Posts by Michael Nelson
August 4, 2008, 05:47 AM ET
Two Princes
Like my fellow Brainstorm bloggers, I write in a wide range of genres: articles for disciplinary journals and popular magazines, books for university presses and college undergraduates, dispassionate analyses and calls to arms. My range of subjects is also wide: the American presidency, the politics of gambling, the music of Frank Sinatra, the life and works of C.S. Lewis, the literature of college sports, and so on.
What I can’t write is fiction. I probably read more fiction than anything else, and I am in awe of people who write it well. Richard Russo, Richard Price, P.D. James, and Tom Wolfe: you are my heroes.
And so I offer up two stories — both of them political, both of them true — that I wish I had the talent to recast as short stories, with all the nuance and insight that good fiction affords. (Calling Ward Just, who, starting with his 1973 story collection The Congressman ...
Read MoreJuly 30, 2008, 08:30 AM ET
Why the Wannabe Next Governor of Arkansas Hates Me
Bill Halter is the latest in a line of Rhodes-Scholars-named-Bill-turned-talented-Arkansas-Democratic-politicians (think Clinton and Fulbright). Halter tried to run for governor in 2006, got nowhere, downshifted to run for lieutenant governor that year, won, and by all accounts is biding his time until the governorship opens up again. The issue Halter has been riding from the start — it’s on the ballot this November as a result of his efforts — is his proposal for a state lottery.
Less than 50 years ago, no state owned and operated a lottery; today, 43 states do. Not surprisingly, the South was the slowest region of the country to embrace lottery gambling, but eight of the 11 Southern states now have one. The winning formula for Southern lotteries was set by Zell Miller when he ran for governor of Georgia in 1990: promise to use the proceeds of the lottery to fund college...
Read MoreJuly 28, 2008, 08:39 AM ET
Should Obama Be Worried?
(Crossposted at Campaign U.)
These are halcyon days for Barack Obama, right? A successful trip to Europe and the Middle East. A steady 5-point lead in the polls. An opponent who can’t seem to get his campaign in gear.
Having spent the morning crunching — that is, adding, dividing, listing, typing, and checking — a wearying array of political numbers, I’m not so sure.
My purpose was to find out what I could learn by compiling a list of all the states ranked according to how much support they gave to the Democratic presidential nominees in 2000 and 2004. Scroll down a few clicks, poke around the data to see what catches your eye (isn’t it amazing, for instance, that Vermont, one of only two states that Alf Landon carried against FDR in 1936, is now the Democrats’ fifth best state?), then scroll back up and see if you agree with the two observations that follow.
1. A good number...
Read MoreJuly 24, 2008, 01:41 PM ET
VP Watcher, Part II
When it comes to vice presidential nominations, the scholars, journalists, and politicians who know and care the most about the subject know something else as well: namely, that people vote for president and not vice president. This latter knowledge is inconvenient. If it doesn’t really matter who the nominees for vice president are, then how can we justify all the time we spend obsessing over who John McCain and Barack Obama will choose as their running mates ?
I recently spoke to this question at a wonderful gathering of political consultants, reporters, and election scholars organized by the indefatigable John Geer at Vanderbilt University. The same iconoclasm that animated John’s prize-winning book, In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago, 2006) spurred in him the original thought that these folks actually had something to learn from each other....
Read MoreJuly 23, 2008, 09:42 AM ET
VP Watcher, Part I
Publish several books in a densely populated field like the American presidency and you still may end up way down the list of go-to scholars for quote-seeking national political reporters.
Publish one book about the vice presidency, and your phone is almost guaranteed to ring off the hook at least four times every fourth year.
I know because for the last 20 years I’ve been there, done that. In 1987 the Century Foundation (then called the Twentieth Century Fund) asked me to write a short book in conjunction with a task force it had formed to make recommendations about the vice presidency. The task force had been created at the initiative of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was promoting the idea of abolishing the office and saw the task force as a way of gaining some luster for his proposal.
Unhappily for Schlesinger, my book, A Heartbeat Away, ended up arguing that the vice...
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