reIn a lively debate at the American Political Science Association convention in Boston today, an esteemed group of political scientists gathered to forecast the 2008 presidential election. The consensus: advantage Barack Obama.

Using various forecasting models with variables that included GDP growth, presidential approval, fiscal policy, the leading economic indicators (LEI), and primary results in New Hampshire as predictors of the two-party vote share, the various political scientists agreed that Obama was highly likely to win the presidency–with the exception of James Campbell, who blogs for Britannica; Campbell, whose prediction won’t be released until next week, since his model relies on the Gallup Labor Day polls (and it’s not Labor Day yet), believes it will be an extremely close election, with a slight advantage to John McCain.

The run-down of the predictions and models:

• Tom Holbrook (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): Model focuses on personal economic conditions and presidential approval. Two-party share of the vote: Obama 55.5%. Obama has a 92% chance of winning.
• Chris Wlezien (Temple University): Model variables include leading economic indicators and polls. Two-party share of the vote: Obama 52.2% based on August polls. Obama has a 72% chance of winning.
• Brad Lockerbie (East Carolina University): model looks at consumer attitudes and behavior and polls. He notes that economic expectations are the second worst since polls have been able to answer this question (in 1980 voters were more pessimistic). Two-party share of the vote: Obama 58%. (He also predicted a 25-seat loss in the House for Republicans.)
• Helmut Norpoth (SUNY, Stony Brook): Using a New Hampshire primary model and an electoral cycle variable (taking account as to whether the incumbent party had held the presidency for two terms or longer), his talk was entitled “On the Razor’s Edge.” Two-party share of the vote: Obama in a nailbiter with 50.1%.
• Alfred Cuzan (University of West Florida): In a talk presented by Randy Jones, Cuzan’s model is based on fiscal policy–that is, that if the share of government spending of GDP increases the incumbent party is penalized by voters. Their model also uses economic growth and length of term of the president’s party. Two-party share of the vote: Obama 51.9%.
• Michael Lewis-Beck (University of Iowa): Lewis-Beck’s model looks at economic growth, presidential popularity, jobs creation, and incumbency. His initial model predicts Obama to carry 56.58% of the two-party vote share. BUT, he notes that one cannot extrapolate beyond their data and that Obama’s candidacy, as the first African American candidate. So, attempting to tease out the race factor, he eventually concludes that 11.5% of voters would never vote for an African American candidate and that there will be a 6.51% penalty for Obama. Two-party share of the vote: Obama 50.07%. Calling this a potential Bermuda Triangle election, he notes that there could be an inversion between the popular and electoral vote a la 2000.
• Alan Abramowitz (Emory University): Boasting he has never been wrong in 20 years, Abramowitz’s model looks at GDP growth, presidential approval, and a “time for change” factor. Two-party share of the vote: Obama 54.3%
• James Campbell (University at Buffalo, SUNY): His model takes into account polls at Labor Day and the economy (GDP). As noted above, he can’t release his final prediction for a few days, but if McCain is at 46% of the two-party poll on Labor Day, he predicts McCain would get about 50% of the vote, meaning that it’s likely to be a close election, with a slight lead for McCain–thus making Campbell the odd political scientist out in Boston on the panel. Perhaps an enviable position to be in.

It was a really intriguing panel as the speakers went through their various methodologies, and voters will have the chance to prove these projections right–or wrong.

And, as James Campbell noted, predictions by political scientists are always wrong.

Of course, it doesn’t stop them from making them.

It’s official. John McCain’s running mate is first-term, 44-year-old Alaska governor Sarah Palin. 

It’s a curious, baffling, and—yes—historic choice that sets up quite a campaign. America will either have its first African American president or its first woman vice president.

For the past several months, Republicans have been questioning Barack Obama’s readiness to be commander-in-chief, even going so far as to suggest that Obama’s selection of Joe Biden to be his VP candidate was a tacit acknowledgement of that fact. The convention wisdom, coming from the Republicans, was that Obama selected someone who possessed characteristics that he didn’t: experience, appeal to white working class voters, etc.

What does McCain’s pick say? I am not sure, and at first blush it makes little sense.

