For most of us, the painting is what we see on the surface, where light reflects the image into our eyes. George Bisacca ’77 sees that same image, but his vision of a painting penetrates more deeply, to the object beneath. As one of the world’s leading conservators of paintings on wood (often called “panel paintings”), Bisacca sees through the paint to the cracks, fissures, worm holes, and clumsy repairs of centuries past—yet he also sees the craftsmanship, history, cultural tradition, and immense beauty of these objects.

In the airy, north-facing conservation studio atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Bisacca stands among a dozen paintings. Some need minor repairs, removal of yellowed varnish, cleaning, or minor retouching. Others are in shockingly bad condition.

On a nearby easel stands a large German oil on wood from about 1585, an Annunciation given to the Met last year by a Florentine art dealer. It’s a familiar Christian scene: the angel Gabriel gestures toward a demure Mary, each figure occupying about half the picture. And in the sky above, a bearded figure of God points at her, releasing a dove of peace.

The two halves of the composition are unified by sightlines and gestures—but they are no longer physically joined. The original panel, made of four planks of wood, has bowed and cracked along its three seams; the central seam is so badly compromised that Bisacca decided to separate it entirely. It seems like radical treatment, but now conservators will be able to align the surfaces and adjust the natural curvature of the entire panel. Once the pieces are rejoined, restorers will clean and retouch the damaged surface, being careful to use materials that can be removed later without damaging the original paint. Today’s restorations are largely done in this manner, so that future conservators can reverse this treatment and conserve the painting differently as new science emerges.

There’s a lot of science in modern art conservation. Soon after X-rays were invented, people began using them to investigate works of art, often finding surprises below the visible surface. Bisacca shows me an unfinished portrait of Michelangelo, painted about 1545, when the great artist would have been 70. It’s attributed to a devoted follower, Daniele da Volterra. Yet X-radiography clearly shows that Daniele painted his Michelangelo atop an earlier image of the Holy Family.

With its varnish removed, the portrait looks flat and faded. Bisacca takes a cotton ball, wets it with turpentine, and swipes it across the face of Michelangelo, bringing out the contrast and color, just as a fresh coat of varnish will do. He points to where the ghosts of the older composition can be seen in the unfinished areas, then shows me the back of the painting, which he and his structural team stabilized before the restorers began their work on the painted surface.

Slideshow: Inside the conservation studio with George Bisacca ’77

X-rays aren’t the only diagnostic tool in the hands of today’s conservators. Infrared reflectrography can reveal an artist’s preparatory drawing, showing how a composition evolves as the artist proceeds. Chemical analysis of paint reveals artists’ techniques and points the way to proper treatments of the surface. And not long ago, Bisacca used a CT scanner to solve a persistent mystery concerning an early Renaissance painting in the Met’s collection.

For a century, art collectors have been hunting down pieces of the Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, painted in the late 1430s by the Sienese artist Sassetta. Like many altarpieces, it consisted of several separate paintings hinged or pinned together. Some were double-sided so that when the altarpiece was “closed,” additional images appeared on the back. Like many old altarpieces, the San Sepolcro was broken up and sold to multiple buyers; the two-sided panels were often sawn in half in cross-section, creating two paintings where there once was just one.

Three central elements of the San Sepolcro altarpiece were found in a Florentine antique shop about 1900 by the famed connoisseur Bernard Berenson, and the hunt has been on for the rest ever since. One supposed member of the set was thought to be in the Metropolitan’s Lehman Collection, yet doubts remained about its attribution.

The problem was that the Met’s painting appeared to be on cypress, while all of the other San Sepolcro candidates were on poplar—including the one thought to be the obverse of the Met painting, a Crucifixion owned by the Cleveland Museum. Met curators were thinking that sometime after the paintings were separated, a cypress backing was laminated to the Met’s thin poplar panel, but they couldn’t prove it. Cutting into its edges to investigate its composition was not an option; it would have been too destructive to the painting and its attached frame.

So, at the suggestion of a colleague, Bisacca took the 17-inch-wide panel downtown to New York University Medical Center, where the CT scanner saw exactly what had been expected all along: a lamination line between two layers of wood—cypress on poplar.

Another key piece of evidence was also found in the scan. The annular lines—tree rings—in the poplar portion of the Met’s painting matched exactly the rings visible on the back of the Cleveland piece. “That put it completely beyond doubt,” Bisacca says. “We proved it.”

At the Vermont campus of the Bread Loaf School of English, everyone—students, faculty and staff, their families, and professional actors in the summer’s annual production—sits down for a meal, three times a day, at long tables in the Inn. I, as a member of the waitstaff, serve them. Most of us are students (some are children of faculty), and only a few in our ranks have any real restaurant experience. The rest of us learn to take orders, carry trays, and pour coffee on the fly. We fake it—we act. Fortunately, we don’t work for tips.

When dinner is over, and we waiters have performed our nightly lines—“All set with that? Coffee or tea for anyone?”—the actors in Hamlet rehearse their own parts in the Burgess Meredith Little Theater. I read in the library nearby and make my nightly pilgrimage to a coffee machine in the Barn. And every night, it seems, Hamlet is roaming around outside the theater, calling, “Mother! Mother!” And Ophelia is bursting out of the double-screen doors, singing and cackling and spinning in circles, mad and loose with grief. Even when I’ve returned to the library, the players’ raucous theatrics and motley instrumentation come through the air like the mist that has already soaked the grass. I learn the pattern of their chants, their hollers and shrieks.

It occurs to me that this is always happening: Hamlet is always happening; all our stories happen over and over, forever. These actors make a temporary echo chamber, bring each scene to life again and again—but isn’t this what is going on in each of our editions, on our very own bookshelves? Crack a spine and all of the characters will come tumbling out, tangled in desperate embraces and grunting, poisonous combat. Or maybe they’re already among us, drinking tea, standing in line. Not just Hamlet and company—everyone. I like to imagine that one night I’ll brush shoulders with a muttering Stephen Dedalus, or hold the door for Clarissa Dalloway, lost in thought.

