Today I am delighted to be able to bring you another VSI column. This month Véronique Mottier has kindly answered a few questions for OUPblog about her latest book Sexuality: A Very Short Introduction. Véronique Mottier is Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences at Jesus College since 1999, and part-time Professor in Sociology at the University of Lausanne since 2006.

OUP: Have sexuality and politics always been as closely aligned as they seem to be today?

VÉRONIQUE MOTTIER: In antiquity already, sex was important to political life, but in different ways from the present. For example, in ancient Athens, it was perfectly acceptable for free men to have sex with women, slaves, or young men. However, men who prostituted themselves were seen to lower themselves to the level of women and slaves by accepting the role of sexual object, and could be stripped of their political citizenship rights. Accusations of sexual impropriety were frequently used weapons against political opponents in public debate in the ancient world and could have devastating consequences. It is difficult to think of any society where the sexual was not political, though how the political and sexual spheres were understood has varied enormously throughout history. What is different today is the pervasive role of the modern state, which intervenes in the sex lives of its citizens through education, legislation, and healthcare. Another important change is that modern citizens demand political rights based on their sexual orientation. In the classical world, the idea of classifying people according to the gender of the person they have sex with would have seemed downright bizarre!

OUP: You talk about the impact of HIV/AIDS in your book. With the rate of new infections still rising in the Western world, what do you think governments need to do to help slow the epidemic?

MOTTIER: There is certainly no room for complacency. While anti-viral drugs have been highly successful in extending the lives of people living with AIDS, the battle has by no means won. Campaigns promoting sexual abstinence have been largely unsuccessful in reducing unsafe sex, while prevention strategies which focused primarily on providing information and condoms have implicitly assumed that citizens are rational beings who will abandon their risky practices once they’ve been informed of the risks. Continuing new infections demonstrate that the provision of information and condoms continues to be crucial; however, it is not enough. Sex does not constitute the most rational area of most individuals’ lives. Today, Western governments are increasingly aware that prevention campaigns need to try to take into account the emotional and irrational aspects of people’s sex lives.

OUP: You say in the book that sexuality has been an issue that has deeply divided feminists over the years. Could you briefly explain to the OUPblog readers in what ways this has happened?

MOTTIER: Many feminists initially embraced the sexual revolution of the 1960s with great enthusiasm, seeing sexual liberation as crucial for women’s liberation generally. Pretty rapidly however, feminist critiques emerged which rejected sexual liberation rhetoric for mainly serving the sexual interests of men while continuing to exploit women. Separatist lesbian groups argued that women who slept with men were ‘collaborating with the enemy’, a stance which hardly endeared them to heterosexual feminists at the time and created great controversy within the women’s movement. Further deep splits over the links between sexuality and women’s oppression occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when prominent voices such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography and prostitution were forms of violence against women, and that sexual violence was the foundation of male domination over women generally. In contrast, feminists such as Lynne Segal or Carol Queen began to define themselves as ‘sex-positive’, rejecting the ‘depressing’ views of sexuality that reduce female sexual pleasure from intercourse to the effects of male brainwashing.

OUP: With so much controversy over sex education, when do you think is the optimum age to start sex education in schools, and why?

MOTTIER: Perhaps we should less worry about the age at which sex education should start (since different cultures have such different ideas about sexual adulthood this that a general reply would make little sense), and more about its contents. It strikes me that much sex education today aims to inform children of the mechanics of sex, as well as of its risks and dangers such as unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmissible diseases. These are extremely important matters; what gets a bit lost in the process is the issue of sexual pleasure. If we want to produce citizens who are able to express and negotiate their sexual needs, and to respect partners’ personal boundaries, sex education needs to address issues of communication and consent perhaps more explicitly than it has done in the past.

OUP: Once people have read your VSI, which five books would you recommend them for further reading?

MOTTIER: Jeffrey Weeks’ Sexuality is an excellent and well-written general introduction (Routledge, 2003). David Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (Routledge, 1990) is a scholarly analysis revealing the enormous gap that separates modern understandings of sexuality from those of the ancient world. The series of reports by Shere Hite, in particular her Hite Report on Female Sexuality, first published in 1976 (Dell Books), remain fascinating, both in terms of offering insights into people’s everyday experiences of sexuality in 1970s America, and as prominent contributions to the feminist critiques of sexuality which followed the sexual revolution. Angus McLaren’s Impotence: A Cultural History (2007) on the cultural consequences of male sexual ‘failure’ is riveting. The influential History of Sexuality (especially Volume 1: an introduction) by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (Penguin 1990) transformed current thinking about sex when it first came out in 1976.

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David Domke is Professor of Communication and Head of Journalism at the University of Washington.  Together with Kevin Coe he wrote The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. To learn more about the book check out their handy website here, to read more posts by Domke and Coe click here. In the post below Domke examines the role of race in the Presidential election.

