Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Ambassador Nominee Samantha Power on the Role of the United Nations

June 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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President Obama nominated Samantha Power to be the next American ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday. As a journalist, academic, and sometime presidential advisor, she has consistently argued in favor of international action to prevent genocide and other abuses of human rights. She discussed her philosophy—and the role of the U.N.—in a 2008 interview with Miller-McCune magazine, the precursor to Pacific Standard, which we've reproduced below. Samantha Power teaches at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and it's worth noting her official title: "Professor of ... Read More

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Why Haven’t Obama’s Scandals Hurt His Approval Ratings?

May 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Last week, Obama's presidency, long noted for its dearth of major scandals compared to previous administrations, somehow pulled a hat trick. Benghazi, the IRS, and the Associated Press leak stories suddenly dominated all the available media coverage of the White House, and it was hard for anyone paying even modest attention to national politics to not get the impression that something bad was going on. And yet, at least up until now, these scandals do not seem to be hurting Obama's approval ratings. Indeed, by some indicators, more Americans approve of his performance now than did so a week ... Read More

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Members of Congress Are Elected to Represent, Not to Get Along

May 7, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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In case you've missed it, there's been a spate of op-eds recently blaming President Obama for a lack of leadership; Obama could have gotten Republican members of Congress to agree on gun control, tax increases, and many more of his legislative priorities if only he knew how to lead. What "leading" means is usually left rather vague. Ron Fournier believes it just involves "rising above circumstance," E.J. Dionne thinks it means showing how much you enjoy your job, and Maureen Dowd thinks it means writing the names of persuadable senators on a chart, just like in an Aaron Sorkin movie. The ... Read More

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Obama’s Unwanted Legacy: The Renewed Influence of ‘Old-Fashioned Racism’

January 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Barack Obama speaks at a campaign rally in North Carolina in 2008 (PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK)

As he looks back on his first term, President Barack Obama can take satisfaction from a series of significant accomplishments. But according to a new analysis by a Brown University political scientist, his rise to power has also produced a less-welcome result: A renewed alignment between political preference and “old-fashioned racism.” Old-school racist beliefs were “unrelated to white Americans’ partisan preferences throughout the post-civil rights era,” writes Michael Tesler. But his analysis of survey data, recently published in the Journal of Politics, suggests that changed ... Read More

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The Presidential Campaigns Didn’t Really Matter

November 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Political scientists argue Americans have all the information we need to make our voting decisions long before the campaign begins. So, we can—almost—call presidential elections while its still summertime. Why then do we have to endure long fall months of endless political rhetoric? Turns out, there is one simple reason. Most of us who are interested in politics are relieved. Whether or not we liked the outcome of the election, we are simply happy not to have to read and hear endless news about the two campaigns anymore. But we probably could have tuned out altogether while it was still ... Read More

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Hurricane Sandy and the Presidential Election

October 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

An October surprise is usually something ginned up by a political campaign, but this year it seems that mother nature has one up her sleeve, in the form of Hurricane Sandy. What effect might this have on the election? Here are two data points that nature's oppo researchers might have considered. According to a historical analysis by the political scientists Christopher H Achen and Larry M Bartels, fluke natural disasters--droughts, flu epidemics, even shark attacks--tend to damage an incumbent by association: We find that voters regularly punish governments for acts of God, including ... Read More

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Fetishizing the Bayonet

October 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

The blog-it, tweet-it, talk-about-it moment of the final presidential debate of 2012 involved, of all things, bayonets. Monday night in Boca Raton, Florida, when Republican challenger Mitt Romney complained that the U.S. Navy is smaller than at any time since 1917, President Obama quipped: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed." While many have already mined humor from the exchange, recent scholarship suggests that bayonets--which have suddenly become a symbol of outmoded weaponry--played a darker role in 20th-century ... Read More

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Atheists for Obama!

October 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Americans are losing their religion, and that's good news for Democrats. So says Pitzer College prof Phil Zuckerman in a fascinating breakdown in Bloomberg Businessweek. Americans have long been more religious than almost all other Western societies, but that's changing fast, reports Pitzer: In 1990, only 8 percent of Americans claimed to have no religion. Today, about 20 percent claim as much. More than one-third of American adults younger than 30 are now religiously unaffiliated, which means that among 20-somethings, secular Americans far outnumber evangelical Christians -- a big shift from ... Read More

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At Tonight’s Debate, Obama Needs to Get a Grip

October 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

If the first presidential debate was any indication, the candidates' body language will be analyzed as closely as their policy declarations during tonight's rematch. But what, specifically, should we look for to determine if they're on their game? Anthropologists Michael Lempert of the University of Michigan and Michael Silverstein of University of Chicago, who co-authored the new book Creatures of Politics: Media, Message and the American Presidency, have a very specific idea. According to a University of Michigan press release, "Lempert has spent hundreds of hours analyzing candidate ... Read More

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Congress: If You Liked 2010-12, You’ll Love 2012-14

October 16, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Writing at Mischiefs of Faction, the University of Miami's Greg Koger makes a good case for this evening's debate being a prelude to...nothing. Using current forecasts from Intrade, Koger calculated that regardless of which man wins the Oval Office, the likely balance of power in Congress post-election will make it nearly impossible for either to get anything done. The crux of the argument is the low probability of a functional legislature post-election. Koger calculated an overwhelming probability that we'd continue with power split strongly enough to make it easy to gridlock the ... Read More

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