But something else happens, too: I read my very own life in the pages of a book. “Several of the waiters,” writes Marcel Proust in Within a Budding Grove, “let loose among the tables, were flying along at full speed, each carrying on his outstretched palm a dish which it seemed to be the object of this kind of race not to let fall.” Too true! “Their perpetual course among the round tables yielded, after a time, to the observer the law of its dizzy but ordered circulation.” Am I dizzy on mountain air, or have these worlds converged? Laertes, dead just last night, ordering the chicken; me, rushing the order, flying across the pages of Proust; gunshots and clashing rapiers and the clamor of three hundred clean forks, all sounding somewhere in between fiction, theater and reality.

At the end of the summer, Hamlet runs for five nights. On one of them, I sit with two companions in the middle of a field, where our Adirondack chairs put down sharp moon shadows. Later, I’ll read a closing passage from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves with satisfied melancholy: “But now the head waiter, who has finished his own meal, appears and frowns […] They must go; must put up the shutters, must fold the tablecloths, and give one brush with a wet mop under the tables.” But tonight is for basking in moonlight and drinking wine chilled in wet grass, and listening to the sounds from the theater that come rolling across the darkness: chants, hollers, shrieks. Silence—and then applause.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/road-taken-echo-chamber/feed/ 0 http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/vignette-the-world-by-the-bay/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/vignette-the-world-by-the-bay/#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:39:16 +0000 Matthew Jennings http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=10247 In 1769, a Spanish exploring party led by Don Gaspar de Portola was sent north from San Diego to establish a fort and mission at Monterey Bay, which had been described 172 years earlier by a passing Spanish seafarer as a “fine harbor sheltered from all winds.” The first whites to see Northern California by land, and suffering greatly from starvation and disease, Portola’s men completely missed Monterey Bay, an open gulf. They overshot by at least 70 miles, but at last sighted the empty land and water that would be called San Francisco and its bay. They returned home thinking they had failed.

The admissions office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies is in a plain one-story adobe house from the historic Mexican period, home to the author John Steinbeck, his second wife, Gwyn, and their infant son, Thom, between November 1944 and April 1945. The Lara-Sota Adobe, he said, was “a house I have wanted since I was a little kid.” The little two-room house was shaded street-side by a massive cypress tree and stood on a quiet street a few hundred yards uphill from bay water. Steinbeck was writing his parable, The Pearl, and its screenplay, in a backyard garden shed in January 1945, when his novel Cannery Row, about colorful down-on-their-luck folk living downwind of Monterey’s sardine factories, was published.  The Steinbecks left the adobe for Mexico and the filming of The Pearl and never returned.

Today is the first day of classes of the fall semester, and the admissions staff is resting on laurels, having admitted one of the largest classes—418 students—in Monterey’s 57-year history. With a total student body of 700, 60 percent women, 40 percent men, from 38 countries and speaking 33 native languages, the average student has three years of professional experience before entrance. Amid its pride, on this quiet late-summer day with all the first-day bustle happening elsewhere on campus, the staff is still panged at the loss of its massive shading cypress, felled by snarling chainsaws only a few weeks before after being declared terminal and hazardous; it is said to have been planted over the bones of a child, an early resident in the Mexican period. Chipped and shredded, the cypress is piled in a small mountain in the center of the campus organic garden and has been distributed in all the gardens and beds, sweetening the already scented air.

The campus sits in a gentle, flower-scented, hillside-bungalow neighborhood, punctuated by cypress, cedars, palm trees, live oaks, Japanese maples, and knobcone pines. Gardens proliferate: alongside very old adobe or stone walls topped with terra cotta tiles, narrow stone or redbrick paths thread between buildings and duck below redwood pergolas, past tiny courtyards, bench nooks, planters and pots and gardens of phlox, coast buckwheat, primrose, buckthorn, thimbleberry, fruit-dangling grapevines, a multitude of flowers.

Near the center of campus, in the Samson Student Center Café, many nations’ flags hang from ceiling timber trusses, from the familiar Old Glory, and France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Egypt, the Philippines, to the less familiar Bhutan, Ghana, Senegal, Thailand, Armenia. Directional signs are pinned to the wall above the cashier station and a Coca-Cola cooler: New Delhi, 7,773 mi; Petra, 6,852 mi.; Madrid, 5,838 mi.; Cairo, 7,512 mi.; London, 5,413 mi; Paris 5,621 mi.; Mexico City, 1,818 mi. In late morning of this first day, the room swells with the sound of young peoples’ banter, a babel of languages, beneath the assembly of flags.

Find a vacant seat in class with Professor Lyuba Zarsky, Public Policy and the Environment. Thirty-four IP majors crowd into a trim, well-appointed, storefront classroom on Pacific Street in McGowan Building; outside the large plate-glass window, busy traffic whizzes by. Many of the students are freshly returned from summer internships or institutes, and from an International Professional Service Semester. Lyuba Zarsky has taught at MIIS for seven years and edited the book Human Rights and the Environment: Conflicts and Norms in a Globalizing World, which will inform this course. She has previous experience—up to 25 years in sustainable development, working with Aborigines in Australia and with an NGO’s a globalization program. She will guide them through discussions of public policy and government functions and through the process of changing norms, to influence laws governing the environment and sustainability.

This being the first class meeting, Zarsky directs students to break into pairs, interview each other about their backgrounds, and then introduce their partner to the class. For 10 minutes, 34 avid, intelligent, and confident graduate students look into the eyes of their partners and digest their lives, filling the room’s air with warm talk. Justin Wright (Middlebury ’08) turns to a classmate to report of his landscaping and carpentry work in Hawaii, Arizona, and Northern California, and how living near mountain-fast Lake Tahoe, witnessing the pressures on the environment brought to bear by wealth, power, and development, led him straight to MIIS to pursue public policy. His classmate, Rainey, has been working as a translator, most recently at the London Olympics, where the beach volleyball competition commanded much attention.

Faculty Authors’ Section—10 shelves—William Tell Coleman Library, a bright and modern, two-story facility. Pull titles at random: Green Planet Blues: Environmental Politics from Stockholm to Kyoto; Bringing Women In: Women’s Issues in International Development Programs; Terrorism and Homeland Security: Thinking Russia’s Revolution from Above, 1985-2000: Reform, Transition, and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime; Strategically about Policy; The Interpreter’s Companion; Leadership in English Language Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Skills for Changing Times; The Human Genome Project and Minority Communities: Ethical, Political, and Social Dilemmas; Translators’ Strategies and Creativity; American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific. Adjacent are five shelves dedicated to the life and career of General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the brilliant, abrasive maverick who served in the Army in China, Burma, and India before and during World War II. Nearby is a lifelike bust of the general, with his prominent ears and thin Yankee nose. Stilwell’s two daughters, who settled near the family home in Carmel, were long associated with the Monterey Institute of International Studies; Nancy Stilwell Easterbrook, born in China and a longtime trustee of MIIS, and her sister, artist Alison Stilwell Cameron, are themselves memorialized outside the Coleman Library in a flower garden with thankful plaques from the many Chinese scholarship students they supported at Monterey.