The consensus among political journalists and pundits is that if race becomes a salient matter in the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama is in trouble. The thinking goes something like this: if white voters are reminded that Obama is black, or start to think through a racial prism, the nation’s first African American major-party presidential candidate will lose.

In the words of NBC News political director Chuck Todd: “Anytime race is THE topic du jour in the campaign, it’s a bad day for Obama. Period.”

I disagree.

Let’s review the three most racialized moments in the campaign.

First there was the tit-for-tat in late January, as the Democratic Party approached the South Carolina primary. Obama had won the Iowa caucuses, Clinton had won in New Hampshire and Nevada, and in the days before the Palmetto State’s voting, the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns traded accusations that each was bringing up race for political advantage. When Obama won a landslide victory, Bill Clinton dismissed it as Jesse Jackson redux, drawing significant criticism for the comparison. Was Obama damaged by all of this? Not hardly. Bill Clinton, however, has yet to recover.

Next there was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remix of God bless America, in which Wright presented an image of an angry-at-America, angry-at-whites black man. The political and media punditry quickly sounded the death knell for Obama’s candidacy, and indeed Obama sank in the polls. The Gallup Daily Tracking Poll in mid-March showed him leading Hillary Clinton 50% to 44% before the Wright videos emerged, and five days later it was Clinton up 49% to 42%. But within days Obama was back in the lead, following his profoundly adult speech on race in Philadelphia.

Most recently we had the he said-he said showdown between John McCain’s and Obama’s campaigns, beginning with McCain’s “Celebrity” advertisement linking Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Some say that tying Obama to young, sexualized white women was an attempt to prime racial stereotypes about black men. For his part, Obama said that the McCain campaign was trying to tell everyone that Obama “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The Obama side later acknowledged it was a ham-handed attempt to highlight race without saying so explicitly.

The McCain camp immediately jumped on it, saying that it was the Obama camp who was playing the “race card.” Sensing an advantage, the McCain campaign has subsequently gone all-in with its advertising strategy, and has now released a web advertisement that declares “Hot chicks love Obama.” ABC News’ Jake Tapper put the count of white women at a minimum of 4. Subtle it ain’t.

Since the McCain-Obama back-and-forth began, the Gallup Daily Tracking poll has shown an interesting pattern. On July 30, when the Celebrity ad was released by the McCain campaign, Obama led McCain 45% to 44%. On each of the following two days the candidates tied at 44%, but nearly every day since Obama has gained ground—and as of Wednesday he led, 48% to 42%. If Obama was hurt by the racial dynamics, these numbers don’t show it.

So how to explain all of this?

I’ll offer two lines of argument.

1. Obama is hurt by race when it is a below-the-radar subtext, but he benefits when it is brought explicitly into the light of day. This is exactly what research in political psychology suggests: that only subtle, implicit racial messages work in today’s U.S. politics. The evidence suggests that most Americans don’t want to act upon their embedded racial prejudices, so when these biases become apparent to them, voters take intentional steps to act differently.

In South Carolina, Bill Clinton’s claims that Obama’s race helps him among black voters and Clinton’s reference to Jesse Jackson made race explicit, and subsequently Obama benefited. With Jeremiah Wright, Obama was hurt in polls when people simply saw Wright’s rants, but then Obama bounced back after his “More Perfect Union” speech directly addressed racial divisions. And in the aftermath of the salvos with the McCain camp two weeks ago, the news media are now giving closer scrutiny to the racial dynamics of the campaign. Such scrutiny, this pattern suggests, will help Obama.

2. There are two political groups that are determined that Obama will not suffer the same fate as Democratic Party nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988, when the George H. W. Bush campaign rode the infamous “Willie Horton” ad to victory.

The first are African American voters, whose support for Obama is at unprecedented levels for a Democrat. In response to the Wright flap, for example, media reports suggested that blacks often rallied to Obama’s side.

Second, the “swiftboat” experiences of John Kerry in 2004 has put the Obama campaign and supporters on high-alert against what it considers unfair criticisms, subtle or otherwise. The Obama campaign launched its site in June, “Fight the Smears,” and on Wednesday Kerry himself launched a site, “Truth Fights Back.” Both of these sites, ironically, draw upon Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign’s war-room approach of instant responses. These kinds of tactics ensure that the Obama campaign will weigh in quickly with its viewpoints, and can go on the offense whenever race comes up. That makes certain that they’re significant players in defining the debate.

These factors have made race a complex factor in this presidential campaign—which is as we might expect, given its deep, embedded, and often-contradictory positioning in American culture at large. The evidence simply doesn’t suggest that Obama is always hurt when race is part of the campaign. In fact, it appears to be exactly the opposite, so far.

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Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the post below he examines the effect of the collapse of the former Soviet Union.