Palin’s selection eliminates—or at least greatly reduces—the effectiveness of the chief charge against Obama–that he’s not ready to be president, that he’s too inexperienced.

How can the Republicans make that case when their vice-presidential pick–someone who is a heartbeat away from the presidency–has less experience than Obama? If Obama’s not ready to be president, then surely Sarah Palin cannot be either. Palin’s youth and vigor will also stand in stark contrast to McCain, who is the oldest non-incumbent ever to secure a major party’s nomination for the presidency.

Many have also thought that with McCain closing the gap with Obama in the polls that he might make a safe choice—a Romney or a Pawlenty. But, the selection of Palin, perhaps in an attempt to carve into Hillary Clinton’s base, is a hail Mary, a choice that smacks of desperation. Again, this is curious, because McCain is probably even money (though not on the Intrade boards) to win the presidency.

The only thing that makes sense is that McCain has always seen himself as a Maverick Man, and perhaps he sees in this pick that he reinforces his image of someone willing to buck conventional wisdom.

If it seems like I am grasping to explain the selection, it’s because I am. The pick may turn out to be quite brilliant—and she may make a great vice president (or president)—but for now it appears to be a desperate choice by a politician who didn’t need to act desperate.

Are the old animated films still ok for kids to watch?  Decide for yourself.   (Hat tip: Christopher Campbell, SpoutBlog)

Click here to watch YouTube video. 

As I write this, Gustavo is a tropical storm off the coast of Jamaica, its winds blowing hard at about 70 miles per hour. By the time this note is published, Gustavo may have begun to fall apart, as energy systems, the laws of thermodynamics instruct, tend to do.

It probably will have gathered force, on the other hand, enough to go beyond Jamaica and enter the Gulf of Mexico—in which case it will almost certainly have become a hurricane, bound for the Gulf Coast of northeastern Mexico and the United States.

A hurricane is a “big wind,” the root meaning of the original Carib Indian word hurucan, technically defined as a strong tropical cyclone with sustained winds of more than 74 miles per hour. But, as residents of New Orleans and vicinity in particular and the Caribbean in general well know, that “more than” can embrace a wide range of qualities, from the comparatively mild to the utterly devastating.

Stormtrackers rely on live, sometimes minute-by-minute reports to keep an eye out on how a tropical storm is progressing. They rely just as much on mathematical models—models that are now pointing to a hurricane, and a big one at that.

The models have only so much predictive value, though, largely because hurricanes are really a loosely connected series of coincidences. One requirement is that the ocean attain a surface temperature of 28 degrees Celsius. Another is that a heat and cold collide, which occurs when the comparatively cool, upwelling waters of West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea flow northward and meet waters heated by the Sahara.

Given these and a few other conditions in just the right proportion (I am deliberately oversimplifying, because the science is both complex and constantly being revised), a tropical storm will result, typically in the form of a column of rising air that turns cyclonically, moving with the prevailing winds and generating ever more intense winds of its own.

Sometimes a tropical storm will collapse under its own weight and die in the middle of the ocean. Sometimes it will make landfall, do damage of some degree, and then fade away. Sometimes, though, it will make land, do great damage, and stay alive, gathering force with every mile. So it was with Hurricane Katrina, still fresh in the memory of those who are now in the path of another storm.

Hurricanes, strange to say, do good as well as harm; they are essential to the workings of a healthy ocean, in part by helping keep coral reefs alive—another complex story. But it is the ravening destruction of a hurricane that rivets us. Stay tuned as Gustavo makes its way in the world.

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To track Gustavo, see the U.S. Geological Survey’s excellent resource Science That Weathers the Storm and the frequently updated reports published by the National Weather Service. For views of what a storm can do, see Spike Lee’s excellent film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.

There he goes again.

Once again, Charles Murray is arguing that some people are not worth the time and trouble to educate because they are “just not smart enough,” in his words, to learn anything more than manual skills. And he can prove it! Scientifically!

Murray, for those of you who don’t follow this stuff, is the co-author of The Bell Curve, which famously argued, among other things, that poor people are poor primarily because of immutably low intelligence—an argument that has been refuted by some of the top scientists in the country (see, for example, Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man; see also The Bell Curve Wars). Murray is back with a new book that was excerpted in The Wall Street Journal this month, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.