At the Holland Center, a photo exhibition overlooks tables for ping-pong and foosball. The pictures are the work of Peter Grothe—former adjunct professor and emeritus director of International Student Programs, who died in June 2012, at the age of 81. All are close-up portraits of mostly young people, an international panoply of children from a lifetime of world travels; the faces brighten a dim and temporarily empty gathering spot.

In early 1960, as adviser to Minnesota Democratic senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Peter Grothe drafted the language of a foreign-aid bill and proposed an entity he called “The Peace Corps.” Later that season, Humphrey gave the idea to the Presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy. Young Grothe wrote Kennedy’s proposing speech and later served in the first “class” of Peace Corps volunteers, assigned to Ethiopia. At Monterey for 31 years, Grothe taught cross-cultural communications and American politics, and recruited in more than 40 countries, greatly increasing international student enrollment. In the student lounge, beneath Grothe’s colorful assemblage of international amity, the pool cues rest on the tables like crossed and put-away swords, and the rows of foosball combatants are, at least for the moment, at rest.

Up behind the Holland Center, grounds super Kirk Eckhardt (who, with his build, could be a younger stand-in for the actor Nick Nolte) is tending a row of tall, stupendous flowering vines that most people would not notice unless they left the traveled way and peeked at an obscure wall, when he is startled by the sight of a wounded deer hiding in the foliage. It seems to have been injured by a car. He calls the wildlife rescue truck for the Monterey County SPCA. It glides discretely up a driveway, and the veterinarian eyeballs the deer before mixing a sedative so the deer can be rescued. Graduate students sit studying and checking e-mail in a nearby courtyard, blissfully unmindful of the little drama unfolding just a few yards away.

The McGowan Building contains the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program, the East Asia Nonproliferation Program, and the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program. Framed decorative posters spied on the second floor: Middle East maps, informational posters on botulism toxin and the dangers of ingesting alpha emitters, and two vintage U.S. government wanted posters—offering a $5 million reward for Osama Bin Laden. It is eerily quiet. Not wishing to wait for the elevator, one takes the stairs to another floor.

One flight above, in a crowded little seminar room, Professor Jeff Langholz is holding the first meeting of Environmental Conflict Management, studying the role of environmental factors in conflicts and international security. Langholz’s research focuses on biodiversity conservation and sustainable development; he worked for the Environmental Protection Agency for five years on toxic waste policy, trained and practiced extensively as a mediator, and has taught a version of this course at MIIS for 13 years. Today’s simulation exercise explores a multination conflict over an imagined watercourse, the Zihum River, which forms borders of five neighboring nations. The students break into five groups, following a process Langholz has directed 5 times at The Hague, 7 times in the Middle East, and 4 times each in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and North America. The conclusion will underscore the importance of earned trust, transparency, flexibility, and most of all, enlightened self-interest. “It pays,” the professor says, “to cooperate.” There have been shouting matches, tears, and walkouts in his mediation exercises in the Real World, but at MIIS, working step-by-step toward an Ideal World, there is teamwork, reason, receptivity, and comprehension. Jeff Langholz’s article about this exercise rests on 100 case histories and will be published soon.

Screeching gulls perch atop the tiled roof of the neighboring AT&T building, echoing on the walls of the Monterey Institute. One may stand on tiptoes on the ringing second-floor balcony of the Morse Building, as a multicolored congress of national flags on their flagpoles waves in the breeze, and one can glimpse a smidgen of Monterey Bay. Toward the end of this first day of classes, four graduate students wander downtown to the water and Fisherman’s Wharf. They gaze at a heap on a wooden float moored to the whale-watching center: 25 sea lions of varying tonnage sprawl in a companionate pile. One meditatively scratches his side with a broad flipper. He grunts. Thirty yards away on a bobbing white skiff, two pelicans supervise the harbor.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/vignette-the-world-by-the-bay/feed/ 0 http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/politics-in-america-just-the-facts/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/politics-in-america-just-the-facts/#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:34:12 +0000 Matthew Jennings http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=10244 With the presidential election looming, and our challenges more complex and global than ever, the state of public discourse in America is in crisis. Where there should be clear choices, anger and antipathy prevail. Partisan considerations trump common sense and cooperation. Compromise is a dirty word. Clear discussions of policy alternatives are buried beneath an avalanche of political positioning and negative ads. Information is overwhelmed by accusation.

We can do better than this.

What the public needs and should demand is serious, fact-driven discussion about real-world problems. Yet real facts are hard to come by in our political discourse. Some candidates and pundits actually disparage the facts. What’s going on? The causes and culprits are all around us.

Too many elected and aspiring leaders feed a vicious circle of assertion and accusation as they frame policy debates as black-and-white choices, simple problems with simple solutions. The media create a peculiar echo chamber; partisan shout fests too often trump the role of consistent fact provider. Interest groups pile on, heaving money, producing more attack ads, and making more claims than the public can ever hope to digest.

Believing that people want an alternative to this depressing dynamic, I started Face the Facts USA with philanthropist Ed Scott. We were determined to find a way to present fundamental facts creatively and memorably but without spin or bias. We wanted the facts to be accompanied by context and informed discussion.

Based at George Washington University, where I head the School of Media and Public Affairs, the project is powered by a tiny staff and a dedicated group of students, (It also has a bipartisan advisory group that counts Bill Delahunt ’63 and Jim Douglas ’72 among its members.) We release a fact a day in subject areas that relate to the economy, national security, education, and other issues.

The experiment is meeting with great success. Diverse media organizations from McClatchy-Tribune, Huffington Post, and Newsmax, to PBS, Journal-Register, and Voxxi are now distributing the facts. Their enthusiasm suggests these relationships are born of something more than convenience. There is a genuine hunger and appreciation for what we are doing—facing the facts every day.

