Not Your Run-of-the-Mill House Candidate

You may remember that a burly protester interrupted the start of John McCain's acceptance speech in 2008. The protester, Iraq veteran Adam Kokesh, is now the front-runner for a GOP congressional nomination. See a profile here. (Declaration of interest: Adam was my student.)

Textbook Costs

Via Matt Yglesias, here's John Holbo on the high cost of academic books:

I hereby declare – for the benefit of anyone at Oxford UP who might be reading – that I was going to require my (probably 50-or-so) students next semester to buy your serviceable little paperback volumes: Woolhouse’s The Empiricists and Cottingham’s The Rationalists. I assigned them when I last taught History of Modern Philosophy, a few years back; and it worked out fine. But now that I see they cost $45 each, for a lousy sub-200 page, 7” x 5” paperback and pretty cheap paper. What’s that about? Do I really want my students to hate me? (Do I want to hate myself?) I am quite sure they were not this pricey a few years back. There is such a thing as charging too much, given that these books are not actually so good that they cause one’s head to explode with insight into the history of modern philosophy. So I am going to put these particular books on reserve in the library, and recommend them to my students as resources, but I am re-doing my syllabus in protest at absurd pricing. So there. Oxford UP has lost a course adoption – the holy grail of textbook publishing. Let that be a lesson to you.

Let me second his complaint with my own recent experience. Next semester I'll be teaching political parties and elections for the first time in nearly five years. I usually begin the course with Anthony Downs's, An Economic Theory of Democracy, a political science classic. Yet Pearson Publishing wants $86.67 for the book. Amazon is offering it for about $60, but that's still way too expensive for a paperback. Plus, it shows that that Pearson is already marking it up by $25 or 40% for those, like college bookstores, who buy directly from them. The book has been in print since 1957, so I'm assuming that Pearson has made its money back and then some decades ago. I strongly doubt that Pearson needs to charge $60, let alone $86, to cover printing costs along with a reasonable profit. As with Holbo, I can't in good conscience require my students to pay this much for just one book.

Danger! Beware of Falling Names

Eric Alterman shows new levels of humility:

I took a seminar at Yale in 1985 when I was getting my master's with Edward Said on the role of the intellectual. Everyone in the class wore black and quoted Derrida (with whom I also took a seminar, in French, of which I understood very little). Anyway, there was a rather imposing African-American fellow at the seminar table on the first day with a vest and tie, etc., and a big afro. He said nothing for the two-hour class and then at the end, was called and ripped into Said with every three-dollar word I had ever heard and many more I had not. It was like a fantasy come true--going back to school to show off how smart you were now; perhaps the coolest moment I've ever seen in a classroom. Then Said said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Cornel West," who apparently was an assistant professor in the Divinity School, letting the rest of us in on the joke. The amazingest thing about Cornel is what an original he is; there's never been anything like him: "Gramsci and Sly Stone both understood..."

California Politics

The Rose Institute offers a good overview of California congressional races. The post nicely summarizes the statewide setting following the withdrawal of Gavin Newsom from the gubernatorial race last week:

Jerry Brown will likely be the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee, and incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer will be the nominee for Senate. While both Brown and Boxer may run strong campaigns, neither one will create the excitement that Obama created in 2008 that helped Democrat congressional candidates down the ballot. Republican incumbents who had close elections in 2008 because of Obama will likely face a more favorable climate in 2010.

In a forthcoming issue of The Forum, I have a review of Seth Masket's excellent No Middle Ground: How Information Party Organizations Control Nominations and Polarize Legislatures. A recent article in The Sacramento Bee tends to confirm Masket's analysis:

On average, individual Democrats in the California Legislature voted with the majority of their party or abstained 99 times out of 100 this session. Republicans, on average, voted with the majority of their party or abstained 96 out of every 100 times. "California is by far the most polarized state legislature" in the nation, said professor Boris Shor, with the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies, who recently published a study on the ideological composition of legislatures. "California makes the U.S. Congress look like tiddlywinks."

An analysis in the Los Angeles Times describes the geography of state polarization:

There is a yawning gulf between the left-leaning coastal regions that feed California's stereotype and the right-leaning inland areas that seem firmly planted in Middle America rather than the land of the Beach Boys.

Demographically, the poll demonstrated, the two populations are distinct.

Inland voters are far more likely to be religious. Almost half were Protestant -- a reflection of the strong evangelical movement -- though that was true of only three in 10 coastal voters. Church attendance, which political analysts see as a key indicator of political behavior -- the more often one attends services, the more reliably conservative the vote -- was also different. In inland areas, almost four in 10 voters said they went to services at least once a week, while three in 10 coastal voters made that claim.

Inland voters were older, more conservative and more likely to be married and white than coastal voters. Interestingly, location seemed at times to trump race or gender. Latino voters who live in the area espoused more conservative views than their coastal brethren. Two-thirds of coastal Latinos were registered Democrats; fewer than half of inland Latinos were. One third of coastal Latinos described themselves as "liberal," twice the proportion of inland Latinos.

President Obama Should Refuse the Nobel Prize

Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is likely to be more of a headache to President Obama than an honor. It reinforces the perception, held among many, that he is philosophically more European than American. And it's not hard to imagine the reaction should he decide to increase troop levels in Afghanistan - "Some advocate for peace!"

As a result, President Obama should refuse the Nobel Peace Prize. He should simply say, "I am honored and humbled by the decision of the Nobel Committee. But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of others who are far more deserving than I am." By doing so, he would reap the benefits (in terms of world opinion) of having been chosen for the award, but stymie critics by acting honorably and with humility and grace.

The Scots-Irish

An excellent analysis of the Scots-Irish vote by Cameron Joseph at The Atlantic:

The populist fury aimed at President Obama and his fellow Democrats may have roots much deeper than health care. In fact, it may be that it can be traced back to the emigration of the Scots-Irish, the first white group to settle interior America.They've been called rednecks, hillbillies and crackers. In the modern parlance of political correctness, they've been referred to as the Bubba vote. They live in Sarah Palin's "real America," and they make up the majority of Reagan Democrats. They count as distant relatives at least twelve U.S. presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and even to Barack Obama, yet the Scots-Irish remain largely ignored as an ethnic group in America.

A Bleg on Technology and Teaching

I'm giving a talk at APSA about the classroom use of Internet resouces, including social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You are all cordially invited:

http://www.signup4.net/Public/ap.aspx?EID=MORT69E

Right now I would be grateful for any thoughts on how you use the Internet. What are your favorite sites? What online interactive resources do you find most helpful? How do you teach students the research uses of the Internet?

Gallup on Ideology

Cross-posted from Epic Journey:

New Gallup data suggest that it is an oversimplification to speak of a rightward or leftward shift in public opinion:

Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven't changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left.

...

Given the stark differences between the current political scene and the one surrounding the 2004 elections, 2004 represents a good comparison point for this analysis. Not only was there a five-point drop between 2004 and 2008 (from 51% to 46%) in the popular vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but there has been a similar drop (from 45% in 2004 to 40% in 2008 and 39% in 2009) in the percentage affiliating themselves with the Republican Party.

Have Americans' positions on major cultural, social, and policy issues shifted left accordingly? A broad review of the available trends suggests not. However, they have not shifted solidly right either, countering Americans' claims in the new poll that they have grown more conservative.