Confronting windbags is an occupational hazard for a journalist in the nation’s capital. They come in all shapes and forms and include politicians, bureaucrats, special interest group officials and, yes, journalists.
Last week raised the esoteric, perhaps timeless, question of whether there is a significant difference between a windbag and a pointy-head.
This philosophical quandary was unavoidable for anyone sauntering through the annual meeting here of the 14,000-member American Political Science Association, an intense four-day intellectual bacchanal featuring more than 800 separate sessions and many desperate young doctoral students looking for work.
This job market tends to be so tight that if a tenured professor in Arizona gets a hernia, a kid working on his Ph.D in Vermont will know within 24 hours and quickly send his resume.
It’s a pretty humorless scene. Indeed, the only veiled hint of romance I overheard was when one balding Georgia academic told an old chum: “My usual roommate plan didn’t work out. Her boss wanted her to be in a room with somebody from his shop to save money.”
The sessions were spread over three hotels and ranged from lofty musings on very dead great thinkers to the disclosure that Vice President Al Gore has already won the presidential election.
Yes, Gore has won.
This year’s 376-page program featured a picture of Honest Abe Lincoln on the cover and the theme “Political Science as Discipline? Reconsidering Power, Choice, and the State at Century’s End.”
Skimming it as I watched a baseball game on ESPN late one evening stirred me with anticipation. There was the prospect of attending seminars such as “Alliances and Conflict: Shields or Handcuffs?” or of reading the following treatises being presented by individual academics:
“An Invincible Disgust to the Body of the People: Expectation, Emotion, and Interest in Bentham’s Indirect Legislation”–Stephen G. Englemann, University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Identifying the Europeanization and Regionalism Interface: The Meanings of Territorial Identities in Scotland and Wales”–Robert P. Haesly, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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“Elizabeth Dole for VP? Voters’ Gender Gap and Republican Women Candidates”–Craig Leonard Brians, Virginia Tech.
“The `Other White Meat’? Pork Projects and Racial Redistricting in Congress”–Christian R. Grose, University of Rochester.
“The Adoption of Anti-Same Sex Marriage Laws: Morality Politics, Interest Groups, and State Policy”–Nathan E. Dietz and David Kalb, American University.
“Exploring the Explanatory boundaries of Alternative Agenda-Setting Models: The Case of Higher Education Decentralization”–Michael K. McLendon, Vanderbilt University.
“Modernity and Moral Decline: Nietzsche, Rousseau and the Narrative of Liberal Decay”–Andrew R. Murphy, University of Chicago.
“Perception of Race, Gender, and the Consequences of Existing Power Hierarchies Within African American Women’s Community Work Organizations”–Erika Gordon, University of Maryland, College Park.
“Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Contours of Gendered Agency”–Edwina Bervosa-Carter, University of California, Santa Barbara.
“Why Parties Fail Asian Americans”–Thomas P. Kim, Scripps College.
“Deliberative Democracy and the Rest of Politics: Can Deliberation Share Authority with Self-Interested Bargaining”–Lorraine M. McDonnell and Stephen Weatherford, University of California, Santa Barbara.
“Hysteretic Unemployment and Economic Policy: The Neoliberal `Attack’ Against Democratic Politics in the New Europe”–Salvatore Pitruzzello, European University Institute.
And then there was “Forecasting the 2000 American National Elections.”
It featured an army of academics who have fashioned mathematical models that appear to be able to forecast, months in advance, the outcomes of presidential elections with great accuracy.
Those models tend to rely heavily on readily available data on the approval ratings of the incumbent president and the state of the economy.
Applied retrospectively, they seem to accurately forecast virtually every presidential election. In 1996, their forecasts tended to be even more accurate than Election Day polls.
For example, James Campbell, who teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo, relies on presidential preference polls around Labor Day and that year’s second-quarter growth rate in the gross domestic product. His prediction, fashioned last Tuesday, is that Gore wins with 52.8 percent.
Thomas Holbrook of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee concluded in early July that Gore will win with a whopping 60.3 percent. His math equation factors in second-quarter presidential approval ratings, readily available responses to whether Americans feel better off economically (the consumer satisfaction index) and the tenure of the incumbent party.
Being a candidate affiliated with the party in power is a big plus, but the longer the party has been in the White House, the less of an advantage one has. Citizens begin desiring change, something the models factor in.
The only one of the crew who did not use similar data, even though he came to the same outcome, was Helmut Norporth of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His key factor for his model is the performance of the incumbent-party candidate in presidential primaries, notably New Hampshire since its arrival on the scene in 1952.
On July 26 his model concluded that Gore would wind up with 55 percent.
“If Gore doesn’t win, this will be the misery loves company panel,” said Norpoth.
Introducing the forecasters, Louisiana State University’s James Garand conceded that such work has at times received scholarly chiding as “recreational political science,” while a few other, politically conservative critics assume that they must all be “left-wing radicals,” especially given the uniformity of pro-Gore forecasts.
He underscored that the panelists were all strong scholars, while noting: “This is not a bunch of Democratic liberals. There are several Republicans in this group,” including Campbell, who was rueful as he said his model comes with an “87 percent probability” that the Gore prediction is correct.
Christopher Wiezien of the University of Houston, who claimed a 90 percent statistical probability for his 55.2 percent Gore prediction, said the vice president could still lose, “but it’s not likely.”
There were a few skeptics in the room, including a sourpuss journalist from a Very Famous Newspaper whose questions seemed to reflect a personal indignity, namely being unable to believe that so many of the daily ins and outs of the campaigns he is used to covering aren’t really that significant.
There was also the more upbeat Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at California’s Claremont Graduate University, who told me: “I am dubious. I believe in the human factor.”
She was saying what would seem inescapable, namely that an awful candidate or a wonderful campaign must make some difference.
Well, to the forecasters, those factors aren’t irrelevant. When President Gerald Ford botched the debate question about Eastern Europe in 1976 against Jimmy Carter, that did have impact but only a percentage point, maybe two, Campbell said.
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Generally, campaigns tend to accentuate trends the forecasters pinpoint in advance, they assert. And though Gore seems not to be profiting in polls from a strong economy as much as one would assume, the forecasters say he is home free–at least in the United States.
Charles Tien, a young political scientist at New York’s Hunter College, just spent a year doing research in China. He once presented his forecast model to a group there and “they were dumbfounded.”
“They had never heard of Al Gore.”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.