A small part of what Murray is talking about is common sense—for example, that different people have different capacities for learning different kinds of things. And he actually has some rather trenchant criticisms of higher education that deserve discussion.

But in typical Murray fashion he goes far beyond what research and common sense allow to say that we as a nation can and should identify children’s innate capacity in first grade and sort them into different kinds of educational experiences, training some to be the worker bees and some to be the thinking leaders and decision makers they are meant to be. He posits himself as a man who has the courage to say what other, politically correct people, fear to say:

Most poor children simply don’t have the intellectual capacity to benefit from a liberal arts education.

It would be kinder, he says, to teach those children to fix cars rather than to ask them read novels, which are really more appropriate for—I’m going to take a leap, here—Murray’s children and grandchildren.

Murray is not the first to make an intellectual determinism argument, and he won’t be the last. But neither science nor history is really on his side.

For one thing, people have genetic limitations, but in most cases no one really knows exactly what they are, what they limit, or how to measure those limitations—in part because the human brain has the capacity to compensate for those limitations in surprising ways. Which raises the question: What sorting mechanism would be sufficient for this purpose? How reliable is it? Couldn’t there possibly be children who should go to college despite scoring low on whatever first-grade measure we allow Murray to choose?

As Ben Wildavsky said, in a wonderful answer to Murray in the Wall Street Journal, “One can’t help thinking: Woe to those who get put in the wrong category.”

In addition, Murray is ignoring the fact that good instruction makes a huge difference in what kids can and do learn. Just to give one example: from 1998 to 2005, Delaware’s poor children gained 25 scale score points in reading on the fourth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress. Some people (see my last blog entry) would count that as improving by more than two grade-levels of reading achievement in just seven years. This isn’t because poor children in Delaware were less poor or less isolated in 2005 than their older brothers and sisters had been in 1998—if anything, the opposite is the case. Instead, maybe, educators in Delaware have figured out something about reading instruction. Similarly, Alabama as a whole gained 8 points on NAEP in fourth-grade reading in the two short years between 2005 and 2007, a remarkable improvement. If teachers and administrators in Delaware and Alabama had accepted that poor children were doomed to the same achievement levels as had been achieved as in the past, they might not have bothered.

As a nation, we make the most progress when we simply ignore the notion that some people aren’t worth educating. In the middle of the 19th century, the establishment of the land-grant colleges and universities opened higher education to a much broader swath of Americans than ever before—the sons and daughters (mostly sons at first) of farmers and workers, many of whom went on to develop and implement the agricultural and industrial innovations which both helped propel the United States into its powerhouse status and later helped feed the world.

Similarly, the G.I. Bill opened even elite higher education institutions to the returning soldiers of World War II. The G.I.s were regarded by many professors and university administrators as bumpkins unworthy of the exquisite educational experience available at such places as Harvard and the University of Chicago. Courageous? Maybe. But were they “smart enough” to analyze and think? Well, those returning vets, once they got a higher education, provided much of the managerial and professional spine for the nation’s economy for the second-half of the 20th century.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, appearing on the News Hour in 2000, agreed with fellow historian Stephen Ambrose’s assessment that the G.I. Bill “made modern America.” Goodwin said, “It shows what happens when you give people who don’t have a chance an extraordinary opportunity.”

When this nation puts its energies into the idea that an education is the birthright of Americans, rather than a scarce commodity that must be doled out on the basis of pre-determined capacity, it sees enormous benefits.

We know that too often poor children and children of color follow an educational trajectory that could be plotted at birth. For Murray to trot out data to demonstrate that is evidence only that we have not done a good job teaching all children; it is not evidence that we can’t.

The worry I have about Charles Murray’s new book is that it will divert attention from the work that needs to be done—figuring out how to teach all kids—to argue yet again over whether we can and should.

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Karin Chenoweth is the author of “It’s Being Done”: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools 

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) designed the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and other parts of that city; Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York; Belle Isle Park, in Michigan; portions of the campus of Stanford University near San Francisco, California; the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina; and many other instances of what might be called “mediated landscapes” throughout North America. Until recently, he was little remembered outside the textbooks, but he was famous in his own day, cheered as a pioneer of a particularly American kind of garden and landscape design.