The collapse of the former Soviet Union generated much satisfaction among many Americans, Europeans, and others who, with justification, saw the evils of that empire as proof of the failures of the Communist system on which it was based. No political system hitherto invented provides protection against the worst instincts of rapacious rulers and their acolytes, and many of those who thought that Karl Marx had done so found themselves contemplating their fate in the gulag, where tens of millions perished while Soviet bigwigs partied in their dachas. The theoretical merits of Communism turned out no better in practice than Nazism or Fascism, whether tested in Russia, China, or Cambodia.

But the world may yet come to appreciate the seven decades of Communist control over the Soviet empire for what it did to constrain the Russian reach for global power. Communism’s end-justifies-the-means produced conditions under which fear, and hence corruption, suppressed initiative and innovation. Communism’s inherent inefficiencies spawned an economic system destined to disintegrate in a globalizing world. The Communist imperialists extended their power over a vast colonial empire reaching from central Asia to central Europe, requiring massive investments in policing as well as armed intervention. Entire populations (for example the Chechens and the Tatars) were exiled to remote desert areas at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, then “pardoned” by more moderate rulers to return to their abandoned abodes where Russians had taken their place. To the wider world, Russia’s Cold-War leaders might threaten “we will bury you,” but the cost of their ruthless rule inhibited their capacity to do so, and the Cold War stayed cold except in proxy settings.

Now Russia is the “free and open” society that might have emerged from the Revolution a century ago, its lost empire a national preoccupation, its former colonies resentful, its Communist-era settlers abandoned to newly sovereign governments, its allies near and far looking to Moscow for succor. In their unconstrained social-spatial engineering, the dominant Russians of the former U.S.S.R. redrew boundaries and awarded territories and peoples to “republics” of which they were not historically a part on the arrogant assumption that all Soviet member states would be Moscow’s vassals in perpetuity. Thus a Soviet dictator in 1954 capriciously transferred the Crimea Peninsula to Ukraine as a reward for Ukraine’s contribution to the Soviet Union’s well-being, not imagining that, before the end of the century, Ukraine would be a sovereign state in fact rather than in Communist mythology. As a result, millions of Russians today find themselves under the government in Kyyiv (Kiev) rather than Moscow.

The Slavic diaspora in what Russians still call their “near-abroad” continue to arouse nationalist emotions in the new Russia. Millions of Russians have returned to their ancestral home, but many more remain beyond the border, from Kazakhstan to Estonia. And others – Slavs as well as non-Slavs – who allied themselves with the Communist cause during the Soviet period also have Moscow’s attention. Indeed, while the current crisis in Georgia has been simmering for years, its escalation relates directly to the last convulsions of another Communist collapse, that of Yugoslavia, and its largest fragment, Serbia.

The devolution of the former Yugoslavia initially yielded five states, of which Serbia was the largest and in many ways the most complex, with Hungarian, Montenegrin, and Kosovar (Albanian) minorities under Belgrade’s government. The Hungarian minority in the north did not agitate for secession, but coastal Montenegro left the Serbian fold in 2006 without serious problems and became another of Europe’s ministates, with a population below 700,000. The Muslim majority of Kosovo, landlocked leftover of the Ottoman period and numbering about 1.8 million, victims of Serbian subjugation during the devolutionary period and inalterably opposed to further Serbian domination, attained independence in 2008 with the support of the United States and a majority of (but not all) European states. Russia vociferously objected to Kosovo’s independence, supporting the Serbian position that Kosovo is a historic part of the former kingdom and vowing to veto any application it might make to join the United Nations.

While the international community’s attention was focused on the Kosovo issue, the simmering trouble between Russia and Georgia worsened, and it was no coincidence. Even as Moscow continued to object to Kosovo’s recognition, Russian military equipment and troops began to converge on two stretches of Russia’s international border: those of Abkhazia, a corner of Georgia on the Black Sea coast, and of South Ossetia, in the Caucasus Mountains. While Georgia was one of the 15 Socialist Soviet “republics,” these two pockets of Georgia – as well as a third, Ajaria, also on the Black Sea coast – were simply administrative acknowledgments of ethnic-minority realities. Indeed, the Ossetians straddled the border between Russia and Georgia: North Ossetia lies one small entity removed from Chechnya, and South Ossetians make up just 3 percent of Georgia’s population. Russians and Russian military “peacekeepers” strengthen Moscow’s presence in this enclave of Russian loyalty, and in Abkhazia, too, the Russian presence outnumbers the 2 percent Abkhazians. Even before the intervention of August 8, 2008, the government of Georgia had little control over either piece of the “near abroad.”

It has been the stated objective of the Tbilisi government to assert its jurisdiction over the three minority territories on its margins, but Moscow has obstructed this initiative in various ways, ranging from the closure of transport routes (and thus commercial traffic) between Georgia and Russia to the award of Russian passports to residents of Abkhazia and North Ossetia. Newspapers and other media commentary in Russia ask why, if Kosovo can be wrested from Serbia because locals there want independence, the same rights cannot be accorded to North Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian commentators are arguing that Georgia’s suppression of Ossetians and Abkhazians is no less ruthless than that of Kosovars by Serbia.

