Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Are Incumbents Invulnerable?

April 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
george-h-w-bush

Being an incumbent politician seems like a pretty good gig. Members of Congress usually win re-election more than 90 percent of the time. Even in famously tough "anti-incumbent" years like 2010, 87 percent of those who sought re-election won it. And, of course, we're on our third consecutive two-term presidency right now. Incumbents seem to get all the breaks—they have an easier time raising money than their challengers, they're better known, they're more experienced, etc. Is it even worth it to try to unseat an incumbent? In a thoughtful post a few weeks ago, Jonathan Bernstein pushed ... Read More

Reversal of Fortune: A Prosecutor on Trial

April 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
ken-anderson

For 30 years, Ken Anderson was the face of law enforcement in Williamson County, Texas, first as a bearded district attorney asking the court for tough sentences, and for the last 10 years handing those kinds of sentences out as a judge. Earlier this month, his beard gone, his hair white, Anderson, noted for his talks to school children about the criminal justice system and the dangers of drugs, walked into the courthouse again, this time as a defendant. He had come to turn himself in, be fingerprinted, photographed, and post $2,500 bail. A few hours earlier a judge had ordered his ... Read More

The Iraq Sanctions Myth

April 26, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
sanctions-march

Just over 10 years ago the United Kingdom followed the United States into the bloody Iraq War. George W. Bush and Tony Blair justified the invasion mainly with the claim that Iraq possessed, or was in the process of building, weapons of mass destruction. Most people now seem to be aware that this premise was false. Yet a crucial myth surrounding the Iraq War still commands widespread belief—that economic sanctions aimed at Saddam Hussein and his regime killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children in the 1990s and early 2000s. The supposed lethality of economic sanctions was used as an ... Read More

Congress Deliberated Something Yesterday?

April 24, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(IMAGE: AURIN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

Public opinion of the U.S. Congress is so low (Gallup had it at 15 percent approval last week) anything but pure party politics can feel unexpected from the institution. Yesterday's Senate hearings on the use of unmanned "drone" aircraft for targeted assassinations were an astonishing example. Most attention on the hearing has focused on the unlikely testimony of Farea Al Muslimi, the 22-year-old son of a hardscrabble farmer and an illiterate mother. Al Muslimi's town in rural Yemen was hit by a U.S. drone strike less than a week ago. (He's written a version the experience in an article for ... Read More

Remember That Time Abraham Lincoln Tried to Get the Slaves to Leave America?

April 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
lincoln-portrait

There’s an Abraham Lincoln you probably know: the tall, bearded, badass President who freed the slaves with his axe while fighting off the Confederate Army, which may or may not have been made up of vampires. Other than the beard—and what a beard it was—and his stature, the Lincoln in Lincoln isn’t really Lincoln. Rather, Spielberg’s character, and the Lincoln that permeates our culture, is one of the ideal, unflawed statesman. The movie covers up his warts and makes him less interesting and less human. Oh, and it ignores the fact that he tried to convince the slaves he so famously ... Read More

Crowd-Sourcing Big Brother

April 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
dark-knight-masket

Last week, Boston law enforcement authorities and the FBI found themselves in a tough situation. A heinous crime had been committed, but they had no suspects or leads. So they asked for help. If you had photos or video from the finish line of the Boston Marathon, they said, send it in. People responded with great enthusiasm, submitting terabytes of data. Included in the many images were the now-iconic pictures of the two suspects, one of whom is now dead, the other in custody. This series of events served as an important lesson about the government's surveillance capabilities. Almost no ... Read More

How Many People Have Died in Terrorist Attacks This Month?

April 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
watertown

In 2011, the most-recent year of the Global Terrorism Index, there were 4,564 terrorist incidents, which led to 7,473 deaths. The numbers presumably take a while to compile, and last year's numbers are still unavailable, but there's a a constantly-updated chart of this year's terrorist attacks here. It's by no means exhaustive, but it's at least a list of attacks and deaths that have definitely happened. From this past month: 75 dead in bombings and shootings in Iraq on the 15th 55 dead in an assault in Afghanistan on the 3rd 45 dead in a bombing in Iraq on the 1st 35 dead in suicide ... Read More

Political Science in the Raw: The Papers That Could Change Politics in the Coming Years

April 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
mpsa-conference

I’ve just returned from the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual conference in Chicago. This conference is always a favorite of mine. It’s quite big, but it tends to draw a large proportion of people who study American politics and methods—my kind of folks. It also draws a healthy combination of graduate students using cutting-edge techniques and established scholars with practical experience, and allows opportunities for mentorship and the sharing of ideas. I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight just a handful of papers I saw that struck me as interesting and ... Read More

Affirmative Action’s Road Doesn’t Pass Through Perfection

April 15, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
supreme-court-building

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion soon on the first affirmative action case it has heard since mumbling (or not) its way through a decision on the Grutter v. Bollinger case a decade ago. The justices heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin last October. The plaintiff, a spurned white applicant to UTA, argued that including race, even tangentially, in its admission process was a violation of the 14th Amendment. Were a court majority to agree, it would essentially overturn Grutter, which had allowed race to be included in a basket of admissions standards ... Read More

Margaret Thatcher: Convicted of Black-and-White Thinking

April 9, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
thatcher-black-and-white

Among the handful of quotes that surface repeatedly in the obituaries on Margaret Thatcher is her self-description not as “a consensus politician or a pragmatic politician, but a conviction politician.” Numerous stories published since her death Monday have used the word “conviction” in their headlines or as the organizing principle in describing her life. Paragraph-length encomiums from Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and even Meryl Streep all feature the word “conviction” as one of the Iron Lady’s qualities. In 2009, University of Connecticut ... Read More