Olmsted was a man of the city, and, though he loved the countryside, he labored first of all to make America’s cities—then grim, smoky, congested, and often dangerous places—more livable. (That remains a challenge for designers, planners, and environmentalists today.) Along the way, by bringing it within their reach, he instructed city dwellers in the pleasures and value of nature, incorporating a sense of the wild in all his designs. All this helped ease the way to the development of a national park system in the closing years of his life, and it is no accident that the greatest architect of that system, Theodore Roosevelt, was a New Yorker who admired what is perhaps Olmsted’s most famous creation, Central Park, and sought out his opinions on how to protect some of America’s most scenic places.

Like Roosevelt, Olmsted packed many careers, wide travel, and deep learning into a long life. He came from a good family, but he was restless, and his father worried that young Frederick, who showed indications of straying from respectable commerce into the arts, was destined to be a dabbler and wastrel. To prove him wrong, and to escape whatever remedy his father might try to apply—an apprenticeship or clerkship, perhaps—Olmsted signed on as a hand on a China-bound freighter, and he served his young years as a common sailor.

His shipboard service, which steered him into many storms and required backbreaking labor, convinced Frederick that the seafaring life was not for him. It did nothing to cure his wanderlust, however. He spent time in Europe, studying art and touring monuments and ruins. He managed, briefly and disastrously, a California gold mine. He crisscrossed the country many times over, writing reports and articles, and worked as an editor for the New York Daily Times and The Nation, where he polished the prose of Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Finally, during the Civil War, he became the administrator of a hospital unit, where he witnessed horrors and bureaucratic ineptitude.

His experiences in the war helped settle Olmsted somewhat. Having seen so much destruction, he was now determined to serve the cause of beauty. He developed a vision of America’s landscape, with its broad vistas and open skies, as a means of shaping the national character. He labored to make America’s urban spaces speak to that promise, bringing trees and scenery into the congested grid of urban streets. He inserted wilderness and pastoral settings into the heart of North American cities such as Montreal, Boston, and Chicago, preferring a small human scale and the randomness of real life to European public spaces, with their imposing architecture and nothing-out-of-place formal gardens.

His program of parks, broad avenues, and greenways would, Olmsted argued, serve a public good by connecting city dwellers to the natural world—and, more practically, by relieving the city’s grim monotony of concrete and metal. And he was right: New York without a Central Park would be a different, and far poorer, place.

It is worth looking at Central Park in detail, for it well illustrates Olmsted’s ideas on what a great public space should be. Working with and often arguing with a formally trained partner for the duration of the project, Olmsted insisted that lawns, trees, and water be the park’s three great elements, punctuated by small plantings of flowers rather than the great, elaborate flowerbeds favored in classic European landscape design. Olmsted used trees as a painter uses colors, mixing different species in different combinations against big, grassy foregrounds. That pleasure in mystery is reflected in Central Park’s playful, mazelike paths, glades, tunnels, and bridges, which enable dwellers in what is certainly America’s most crowded city to find little spots to get away from other people. His other urban parks fill much the same need, offering both private spaces for harried urbanites and large open areas where they could meet en masse to play, see sports events, listen to concerts, and enjoy the sun.

Olmsted also took away from his hospital experiences the notion that planning was the key to success. Whereas most Americans of his time lived from year to year, bound to the cycles of agriculture and business, he considered what his projects might look like a hundred years and more in the future. He carefully plotted the placement of statues, fountains, ponds, benches, and flowerbeds alike, and he drew and erased and measured and drew again before putting anything on the ground—a very good practice for any gardener or home-improvement buff to take up.

Olmsted insisted on being allowed to act independently to achieve his vision. His clients usually complied, though they didn’t always pay him on time. It is hard to imagine any designer being given as much autonomy today, for now endless commissions, interest groups, and municipal offices turn every project into a design by committee—which may be one reason why modern gardens, parks, and public spaces seem formulaic and uninteresting in comparison to his creations.

Click here to watch a video of Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.  

