, but I feel the same pregame sensation of needing both to drink and to pass water.

What do I hope to accomplish today in each of my classes?

First and foremost, I want to get my students excited about the subject we are about to spend four months studying together. That means I need to show them that I’m excited about it. Serene offhandedness and critical detachment—stances that we academics often adopt when talking about teaching with each other—ain’t gonna cut it with a group of undergraduates. If you’re not excited about what you’re teaching, what are the odds that they’re going to be?

Second, I want my students to know what to expect from me this semester—that is, why...

A conventional wisdom is forming to the effect that if Barack Obama loses the presidential election in November, white racism will be the cause. The reasoning runs as follows: The combination of economic anxiety, the unpopular war in Iraq, George W. Bush’s low approval ratings, and the public’s overwhelming sense that the United States is on the “wrong track” means that the deck is stacked this year in favor of the Democrats. So if the Democratic nominee for president loses, it must be for some shady reason. Add to that a recent New York Times poll showing that although only 5 percent of voters say they would not vote for an African-American candidate for president, 24 percent say they don’t think the country is ready to elect one.

The truth is more complicated. In good times and bad, Democrats tend to lose presidential elections: Since 1968, they have lost 7 of 10, four of them by...

Barack Obama’s selection of Joseph Biden for vice president (predicted in this space before — admittedly just minutes before — it became the conventional wisdom in Washington) makes it all but inevitable that John McCain will choose Mitt Romney as his running mate. I have been picking Romney all along, but now I’m willing to bet on it.

Why does Biden’s presence on the Democratic ticket seal the deal for Romney? One word (or is it two?): Counter-programming.

1. Obama, McCain, Biden — they’re all sitting senators. None has ever been a governor, which has been the prime talent pool for presidents for more than 30 years because governors get to make the politically appealing argument that they’ve been too busy solving problems as chief executives of their states to get caught up in the “mess in Washington.’ Romney was a governor.

2. Obama chose Biden because he’s strong where Obama is...

Michael Kinsley once offered what is surely the most famous axiom of gaffology: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head.”

Here’s another: The political cost of two gaffes on one subject in five days is huge, especially when compounded by a political convention opening in another five days and offering four nights of oratory to an audience of tens of millions.

Last Saturday night, at Saddleback Church, pastor Rick Warren asked John McCain to “define rich.” McCain’s convoluted response included this sentence: “I think, if you are just talking about income, how about $5 million?”

Five days later, in an interview with politico.com, McCain was asked how many houses he and his wife own. His answer: “I think — I’ll have my staff get to you. It’s condominiums where...

My first two posts on this blog — VP Watcher, Part I and VP Watcher, Part II — are now nearly a month old. In both of them I strove for depth, objectivity, and wit, but at this point all I care about is getting my bet down. It’s the same dysfunctional rush I feel during the last few minutes of bidding on an item at eBay, only in this case I won’t be spending money I can’t afford just for the sake of trying to win.

Here’s my final prediction (which I hope readers will not notice is different from my initial prediction): Obama will name his running mate on Friday, and it will be Sen. Joseph Biden.

Why Friday? Because it’s three days before the convention: enough time to launch the ticket with suitable fanfare but close enough to the first day of business to distract the media from what otherwise would be a weekend of speculation about how well or badly the Clintons will behave in...

One of contemporary politics’ more annoying tropes is the frequent claim of candidates that they will “fight” for this or that group of voters or this or that cause. Use the word fight in an ordinary sentence and we all know what you mean: violent action. It may be fists, as in “Friday Night Fights”; it may be fists, knees, and elbows, as in ultimate fighting; or it may be bullets, as in a gunfight or firefight. But in no sense does “fight” bring to mind what what politicians do—talk, talk, talk, then talk some more.

Hillary Clinton, like her husband, was especially bad about this—google “Clinton I will fight” and stand back. Indeed, fight talk is a particular malady of Democratic politicians, whose consultants tell them they have more to prove in voters’ minds about their toughness.

But it was a Republican, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who took misuse of the word beyond...

(Crossposted at Campaign U.)

Mainstream political commentators have reacted to Hillary Clinton’s decision to have a roll-call vote at the Democratic convention as if it were a slap in Barack Obama’s face. I don’t get it: Why wouldn’t there be a roll-call vote? Well over a thousand delegates were elected in state presidential primaries and caucuses for the precise purpose of voting for Clinton in Denver. For them not to be allowed to do so — now, that would be news worth commenting on.

Mainstream commentators are also portraying the Clintons’s prime-time speaking slots as insults to Obama. But since when is the runner-up in the presidential nominating contest — not to mention the party’s only two-term president since FDR — not entitled to a prominent place on the program?

(Crossposted at Campaign U.)

It was just a hunch but it panned out. Earlier this year, when both major parties’ nominations were still in doubt, I asked the roughly 40 students in the class I was teaching on the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University how many of them were for Obama. A strong majority raised their hands. “Those of you with your hand up,” I asked: “Who’s your second choice?” By a smaller but still clear majority, the Obama supporters said, “McCain.”

Every election establishes a polarity that’s wider than the reality. That’s because once the two major party nominees are chosen, they instantly constitute the entire range of candidates from which the next president will be chosen. Everyone — the candidates themselves, their campaign advisers, their grassroots activists, party leaders, the news media, and,...

It’s 85 suspenseful days to the November election, but only 11 days until the election that generates an even greater mix of hope, anxiety, joy, and despair in higher ed circles. The first election is for president of the United States. The second, according to the U.S. News & World Report Web site, is a week from Friday. It’s the election in which U.S. News will announce which schools have made its Top 50 for 2009 in the categories of national universities and liberal-arts colleges.

The stakes are high, which explains the nail biting. Despite the rankings’ well-established imperfections, high school seniors and college counselors take them seriously (fair payback, I suppose, for our taking standardized test scores so seriously.) Climb into the Top 50, or rise within it, and it stands to reason that the quality of your college’s applicant pool will rise as well. Fall down or — God for...

Okay, so is Swing Vote, the new father-daughter- Republican-Democrat-kinda-Capra-kinda-Recount political comedy starring Kevin Costner “one of the most surprising, politically suggestive movies to come out of Hollywood this year” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times) or is it “a formless, pastry blob of a movie … a satire with dentures” (Dana Stevens, Slate)? Or did Laura Yao get it right in the Washington Post: “The film’s not nearly as idiotic as its trailer made it seem.”

Nearly 40 years ago, soon after the 1968 election, Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg published The Real Majority, an advice book for Democrats whose premise was that the swing voter who decides presidential elections is “a 47-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband is a machinist.”

Swing Vote takes this approach to its illogical extreme. As a result of plot machinations too...