I have been in journalism since my days at Middlebury. From a small radio station in Springfield, Vermont, to the Voice of America, the Associated Press and CNN, I have had the great privilege to travel the world, cover historic events, meet amazing people, and tell stories, hoping always to inform along the way. But I am deeply worried by the political and media noise machines around us. In too many places, we are polarized and paralyzed.

There is no easy fix to the depressing reality of America’s sound-bite culture and political gridlock. But the status quo is unacceptable. Facts matter. They are where we should start. And as Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

It is my hope that this project, driven largely by young people who have the most to gain—or lose—can contribute to our national discourse.

Yes, we can do better. We have to.

Frank Sesno ’77 is Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at The George Washington University. He served as CNN White House Correspondent, anchor and Washington Bureau Chief. He graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in American History and served as a trustee of the College from 1994-2004. Sign up for your fact a day at www.facethefactsusa.org.

What are some of the cost implications?
Wage and salaries represent about half of all of our costs. And we have significant fixed costs related to our infrastructure. So we have to take a look at how we deploy our staffing based on what we feel is the most important pedagogy, and where that pedagogy is absolutely essential and where it is a luxury.

As we think about a Middlebury education, we have to acknowledge that one of the most important reasons students come here is because of the personalized approach to learning that one will get, the opportunities to engage faculty who are committed to undergraduate teaching and who understand that the core mission of Middlebury College is undergraduate education.

But let’s step back and ask if that means students have to have that 100 percent of the time. If you look at a student who has gotten the most out of a Middlebury education, what does his or her four years look like? How much of it is really one-and-one instruction, how much of it is really in small seminars? Hopefully a large part of it, but it’s certainly not the entire part. So before we think about continuing to do what we have done as we have done it, we have to step back and ask, “Might there be another way?”

Let me give you one example that is illustrative of the opportunities we have (and it shows why we have a comparative advantage over our peers): Our Chinese department is second-to-none in teaching Chinese language, literature, and culture. It is remarkable both in its rigor and how our students emerge four years later with a fluency and a sensitivity to the culture of the language that they are studying. At the same time, we hear repeated commentary about the department’s narrow course offerings at the senior seminar level from students who have returned from studying abroad at our sites in China; [these offerings] reflect the professional experience and expertise from a relatively small number of faculty. The students see too few opportunities to apply their Chinese language capabilities to contemporary issues. So instead of hiring two more faculty in the Chinese department to cover China’s economy or Chinese-U.S. relations, in Chinese, why not tap into our existing resources in China, at our sites in Kunming, Hangzhou, and Beijing, where we cover environmental sciences (Kunming), the arts (Hangzhou), and the social sciences (Beijing)?Why not tie in classes that are going on in Beijing with classes at Middlebury? An 8:30 p.m. seminar in Beijing would be an 8:30 a.m. class for Chinese majors in Middlebury.

We’ve hired the faculty to teach our students in Beijing, and now we can have that course in two places using videoconferencing and technology that didn’t exist three to five years ago. The ability to bring in expertise from our 38 sites around the world presents this kind of opportunity for us in multiple languages across many disciplines. And so without ever increasing the size of our faculty, we can expand our curriculum significantly and provide important new opportunities to our students. And that’s just one area we can think about a little bit differently.

So, tell us more about untapped potential . . .     
Well, despite having great educational resources such as the language schools (since 1915), BLSE (since 1920), and schools abroad (1949), they have largely existed in a vacuum. They have served separate cohorts of students, with occasional overlaps with our undergraduates, but only recently. These programs represent untapped resources for the College. The challenge we face now is rationalizing—leveraging, if you will—these resources to the benefit of our core mission, which is undergraduate education. Which is to say, if these programs produce financial surpluses for the College, great. If they provide important and unique educational opportunities to our undergraduate students, then even better. So a lot of my attention is given to strengthening this network of educational programs to the benefit of the entire institution, and especially our undergraduate students. It’s time we capitalized on these long-standing programs.

What role do you see technology playing?
For a period of our history, our isolated location was a great benefit. It was an oasis of sorts, an escape from noise, a place where students could come and have a contemplative four years immersed in their studies. But the world has changed dramatically since those times. I don’t think students can afford to be totally checked out, isolated from what’s going on in the rest of the world for four years, and then jump in when they graduate.

Technology is a great leveler. Even for those students who go abroad—and that’s 55 to 60 percent of our student body—technology will still be key, because it will allow students to stay connected after they return. It also is a way in which faculty can rethink pedagogy. Collaborative learning and accessing information instantaneously have become so important. Technology plays a role in how faculty can do so much more than the standard 50-minute lecture three times a week. But we have to be smart. There’s good technology and there’s not-so-good technology, technology for the lazy and bored. We don’t want that. We want to retain our focus on undergraduate education, human contact, but that’s not mutually exclusive from finding ways technology can enhance that experience.

How might the curriculum evolve?
Students being learned in the classics and foundations of the liberal arts should not change. It’s crucial that students learn fundamentals from Western and Eastern texts. Those are building blocks to understanding the human condition, and they don’t lose their relevance.

However, when you talk about the organization of the curriculum, and you divide things by, say, the regional division of the world (Asian studies, African studies, Latin American studies, etc.) it assumes that the old order—state institutions—play the most significant role in world affairs. If we learned anything since 9/11, we learned how non-state actors are becoming more and more important. So, we need to think about how this kind of change alters how we organize, at the least, our international curriculum and also how we view “the world.” And then there are the ways disciplines have evolved. It’s tidy to say “I’m a biologist” or “I’m a chemist,” but what’s happening in between the established disciplines is, in many ways, as significant and exciting, if not more. Then again, graduate schools continue to produce PhDs almost solely within disciplines. So it’s tricky. But it’s worth examining what we learn, how we learn it, and what constitutes knowledge in today’s world. Just because something has been done a certain way doesn’t mean it should always be done that way.

Also, we need to set our expectations for what students need to know. What represents the best launching pad for students not only to get a fundamental base in a liberal arts education, but also best prepares them to thrive in the world?

This leads to how our students learn . . .
I’d like to think of a Middlebury education as being a sum of all the parts, and that they all support one another, rather than being perceived to be in competition with one another. So it’s not a zero sum game, but rather a summation game.