But by militarily intervening as the Russians have, including the bombing of targets in Georgia itself, Moscow appears intent on creating a crisis that will demonstrate its capacity and willingness to wage war for its interests in the “near abroad” despite serious risk of potentially uncontrollable escalation. Kosovo may have been part of the kindling, but Russia resented NATO encroachment toward its borders, American-planned construction of missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, EU involvement in Ukraine’s long-range plans (Georgia has also proclaimed its hope to join the EU, and you will see the EU flag, beside the flag of Georgia, stand behind President Saakashvili’s desk during interviews) and other slights. One question is whether Russian bombers will target the Georgian section of the oil pipeline linking the Caspian Sea reserves to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another is whether, should Russia impose a naval blockade on Georgia, Ukraine will deny it the use of its Crimean naval bases, potentially drawing Kyyiv into the conflict and creating a motive for Russian action there as well.

A belligerent Russia has already choked off the flow of natural gas to Europe during a dispute over payments, has allowed a murder case (allegedly by a Russian agent in London) to damage relations with the United Kingdom, has turned a blind eye to criminal activity in Moldova, has obstructed efforts to persuade Iran to alter its nuclear practices, has imprisoned business leaders deemed politically inconvenient in ways chillingly reminiscent of gulag times, and has sent bombers flying into airspace in the Cold-War mode. The brutality of its post-Soviet campaigns against Muslim Chechens was seen in context of the wider “war against terror”, but the destruction now being visited on Georgia suggests that a new page has been turned.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the candidates actions at the Faith Forum. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Watching John McCain at the Faith Forum with Pastor Rick Warren, one could come away thinking that he is in full pander mode. The party maverick in him has been fully exorcised. Now he delivers the punch lines, one after another. General Patraeus is his hero, activist judges should not be on the bench, life begins at conception. For fellow partisans, he delivered a conservative homerun; this weekend. Many wise political observers concur that McCain was ruthlessly on message, and Obama was congenial, though a little too thoughtful.

For one reason, this was to be expected. McCain was with a sympathetic audience, so he could deliver the lines they wanted to hear without qualms. Comfortable as Obama purports to be with his faith, he is a Democrat, and every Democrat must equivocate before an evangelical audience.

But, it could still be asked - why was McCain so dedicatedly on message? If he already has the evangelical vote (which for the most part he does), why is he delivering the punch lines? One would think that someone who already has his base would be trying to woo the other side. Conversely, why is Obama setting himself up for a difficult, if not a losing, battle? Why is he so significantly less risk-averse than McCain?

Obama is trying, and McCain is securing, and I think this says a lot about the electoral dynamics of the 2008 elections. Obama is going for big game here - he is trying in Virginia and Georgia (all 50 states, as Howard Dean attests), so heck, why not try with evangelicals - and we should not underestimate the either the scope or the riskiness of his ambition, especially given the unsettled score with Clinton supporters within the Democratic party. McCain, on the other hand, is making comparatively only perfunctory efforts to reach the median voter - who, as we know in a two-party system ultimately decides elections - suggesting that he does not think he has secured his base.

McCain is delivering the lines his base wants to hear because he cannot afford another crack in the faltering Republican armor. He may have been entirely authentic in his professions this weekend, but it is still revealing that he did not (and perhaps could not) choose to take the strategic path of trying to increase his lead among independents. Obama’s relative equivocation on faith and conservative issues probably did not impress most evangelicals, but most Americans are not evangelicals.

Many liberals think that McCain was in full pander mode this weekend. Maybe he was, or maybe he was being authentic, but I am surprised that McCain isn’t trying harder to reach across the aisle to coddle the independent voter who may not buy every one of his conservative punchlines. Revealed preferences seem to indicate that he doesn’t think he has a choice. Here’s the danger: for all of McCain’s determination and perceived obligation to deliver an ideologically pure message, it may not resonate as strongly as it certainly did in 1980. Because it’s 2008.

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Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the post below he examines the recent events in Belgium.

Once again, Belgium – that is, Belgium’s future as a country – is in the news. It is in a way the ultimate irony that the European Union (EU) member whose capital serves as the headquarters of the world’s foremost experiment in supranationalism teeters on the brink of disintegration. Sophisticated, bureaucratic Brussels, Francophone island in Belgium’s Flemish-speaking north, represents multicultural cooperation to EU enthusiasts across Europe, but foreign intrusion to Flemish nationalists in its immediate hinterland. The collapse of one of the EU’s founding members, a key participant in the Benelux union that preceded the EU itself, would signify a failure that could have serious ramifications for the entire project.