Condos are still available in the first rotating skyscraper in the world, situated (where else?) in Dubai.  Says architect David Fisher, designer of the building, “From now on, buildings will have four dimensions, the fourth dimension is ‘Time’ to become part of architecture. Buildings in motion will shape the sky line of our cities.”  Each floor moves at a different speed, resulting in an ever-changing shape to the structure.  The building is also prefabricated and self-powered, generating enough electricity for itself and nearby buildings.  Many construction details, however, are still to be worked out.  Completion is slated for 2010, so order now (it’s only $3,000/per sq. foot)!

I don’t know about those who watched the Olympics in non-battleground states, but here in Virginia, I saw a constant loop of commercials that fit into a very tight range of categories:

1) Coca-cola’s valorization of China – It is a big market that likes red things, and we don’t want them turning to Pepsi.

2) Budweiser – Every time the Dalmatian gives the Clydesdale a fist bump my two-year-old screams with delight and dances around the room.

3) Erectile dysfunction products – Evidently, nothing makes middle-aged men want to feel young and vital again more than re-kindling the lost dreams of athletic glory. Viva Viagra!

4) Presidential Candidates. John McCain and Barack Obama are going at it like it’s October here. I think that the fact that McCain runs ads that intone “We are worse off than we were four years ago” is still amazing to me, but with a “wrong track” number near 80%, it would be foolish to open with, “Let the good times keep rolling.”

However, what I am really interested in is the connection between (3) and (4) – I want someone to start asking the presidential candidates about IMPOTENCE. I don’t care about whether or not they need Viagra, or Cyalis, or Extenze, or even how many bedrooms they may have in their house(s). I want to know how they plan to deal with America’s impotence.

For the last eight years, we have been entranced by a narrative of infinite virility. We can, we are told, do anything we set our mind to. If an enemy defies us, we can attack them. If they fight back, we have a surge capable of controlling every force within their power. Not to overplay the sexual imagery, but the promise that our targets will submit to our advances if we only have the courage to be bold and forward has been repeated so often that it has become heresy to even question it.

But the last three weeks should confirm that our pretensions to infinite vigor and overwhelming force have been far less real than we hoped. Both Russia and China have confirmed that there is little we can do to contain their power. In Georgia, Russia continues to flout all our warnings that they must leave the sovereign boundaries of a country that we were recently intent on bringing into NATO. We should be relieved that we had not done so yet because if Georgia were in NATO, Russia would have attacked anyway, and we would have looked that much more helpless when we had no viable way to come to their defense.

On the other side of Asia, China has flouted every norm of liberalism that we thought they had promised to uphold in exchange for the Olympics, and we had no answer other than to gush over how efficiently the whole system works. They conclusively demonstrated that they could play all the games that interest American corporations and American consumers and still maintain a repressive political system. The contradiction that we thoroughly expected would undo them appears to be no contradiction at all, and we have no plan B for encouraging changes that they have no intention of making.

All of this is to say that the last President spent eight years vocally proclaiming that there was no limit to the potential transformation that American power and preeminence could bring to the world, and now the next President is likely to spend four (or eight) years trying to explain why we can’t change some things and how we must learn to live with or mitigate evils beyond our correction.

John McCain’s forceful denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia did make Barack Obama’s slow, low-key, and calibrated call for restraint look somewhat weak and indecisive, and Obama quickly felt the need to ratchet up his rhetoric. However, neither has offered any clear and credible way to deter Russian designs on Georgia. McCain’s stated willingness to suspend Russia’s access to the G8 channels does not appear to scare the Russians nearly so much as it scares our European allies who are closer to the action and decisively dependent on Russian oil reserves. Does it make any sense at all to speak so strongly when carrying no stick?

Whoever the next President is, he will probably face an ongoing crisis in Georgia, a long-term question about how to deal with an immensely powerful China, and numerous other cases from Iran to Malaysia and North Korea in which our options are decisively limited. I, for one, would respect a President willing to say, “Yes, that is a very bad situation, but there is only so much we can do about it.” Neither Obama nor McCain seem very inclined to give that answer, but it is time that we admit that there are many national and international arenas (far from the bedroom) in which impotence is one of America’s most thorny problems.

Click here to watch a video of Jimmy Carter at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.