Now, there is a risk of charlatanism when students get involved superficially in a number of disciplines. But through projects like the Solar Decathlon or the “Hydrogen tractor” winter term course taught by two alums last year or MiddCORE, we see examples of where you have a superb academic experience in the classroom supporting and being supported by what students are doing outside the classroom. And that’s an important aspect of today’s liberal arts education.

Though I understand it, I don’t necessarily believe it’s in the best interest of our students that during the past 25 years, we have become so focused on excellence in the classroom, we have devoted less attention to what students are doing outside of class. We as a faculty need to see how life outside the classroom is a crucial element of a Middlebury education.

What about the evolution of the student body?
Diversity of life experience and diversity of thought are the two most important things in creating a vibrant learning environment. If we manage to bring together students of different world experiences and of different thought—political, social, cultural—it will enrich the educational environment significantly.

I started teaching here in 1984 and seemed free to make statements in my political geography class that 15, 16 years later would have been challenged by students whose life experiences would have rendered my positions and my lectures dated and, well, provincial. We now have students from more than 75 countries, so to speak about international development or dictatorships or freedom of speech takes on a very different character when people who have experienced a very different system or lifestyle can say, “Wait a minute, what about this perspective?” That’s what we try to do here: provide different viewpoints so as to stretch our students’ understanding and comfort levels as they study across the liberal arts.

If we successfully answer the relevance concern, does that solve the cost issue as well?
Partially, yes. It buys us time. But we can’t assume a five or six percent growth in the cost of a college education forever. So we need to work on both. We have to make “the relevance case” more strongly in order to attract and retain the best students, and we have to address cost before we lose too large a segment of the population who believes it would be impossible to finance a Middlebury education.

On the afternoon of October 18, 2012, President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney arrived at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to speak at

[sound of door opening]

Romney Oh, for Pete’s sake. Guys!
Obama Governor, come back.
Romney There’s some kind of mix-up!
Obama It’s no mix-up. Please, come in. Look: no cameras, no witnesses. It’s a chance for the two of us to just talk . . . honestly.
Romney . . . Why?
Obama It’s tradition. Bush–Dukakis, Carter–Ford, Reagan–Carter, they all did it: The Al Smith Sauna Summit.
Romney Reagan sat here?
Obama Kennedy and Nixon sat here. Picture it: America’s great cold warriors, sweating it out on these very benches.
Romney . . . They had towels.
Obama I assume they had towels . . . Kind of a draft coming in here . . .
Romney Oh, sorry.

[sound of door closing]

Obama They didn’t warn me either, first time. I walk in, there’s McCain stretched out in a full sweat. Scars and all.
Romney Pretty banged up is he?
Obama Unreal. I mean, you’ve heard the stories about what happened to him over there . . .
Romney Right. But until you actually see . . .
Obama Exactly . . . That’s quite a little scar of your own there. The car crash?
Romney Yeah. Not quite as heroic as getting shot down and tortured, but uh, I guess we all have our narratives.
Obama True.
Romney Hey, didn’t Churchill speak at this event?
Obama By phone, yeah. And Eisenhower. Three different times . . . Probably had his own locker.
Romney Everybody loves a war hero.
Obama Men who risked it all to change the world.
Romney Right . . . And now us.
Obama Yeah . . .

[long silence]

Romney Michelle . . . doing well?
Obama She is, yeah. Tired, you know.
Romney Well, sure.
Obama Ann seems to be . . . hangin’ right in there.
Romney Amazes me.
Obama Remarkable woman.
Romney We’re lucky men, Barack . . . Geez, that sounds funny, doesn’t it?
Obama It does . . . Mitt.

[laughter]

Obama You mind a little steam?
Romney No, go ahead.

[sizzle of water on stove]

Romney Normally I’m more of a Jacuzzi guy.
Obama Me too. High heat kinda goes to my head.
Romney Yeah, what is that?
Obama No idea.
Romney Breathing it in, maybe?
Obama May be. Or maybe we’re just lightweights!
Romney Right! . . . Hey, what the heck? Give her another shot!
Obama Why not?

[sizzle. laughter]

Romney So. One of us, huh?
Obama Keys to the kingdom.
Romney Someone tries to pull the old “You’re not the boss of me,” you get to say. “No, I am.”
Obama Well, it’s a little more—
Romney They say, “You can’t make me!” You go, “Actually? I can.”
Obama That’s not exactly —
Romney Nah, I’m pulling your leg . . . Though you gotta admit, looking down that menu of al-Qaeda operatives every morning, choosing one for a little drone visitation, that must kinda brighten your day.
Obama . . . No comment.

[laughter]

Romney You know what I wonder about you, though?
Obama What?
Romney Do y’ever look at Bill Clinton, crisscrossing the globe, rescuing exotic populations, connecting with audiences off the cuff, and you just think to yourself, “Ex-president. Now that would be a great job.”

[sizzle]

Obama Every day.
Romney Really?
Obama You sound surprised.
Romney No, it’s just—
Obama You’re thinking, “Whoa, Obama’s starting to think about defeat.” Well guess what? I am . . . In fact, I’ve pictured it: Four days from now in Boca Raton, final debate, foreign policy, we’re in the final round, and I’m starting to say something about multilateral relations with Iran or something, when suddenly, I go blank; it’s like this cloud passes between my ears, and you just rear back and pounce: teeth, claws, flesh is flying, absolutely no mercy
. . . By the time you finish, I’m either in tears, or on my knees praising Allah. I’ve seen it different ways: In one version, I start apologizing to the bin Laden family, but whatever I do, it’s clear to every human being on the planet that Obama is finished. No, We Can’t! No, We Can’t!

[laughter]

Obama You’re probably wondering why I would tell you that.
Romney No, it makes sense, tactically.
Obama Wait, what do you . . .
Romney I mean if we’re trying to psych each other out for the debate, it’s a decent strategy. Transparent, but . . .
Obama No!
Romney “Oh look, it’s just like Obama said. My chance to lunge and risk it all! In a national debate!”
Obama Okay, I can see why you think that but . . . you’re wrong.
Romney I’m wrong?
Obama Yes.
Romney Enlighten me then.
Obama Well, it goes back to my time in here with McCain.