The rise of Flemish nationalism and the default of Belgian federalism are not, however, unique to this small, prosperous country whose very survival is linked to the EU experiment. Europe’s growing integration is animating nationalist sentiments among locals in many of the EU’s 27 member states, and central governments try in various ways to defuse the associated political pressures. The European map is replete with cultural minorities that see themselves threatened with a loss of identity in Europe’s economic and political homogenization, and some of these minorities have national aspirations, viewing the EU’s still-formative period as an opportunity to strengthen their autonomy. The partition of

Czechoslovakia created two states for such cultural majorities and is often cited by others (in Catalonia, Scotland, Corsica, the Basque country as well as in both Belgian Flanders and Wallonia) as the prototype for their own aspirations. Separatists may be aware of the ultimate futility of their campaigns, but some of them nevertheless punctuate their activities with violence. The European political scene is anything but placid.

Thus the fate of Belgium will be of particular significance for the EU. Overcoming devolutionary forces by demonstrating the economic and social advantages of representative membership is the whole idea, and in general it has worked. The list of states aspiring to join the EU, including not only Turkey but also Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Ukraine and even Georgia, is longer than that rejecting the option (Norway, Iceland and Switzerland), and only one entity has left the EU when the opportunity arose, namely Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). But if a state at the very heart of the EU, and one of its greatest beneficiaries, fails to accommodate its centrifugal forces, it will constitute a setback that will raise doubts among members and would-be members alike.

Flemish-Walloon negotiations having failed, should the EU seek to intervene? Might an EU transitional administration give the parties time and space to renew their efforts? The prospects appear dim: Flemish nationalism is again on the rise, with visions of independence and, ironically, eventual full membership in the EU. Resentment of French-speaking Belgians runs deep; xenophobia is rife. The Flemish flag waves over public buildings and town squares in the northern provinces; advertisements promoting the economic advantages of Wallonia in commercial publications barely mention Belgium at all. That two cultural communities with so much in common could find themselves at this impasse casts doubt on the whole EU enterprise.

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Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry, and will be published in August. In the article below he looks a Beatles’ revolution.

On 21 August 1940, Winston Churchill famously declared, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” The RAF had been dominating the Luftwaffe in the air and Churchill saw an opportunity to bolster British morale amid the fire, smoke, and death on the ground. In Liverpool less than two months later and during the Blitz, a mother would celebrate the Prime Minister’s resolve by naming her son John Winston Lennon, someone else to whom many would owe much and no less so than for what he contributed in another turbulent August.

On 11 August 1968, the Beatles announced “National Apple Week” and launched their own label, Apple Records, as a declaration of independence from corporate media. In many respects, they were babes in the woods with the wolves of the industry at their heels, but during a summer of increasingly violent riots and protests, Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr defied expectations of their demise. In August 1967, their manager and friend Brian Epstein had died after naïvely mixing drugs and alcohol, leaving the band and their finances in shock and disarray. Almost immediately, the Beatles went into a brilliantly destructive tailspin, launching one ill-fated venture after another: a divisive retreat to India with the Maharishi, a clothing store on Baker Street renowned for shoplifting, and the Boxing Day disaster of their film, Magical Mystery Tour. A year after Epstein’s death, they returned to what they knew best: making records.

Apple released three charting records on 30 August 1968: Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by Paul McCartney), Jackie Lomax’s “Sour Milk Sea” (produced by George Harrison), and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Revolution.” Both the Hopkin and Beatles disks would climb to the top of British charts, but where the former simply updated a nostalgic Russian ditty, the latter broke new ground in more ways that we can discuss here. In particular, Lennon’s “Revolution” challenged the violence that the Rolling Stones seemed to be embracing in “Street Fighting Man.” Although a master of obfuscation (consider “I Am the Walrus”), Lennon openly and plainly questions politicos of every stripe while striking down a path he would follow for most of his short life, his most poignant articulation coming with “Imagine” (1971).

Released a little over a week after soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia quashing the Prague Spring democracy and only days after Chicago police rioted against war protesters, “Revolution” scathingly chastised the chattering of authority, right and left. Rather than the catalyst for revolution that Richard Nixon had imagined Lennon to be, the Liverpudlian born in a milieu of bombs and death called upon a generation to stop and to consider the consequences of violence and demagoguery. Evoking his stature as a Beatle, he essentially asked everyone to step back and take a deep breath. He succeeded in taunting both conservatives and radicals, but he also gave voice to reason. In that summer of human conflict, his cynicism rang true.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the role of race in our upcoming Presidential elections.  See his previous OUPblogs here.

And so it begins. Of course race was going to become an issue this year. It was never possible that the first competitive African-American candidate for president, Barack Obama, would face no obstacle in terms of his racial eligibility for the Oval Office. The only question is how race would rear its ugly and inevitable head.