[sizzle]

Obama Towards the end, he got all quiet, just lying there. In fact I was getting a little worried—man that age. I was just about to give him a little shake, when there’s a knock on the door. They give you a two-minute warning at the end; so this knock comes, and like a shot, McCain sits up, pulls his knees up to his chest like this, and says: “I am a black criminal, and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died, and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.”
Romney Whoa.
Obama Yeah. Verbatim from his taped “confession.” And for a second there, he looked disoriented, you know? And sort of embarrassed. But then it was like his face relaxed and this calm came over him. “There,” he said, “now you know what haunts me.” I don’t know if you saw the speech he gave that night.
Romney Oh, he killed.
Obama I’ve never seen him so comfortable with himself.
Romney Fearless. If he’d kept that up ‘til election day . . .
Obama He’d be sitting here right now.
Romney With Hillary!
Obama President McCain . . .
Romney . . . All right, where’s that water bottle?
Obama Here ya go.

[sizzle]

Romney One thing that really spooks me?
Obama Go ahead.
Romney Is that I get elected and then I spend my entire presidency trying to rein in Ryan.
Obama For me, it’s the Blue Dogs.
Romney Plus, I’ve got Grover Norquist. The Chamber of Commerce. NRA.
Obama Hey, I’ve got two NEAs to deal with!
Romney Wall Street Journal. Rush Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh . . . And that’s before I even get to the opposition.
Obama Good to know we’re in there somewhere.
Romney Oh, oh, oh. Almost forgot. The absolute scariest guy of all.
Obama Netanyahu?
Romney Sheldon Adelson.
Obama You’re afraid of the man who gave you guys 71 million dollars?
Romney Closer to 100, and yes, it’s like the whole Nightmare on Elm Street series playing out in my head: all these scenarios where I’m carrying Sheldon’s golf bag, I’m grooming his cats. This one scene, I walk into the Oval Office, my very first day on the job and there’s Sheldon, sitting in my chair, signing pardons with my pen. And I have to kneel next to him—this is the part I really don’t get—because he has this box of mothballs, Enoz Old Fashioned Moth Balls, right? And whenever he picks one up, I have to open my mouth so he can pop it in. So after a while—

[a knock at the door]

Romney Darn it.
Obama We’ll be right out!
Romney I have so much more to unload.
Obama I didn’t get to say half of mine.
Romney . . . Okay, prioritize.
Obama What?
Romney What is your absolute worst fear of all?

[sizzle]

Romney Barack?
Obama That we broke it . . . We had this amazing country and I worry that we just . . .
Romney Yeah, that’s mine too.  Somewhere around the Gulf of Tonkin something cracked . . .
Obama I keep thinking, we don’t get along, it’s like we don’t even want to get along: why don’t we just . . .
Romney Call it quits. That’s what you’re thinking, right? Go ahead, say it.
Obama . . . Amicably.
Romney Good luck!
Obama Like two grown-ups.
Romney You are such an optimist.
Obama We could at least try!
Romney Like last time?

[sizzle]

Romney No, we are stuck in this particular union, my friend. Till death do us part.
Obama Yeah . . . Makes you wonder, though . . .

[sound of door opening]

Obama What if every four years, we could just have an adult conversation and then vote?

[laughter]

Romney There you go again.

[sound of door closing]

The parties and their proxies, including Super-pacs, intend to spend $2 billion on this year’s election. Just how many votes can be bought with that kind of money remains to be seen. Ben LaBolt ’03, the Obama campaign’s national press secretary, is hoping it’s enough to keep him employed after November 6. Also, he would like to point out, the future of the greatest country in the world depends on it.

***

LaBolt ducked out of Obama for America’s glass-and-granite headquarters in downtown Chicago to grab a quick lunch the other day. He was wearing his characteristic five o’clock shadow and a well-cut pair of jeans. He has eyebrows like “em” dashes, perfectly flat and humorless—and a slight growl. At 31, he is world-weary in a way usually reserved for roadies and parole officers, people who have seen it all and have lost their capacity for surprise. “I don’t think anybody’s ever accused me of being an idealist,” he said, tucking into a bowl of potato leek soup.

His CV reads like the portrait of a political operative: In 2003, weeks out of college, he went to “knock doors” for Howard Dean’s nascent presidential campaign; when Dean flamed out, he jumped to the Democratic National Committee. He did press for Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) on the Hill, assisted Sherrod Brown’s (D-Ohio) successful Senate campaign in 2006, and a year later went to work for the junior senator from Illinois. The weekend that LaBolt arrived, his new boss—a largely unknown legislator with a funny name and dark skin—announced his presidential ambitions. LaBolt would go on to be one of Obama’s 2008 wunderkinder, and after Obama’s inauguration, he found a home in the West Wing as an assistant press secretary. When Rahm Emanuel left the administration in 2011 to run for mayor of Chicago, he took LaBolt with him as his communications director. As soon as Emanuel was sworn in, Obama took LaBolt back and made him national spokesman for Obama for America.

All of which is to say, this is not his first rodeo. And the itinerant life of a political cowboy suits him just fine. “I used to relitigate my future at the end of every year and really focus on developing a 10-year plan,” he mused. “I don’t do that anymore.”

His Cobb salad, no bleu cheese, arrived. Lunch outside the office is a rarity these days. He rises between five and six a.m. “in case news has popped overnight,” and he fields calls from morning-show producers who need a quick sound bite. The e-mails begin soon after, with reporters from the big dailies and wire services checking in to see what narrative the campaign is pushing (today it’s Romney’s tax returns) and “asking us to show some leg” on issues like Medicare or off-shore drilling. LaBolt might do a national cable appearance with Fox to spar with the anchor over Vice President Biden’s gaffe du jour or knock down Romney’s latest attack ad. “Cable contributes to the daily national-news cycle to drive a story,” he admitted, “but you really don’t reach voters doing that. You really have to get into the local market.” Swing voters care less about Romney’s car elevator than they do about, say, emergency drought relief. “That’s just not relevant to people who aren’t junkies.”

Instead, LaBolt does dozens of weekly radio and TV interviews in targeted markets, talking about the president’s position on education reform (Akron), the farm bill (Ames), the renewable-energy tax credit (Fort Collins), and defense spending (Norfolk). “Our ultimate focus is what’s on TV in Cleveland and Orlando and Denver, rather than on dominating the conversation in every media outlet.” A studio in the corner of the Chicago office allows him a direct feed into the cars and living rooms of millions of Americans. Does he ever get nervous that he’ll stray from his talking points and say the wrong thing? “Every spokesperson worries about that. But you also know that things move quickly. If it was insignificant, in 48 hours it’ll be gone.” He added,
“The truth is, we don’t get very far up or down about anything. We know there’s always going to be another turn of the wheel.”

By late afternoon, the campaign’s senior staff has planned the next day’s line of attack, briefed reporters, and, if need be, begun to “get out in front” of any negative stories coming their way, while a “rapid response team” continues to parse Romney’s every statement from the campaign trail.

This routine plays out six and a half days a week, with a slight slowdown after the Sunday news shows are over. On a good night, he’s out of the office by 9 p.m. and back online for a few hours after dinner. His iPhone is always within reach.

LaBolt’s office has a killer view of Millennium Park, with its free lunchtime concerts and young folks lounging on the grass after work. He probably hasn’t noticed. The first thing staffers see when they arrive each morning is a sign in the entryway reminding them how many days remain—today, 84—until the election. The place feels like a San Francisco start-up on the verge of an IPO, where chaos is the organizing principle and a half-empty bottle of Jameson is a perfectly acceptable paperweight. Instead of walls, state flags delineate boundaries between desks, organized by region. The “First Lady’s Ladies” manage Michelle-related campaign initiatives, while the “Voter Protection” team stays abreast of new voter I.D. laws. An office manager dispenses paperclips strictly on a need-to-collate basis. “These are volunteer dollars,” one press assistant explained. “There is no free shit.” A phalanx of programmers keeps the campaign’s sprawling Web empire running, and a corral of designers churns out reams of thematic posters. “We are hungry and foolish,” reads one, “fired up and ready to go.”

If that sounds a little 2008, a little “hopey-changey,” well, it is. In truth, LaBolt shares little of the younger staffers’ caffeinated ebullience.

“The biggest mistake you can make is trying to repeat the last campaign that you’ve run,” he said. “Obviously the political climate is different.”

Since the court rulings on Citizens United and SpeechNow.org, Democrats have been hammered in the SuperPAC fund-raising game by Republican heavyweights like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson. (As of early September, according to Center for Responsive Politics, conservative groups had spent more than $226 million to unseat Obama and wrest back control of Congress, to liberals’ $63 million.)  Meanwhile, on the issues, this election is less “Si se puede” (yes, it is possible) than it is “It could be worse.”  Still, LaBolt added, “It’s sort of a myth that ’08 was all unicorns and rainbows.”

This go-round, there will be no such myth.

* He didn’t. Michelle Bachman did.

Kevin Charles Redmon ’09 writes from Washington, D.C.

Middlebury Magazine You are a working as the deputy general counsel to a presidential campaign at a time when lawyers and politicians (and journalists!) aren’t held in the highest public esteem. What attracts you to this particular job? And what would you say to those who have less than a positive image of politicians and lawyers?

Meghan Sowards It’s unfortunate that this perception exists, because my career in public service provides me with a front row seat to the sacrifices that men and women on both sides of the aisle make in order to stand for election and to serve in public office. I see the long hours, the missed family events, the attention to detail, the passion for fact-finding, the day-to-day hard work that comes with being an exemplary public servant–things the general public doesn’t get to see. I’m fortunate to work for men and women who became involved because they believe that their efforts will strengthen our country and improve the lives of all the people they serve. I feel strongly that this presidential election will be the most consequential of my lifetime. It’s tremendously satisfying to work for someone who I believe has the skills and know how to lead country in the right direction.

MM You’ve written speeches for the State Department and served as a speechwriter and press secretary, respectively, for a pair of United States senators (Susan Collins from Maine and Lincoln Chafee from Rhode Island). How has this experience informed what you are doing now?

MS Obviously those jobs helped me hone my writing skills, which I use every day as a lawyer.  Having worked on both Senate and State Department staffs, I know what those positions entail. So, that background helps me provide more practical legal advice to my co-workers on the campaign. I’ve stood in their shoes. I have a greater appreciation for the realities and demands of their jobs. Campaign staffers may not always love visiting the lawyer’s office, but I hope my background makes me a more approachable counselor.

MM Is there anything about this job that has surprised you?

MS I’m continually amazed by just how much work goes into running for president and how such a small team of people is able to get it done. Even basic things—like making sure that the candidate’s name appears on the primary ballot in every state—require a great deal of preparation and effort. During the primary, I spent a lot of time researching each state’s unique ballot access requirements and making sure that our campaign had met those requirements in all 50 states and D.C. These can range from filling out a basic form to submitting a petition signed by thousands of registered voters in a strictly prescribed format.  Our office oversaw the process from start to finish—including taking volunteers into the field to gather signatures. Even on a presidential campaign, everyone rolls up their sleeves to get the job done, no matter how big or small. You have to earn it.

MM What does a successful day look like to you?

MS A successful day is a day when no one outside the campaign knows that I exist.  When the lawyers have done their job, we’ve anticipated the pitfalls and steered the campaign in a direction that avoids them.

MM You’re on leave from a position at one of the most prestigious D.C. law firms—Patton Boggs—to work as legal counsel on a presidential campaign. Think back to 1997-98 and your senior year at Middlebury. In your wildest dreams, did you envision doing what you’re doing today?

 MS Not at all. I don’t come from a political family or even from a family of lawyers, so it wasn’t until I started working on the school newspaper at Middlebury that I gained any exposure to politics. Then a Middlebury alum offered me a summer internship on Capitol Hill, and I realized that politics is in my blood. Even then, though, I never imagined that I would have the privilege of working on a presidential campaign. It’s a thrill.

]]> http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/politics-in-america-legal-eagle/feed/ 0 http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/politics-in-america-myth-or-reality/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2012/10/30/politics-in-america-myth-or-reality/#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 18:43:13 +0000 Matthew Jennings http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=10226 In the media’s telling, a presidential election is in almost daily flux. Voters’ sentiments shift, often dramatically, in response to each new event: a change in candidate tactics, an evocative ad, a dramatic speech, a strong debate performance, and, not least, a highly publicized candidate “gaffe.” Entire news cycles are devoted to parsing the electoral implications of candidates’ rhetorical miscues: “you didn’t build that,” a claim that 47 percent of people “are dependent on government,” or even seemingly trivial mistakes such as a misremembered marathon time.