Already a pattern has emerged. The minority candidate is always accused of playing the minority card. Senator John McCain was quick to throw this accusation last Thursday. This was a response to Obama’s

claim the day before in Missouri in which he charged the Republicans for trying to scare voters by questioning his patriotism and “funny name” and by pointing out he doesn’t “look like those other presidents on those dollar bills.” The question of who really was playing the race card can only be answered in the eyes of the beholder. But let it be said that allusions to Obama’s otherness have been made on both sides from earlier on in the campaign. In naming the “race card” at this particular moment in the campaign and not earlier, the McCain campaign is not just retaliating or reacting to Obama’s actions or words, it is strategizing.

Remember when the Obama camp was accusing Hillary Clinton of playing the gender card? In some degree, Obama is getting the first taste of the medicine Hillary Clinton had to swallow during the primaries. Accuse a minority of playing a minority card, and s/he is dealt a double blow: supporting members of the majority are reminded of the candidate’s minority status and his/her electability problem; at the same time, opposing members of the majority have their stereotype of a whining minority candidate reinforced. When Hillary Clinton was accused of playing the gender card, some of her supporters were reminded that there are some sexists out there who would never vote for her (the “polarizing,” “unelectable” narrative about the Clinton campaign) no matter what, and so cast their votes in favor of Obama. At the same time, those who were already against her strengthened their view that she was a whining, sore loser.

Obama suffers an analogously double hit with the charge that he has played the race card. Independent general election voters are reminded that race is still a salient factor in American politics and some of these voters may see no value in throwing away their vote for an unelectable, polarizing candidate. At the same time, those opposed to Obama are vindicated in their belief that he is an angry race-baiter.

The dominant strategy for a majority candidate, then, is always to accuse a minority candidate of playing a minority (gender or racial) card. Whether or not the card is actually being played, it always benefits the majority candidate to say that it is. Remind enough people that that a minority is a minority, and the faithful lose heart, while the bigots (those who would reject a candidate purely on the basis of his/her minority status) gain ground.

For a majority candidate to not acknowledge his privilege and to deploy a strategy that is asymmetrically available only to him is to engage in the lowest kind of politics. Race is already going to be an explosive issue this year without politicians stoking it. A gentleman acknowledges an underserved advantage when he possesses one. I urge the McCain campaign to take on Obama’s campaign on higher ground.

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Paul M. Collins, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. He is author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making. In this article, Collins discusses interest group participation in the recently decided U.S. Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller and the future of Second Amendment litigation.

It is fair to say that one or two cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court stand out each term. I think it is evident that this term’s most salient case is District of Columbia v. Heller. In that 5-4 decision, the Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on the possession of privately owned handguns within District limits. In so doing, the Court clarified the meaning of the Second Amendment for the first time in almost 70 years by endorsing an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Aside from its significance in partially resolving the meaning of the Second Amendment, this case is notable as a means to illustrate the role of interest groups in the courts. Like many seminal constitutional decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, the Heller decision originated as a test case. Test cases operate as a type of quid-pro-quo. An interest group uses the case in an attempt to etch its policy preferences into law. In exchange, the group finances the case for the litigant named in the suit by providing that litigant with attorneys, performing legal research, and paying court fees. Robert Levy of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, began the case in an attempt to get the Supreme Court to clarify the meaning of the Second Amendment. Dick Heller was handpicked by Levy as an ideal litigant: Heller was a security guard who carried a gun at work, but could not possess his handgun at home as a means of self defense. The idea was that Heller, as a law abiding citizen with a connection to the law enforcement community, would be a sympathetic figure in the eyes of the courts. Evidently, this was a good choice as the Court ruled in favor of Heller in nullifying the District of Columbia’s ban on the private possession of handguns.

In addition to providing an excellent example of a test case, the Heller decision is also significant for understanding the primary method of interest group litigation: the amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief. These briefs provide a means for organized interests to furnish the courts with legal argumentation in an attempt to persuade the justices to accept their interpretations of the law. A total of 67 amicus briefs were filed from a wide variety of interests, ranging from academics to civil rights and liberties organizations to gun advocacy groups. These amici illustrated the reality that the Supreme Court is a public policy battleground in which organized interests clash in their attempts to manipulate the law to further their own agendas. The interest groups highlighted to the justices the broad policy significance of the case, discussing a wide assortment of issues, including matters of children’s safety, racial discrimination, and federalism, in addition to their primary focus on the Second Amendment. While most of the amicus briefs focused on the legal and historical interpretation of the right to keep and bear arms, several amicus briefs provided the Court with social scientific evidence, reading more like statistical analyses than standard legal briefs.

47 amicus briefs were filed supporting Heller, representing a wide assortment of organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality, Disabled Veterans for Self Defense, the Foundation for Free Expression, and the National Rifle Association. 20 amicus briefs supported the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Bar Association, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and National Network to End Domestic Violence. These amicus briefs appeared to influence the justices’ decision making. Indeed, the Court’s majority and dissenting opinions cited more than 15 separate amicus briefs and Justice Breyer was particularly attentive to the arguments raised by the amici. Although the number of amicus briefs supporting a particular litigant is not necessarily determinative of the outcome of cases, the Court nonetheless tends to side with the litigant supported by the largest number of briefs, consistent with the Heller decision.

A particularly important point is what the Supreme Court did not do in the case. That is, the Court did not address the issue of incorporation: whether the Second Amendment applies to the states. While the Bill of Rights was originally intended to protect individuals from the actions of the federal government, over time the Supreme Court has extended most, but not all, provisions in the Bill of Rights to the states. However, in Heller, the court did not extend the Second Amendment to the states. What this means in practice is that we will see a surge of Second Amendment cases percolate throughout the federal court system for decades to come. To be sure, most of these cases will be brought by interest groups seeking to both incorporate the Second Amendment and have the courts clarify exactly what restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms are permissible under the Constitution. Thus, Heller should be viewed as a starting point for the contemporary understanding of the Second Amendment, rather than the final word on the subject.

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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.  In the article below he reflects on the Presidential candidates.  See his previous OUPblogs here.

We like to think that we are agents of our will, autonomous individuals with the power to make our mark on and even write history. Political campaigns operate under the assumption that strategy matters. A wrong word, a lapel pin, a mole on the face, a former pastor, a wife’s comment, even the use of a laptop - any of of these can make or break a candidate.

And so, looking at the polls today, we might conclude that Obama has run a near-flawless campaign, and McCain has made one one mistake after another and has had the worst luck.

But elections are about fundamentals, and the life cycles of political regimes. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter could have been consummate politicos in 1932 and 1980, but voters were just not prepared to give these men and the parties they represented a second chance.

The truth is not everything has gone Obama’s way this year. He had to deal with Jeremiah Wright’s, Michelle Obama’s, and Jesse Jackson’s poorly worded comments, for instance. Right now, he is still working on finding a cogent equivocation for how the “surge” in Iraq worked but that he opposed it when it was first proposed. But the point is that he nevertheless appears to have cruised through these problems.

I don’t think the fact that Obama is probably a more artful politician than McCain explains the striking contrast in their fortunes as they now stand. It almost seems like McCain stumbles at every turn, and Obama can do no wrong. Even when it comes to justifying his initial opposition to the “surge,” it seems like Obama’s anti-war supporters have already decided that the good news came too little and too late. (As was Herbert Hoover’s decision only in 1931 to provide direct government assistance to thousands of Americans without work; as was Carter’s anti-inflation program in 1978. Incidentally, both Hoover and Carter,
like McCain, were characterized as having been really unlucky too.)

In every election in which the electorate collectively sighs, “too little, too late,” and the standard bearer of the incumbent party keeps running into what appears to be a string of bad luck, then his / their time is up. The question is, will 2008 be the last hurrah of the conservative regime founded by Ronald Reagan that is rapidly losing its legitimacy (as were the election years of 1928 and 1976 were for the regimes respectively founded by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt), or is the country unequivocably ready to move on? Every political regime, liberal or conservative, like every empire, has its rise, its crest, and its demise. The relevant question is where does 2008 fit in the life cycle of the current conservative regime.

Strategic blunders may not have as much explanatory power as we think. After all, we are usually more forgiving of the boy who cried “wolf” once than when he did it thrice - the political impact of a blunder depends on whether or not our patience has been worn thin. Luck is the error term we put in an equation to explain what will and actions fail to explain. What precedes both will and luck are electoral fundamentals and the life cycle of political regimes.

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Oh the overture- that magical moment at the beginning of play when you settle in and get ready to be entertained. Well, Thomas S. Hischak, author of The Oxford Companion To The American Musical: Theatre, Film and Television has highlighted the 15 best overtures below.  Hischak is a Professor of Theatre at the State University of New York College at Cortland. He is the author of sixteen books on theater, film, and popular music as well as the author of twenty published plays. In The Oxford Companion To The American Musical Hischak offers over two thousand entries on musicals, performers, composers, lyricists, producers, choreographers and much more.

Does anybody remember musical theatre overtures? You know, those medley of songs you only hear now at the beginning of revivals. They don’t write them anymore. Audiences today seem too impatient to sit through eight to twelve minutes of music when they are anxious to get the show on the road. But in the past the overture to a Broadway musical was a glorious thing. They got your adrenaline going as you heard tidbits of the score, sometimes recognizing a popular tune that was on the radio or other times discovering new hit songs for the first time. When they stopped writing overtures for Broadway, somewhere in the 1960s, they took away an opportunity for anticipation and recognition and found nothing to replace it with.