In our view, this media narrative—if not wrong—is very misleading. As our students and those watching our Professor Pundits videos have heard us say, we believe that voters are not so easily swayed, and that presidential elections turn on much more substantial matters. The history of past campaigns, the data on public opinion and voting behavior, and our understanding of how political activists and groups behave suggest to us that the voters’ political sentiments are both more stable and more rational than media accounts indicate. To illustrate our claim, we focus here on four key themes that we believe will shape this election in ways that the conventional wisdom may not appreciate.

It’s the Economy, Stupid
Much election coverage focuses on hot-button “social” issues—abortion, welfare reform, and gay marriage—that pundits believe divide voters along partisan lines based on gender, race, or other demographic characteristics. The media also spends considerable time discussing candidate qualities, such as likeability, as measured, for example, by which candidate voters would prefer to have a beer with. In contrast, we tend to discount these factors as major electoral influences.  Instead, when voters are asked to identify the issue that most concerns them, polls repeatedly show that the economy—particularly jobs, governmental spending, and the federal budget deficit—is by far the most important priority. Health care usually comes in a distant second, followed by immigration. Cultural or “moral values” issues, on the other hand, barely register on the list of voters’ concerns. This is why we believe this election will turn largely on how voters assess the state of the economy and to what degree they hold President Obama culpable for its middling performance during his first term.

Similarly, we do not find much historical evidence that candidates’ personalities are strongly correlated with election outcomes. Just because a voter might prefer to have a beer with one candidate does not mean she’s likely to vote for him. It is true that whether a candidate is viewed favorably or not does have some bearing on the race, but favorability ratings say as much about voters’ assessment of contextual factors, such as the state of the economy, as they do about attitudes toward the candidate. That’s why the most accurate election-forecast models are based largely on economic variables and not on other issues. To be sure, in a tight race, one can cite almost any issue as determinative. But in prioritizing electoral influences, we start with the economy.

Drowning in Campaign Cash
A new entity, the Super PAC, emerged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC. Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts in connection with electoral races, so long as they do not coordinate their spending with the campaigns themselves. This is significant because it has rearranged how campaign money is spent, but it probably has not dramatically increased the likelihood that election victories can be “bought,” as many critics have claimed. First, the total percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on politics in the U.S. has remained stable over the last century despite numerous changes in campaign finance rules; this is unlikely to change any time soon. Second, evidence from past campaigns suggests that while lack of money can lose elections, a surplus of money is no guarantee of winning. Witness 2012’s most generous Super PAC donor, Sheldon Adelson, who was unable to “buy” the Republican nomination for his preferred candidate, Newt Gingrich.

Although large donors like Adelson have received most of the attention this year, we continue to see an increase in small-donor contributions of $10, $25, or $50. This year, the Federal Election Commission made it even easier to donate small amounts by approving technology that allows giving via text message. Reformers laud small contributions as more democratic than large ones, but small donors are also unrepresentative of the electorate at large. They are more likely to be white, male, and possess a higher income, and—importantly—they are also more likely to hold views on policy issues that are far from the mainstream. Those who collect most of their money from small contributors are candidates such as Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, and Vermont’s own Bernie Sanders—none of them is a moderate.

A Hopelessly Polarized Electorate
If there is one overriding media characterization of this election, it is that we are a deeply and increasingly polarized nation, an image indelibly captured in the ubiquitous red-state, blue-state electoral maps. That division, pundits tell us, is based on fundamental differences between Republicans and Democrats on a host of issues, from gun control to prayer in schools.  We believe this image is overdrawn. The mistake pundits make is to confuse a choice between two polarized candidates with a polarized electorate. It is true that candidates go to great lengths to differentiate themselves across a host of issues, and that these differences are based on very real and contrasting ideologies. However, as political scientist Morris Fiorina puts it, voters, while closely divided, are not deeply divided. Although they must choose between two very partisan candidates, most voters are moderates.

As we noted above, the moral values that attract so much media attention actually rank very low in voters’ priorities. Moreover, there is not much evidence indicating that red-state and blue-state voters differ significantly in their views on most of these “hot button” social issues. Aside from party identification, income remains the most consistent predictor of the presidential vote, with lower-income voters more likely to vote Democratic. Church attendance has become a better predictor of votes in recent years, but that may reflect the fact that presidential candidates are talking more about religious issues than it registers a change in voter opinions.

Health Care
We’ve been hearing all season long about Republican vows to repeal the Obama administration’s health-care law, and about Democratic vows to defend it. This campaign bluster obscures the fact that the main battles over the health-care law over the next few years will focus on the states. At the national level, Republicans are unlikely to have the votes to overturn the Affordable Care Act, but numerous Republican governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, Rick Scott of Florida, and Nikki Haley of South Carolina have promised to resist at least some provisions of the law. Indeed, over the summer the Supreme Court handed the states a powerful tool by ruling that states are free to reject the Act’s Medicaid expansion provisions.

It is no accident that the states are playing a key role in a controversial U.S. policy area. Congress and the White House often find that it is easier to get a bill passed if major conflicts are deflected onto the states. In the case of health care, Congress decided to let states set up insurance exchanges, for example, rather than fighting a battle over a single national model. One of the reasons that the U.S. federal system remains vital is that politicians in Washington repeatedly pass the buck to other levels of government. Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote that there is hardly a political question in the United States that does not eventually become a judicial question. We would add that there is seldom a national policy debate that does not touch on a local policy debate.

Conclusion
We hope that most readers will find the picture we paint more reassuring than the media’s portrayal of an electorate whose vote can be bought by misleading ads, flowery rhetoric, and pleasing candidate personalities. To be sure, voters have neither the time, nor the inclination, to dig deeply into the weeds of policy platforms or candidate biographies.  But they can tell a lot by observing shorthand cues, starting with the presidential candidates’ party allegiances, that allow voters to infer the relative candidate positions on those issues, particularly economic ones, that really matter to them.   And the evidence indicates that voters choose accordingly, in ways that are consistent with both their own preferences but also with what they view as the best interest of the nation. That voters do so is, we believe, a sign that elections continue to provide an effective mechanism for choosing our president and for insuring that he—someday she—remains responsive to the collective will of the American people.

Matt Dickinson and Bert Johnson teach in the political science department.  Matt and Bert cohost the middmag.com video series Professor Pundits.