Overtures go back to opera and were standard with operettas before musical comedies found the value of warming up the audience with selections of the score. Rarely was an overture put together by the show’s composer. Usually the music arranger selected what melodies were to be fashioned into an instrumental sampling and the orchestrator figured out how to blend the various tunes together in an effective manner. The best overtures gave the audience the flavor of the show, be it lush and romantic, as with “Brigadoon,” exotic and mystifying as in “Kismet,” or silly and playful, as with “No, No, Nanette.” Perhaps it was “Carousel” in 1945 that signaled the waning of the Broadway overture. Rodgers and Hammerstein opted for a musical prologue to set up the story and characters of “Carousel” and it was so effective that others started to consider alternatives to the traditional overture. In the 1960s, such hits as “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Cabaret,” “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” and “Hair” all did very nicely without an overture. By the 1970s you only heard overtures in musical pastiches such as “On the Twentieth Century” and “Annie.” By the new century an overture in a new musical was a very rare thing indeed. Mel Brooks wrote and recorded one for “The Producers” and it got laughs when “Springtime for Hitler” was heard. But audiences were too anxious to sit through the whole overture so it was reduced to a musical introduction and the curtain went up.

All the same, I still cherish the traditional musical theatre overture and salute the ones that were so potent that they became showpieces in themselves. I’ve narrowed down my favorites to fifteen. These deserve attention because they did what a great overture should do: prepare the audience for a very specific theatre experience. In chronological order, they are:

1. “Very Good Eddie” (1915) A musical rarely done today, but recordings of this early Jerome Kern musical reveal that the great musical comedy overture was already in place by World War One. Like the show, the overture was contemporary, refreshing, and sparkling.

2. “Oh, Kay!” (1926) The number of Gershwin brothers’ hits in this musical make it my favorite of their many overtures. When the mood of an overture can shift from the silly “Do Do Do” to the heartbreaking “Someone to Watch Over Me,” it is quite an accomplishment.

3. “Show Boat” (1927) Kern’s greatest score easily lends itself to a superb overture. But it is brilliant on many fronts. Notice how the somber “Ol’ Man River” is played fast and upside down for the rhythm section. Who else but Kern would do that, knowing most listeners would never notice?

4. “On Your Toes” (1936) My favorite Rodgers and Hart overture because the battle between classical music and jazz, essential to the plot and score, is right there in the overture.

5. “Annie Get Your Gun” (1946) It not only has more hit songs than any other Irving Berlin show, but this overture holds together so well it feels like a medley of the Best of Broadway all in one composition.

6. “Kiss Me, Kate” (1948) Cole Porter’s best score is well served by this flowing overture that easily switches from operetta schmaltz to brassy big band.

7. “South Pacific” (1949) The Rodgers and Hammerstein overture that is the most effective, in my opinion. From those ominous three notes of “Bali Hai” to the melodic romance of “Some Enchanted Evening,” this overture is a masterwork.

8. “Damn Yankees” (1955) Perhaps the quintessential musical comedy overture of the 1950s, this medley bursts with energy and joy. It does what Bob Fosse’s choreography does in the show: reject gravity and seriousness.

9. “Candide” (1956) The original show may have been an undeserved flop but the overture was a hit and is still played in concerts around the world more than any other Broadway overture. It’s easy to see why. The piece is a musical feast.

10. “My Fair Lady” (1956) Although it uses the show’s least famous song, “You Did It,” as its musical signature, this overture is a masterpiece of mood setting and anticipation. Maybe the arranger thought “You Did It” would be a hit. Regardless, it works marvelously in the overture.

11. “The Music Man” (1957) Marches were always a standby in operetta but no other musical comedy uses them so effectively as in the Meredith Willson score. That influence is heard in the show’s rousing overture as well.

12. “Gypsy” (1959) Legend has it that the audience stood and cheered at the first performance of this riveting overture. I tend to believe it because the overture still packs a wallop. In the opinion of many, this is the greatest Broadway overture of all.

13. “Hello, Dolly!” (1964) Jerry Herman wrote a conventional score for this hit show and, just as the old-fashioned quality of the songs are irresistible, so too is the overture.

14. “On the Twentieth Century” (1978) When train smoke gushes out of the orchestra pit during the opening chords, you know some one still loves the overture in the 1970s. Cy Coleman’s music is a carnival of sounds and it’s all heard in this wonderful medley.

15. “Nine“(1982) No one was writing overtures by the 1980s but Maury Yeston used the old convention in a new way: the medley was vocalized by all the women in the cast. Like much of the show, it was a gimmick but one that was very pleasing.

Honorable Mention: “The Fantasticks” (1960). Harvey Schmidt’s overture for this long-running Off-Broadway classic is unique. It is the only theatre overture I know of in which none of the songs from the score are heard in the overture. Instead Schmidt composed an instrumental piece that bubbles with the charm and playfulness of the score to follow.

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