United States presidential election, 2008: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation

An American Enterprise Institute (AEI)-Brookings Institution Event

Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

2:00 - 3:30 pm

Falk Auditorium - The Brookings Institution

Countries around the world - even long-established democracies - grapple with the fundamental issue of guaranteeing that their elections are fair and competitive. Recent events ranging from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Indiana’s voter identification law to the turmoil that has resulted from Zimbabwe’s recent presidential contest only confirm that fact. Drawing on social science research from the U.S. and abroad, Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation explores ways to define, measure and detect fraud, and makes recommendations for reform.

On May 21, 2008, the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution will host a discussion with the book’s editors, R. Michael Alvarez and Susan Hyde. Thomas Mann, co-director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Election Reform Project and senior fellow at Brookings, will moderate the panel.  

After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Moderator:

Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Co-Director, AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project

Panelists:

R. Michael Alvarez, Professor of Political Science, California Institute of Technology  

Thad E. Hall, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Utah 

Susan D. Hyde, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University

To register for the event, please contact the Brookings Office of Communications at (001) 202.797.6105; or register online here.

United States presidential election, 2008: AEI Political Report

Here you may view the Spring 2008 issue of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Political Report.

It features:

• A poll-based election snapshot: Who Americans think will win, who they want to win, and where the race stands
• What the polls say about the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses
• What the nation and Democratic voters are saying about the Democratic race
• Historical data on delegate counts at the convention
• The latest data on economic insecurity
• A collection of the latest polls on the Iraq War and the Surge

United States presidential election, 2008: Barack Obama on Zionism and Hamas

In an interview with the Atlantic Monthly published yesterday, Barack Obama said the idea of a Jewish state is “fundamentally just,” and said his position on Hamas is “indistinguishable” from the positions of his opponents.

“I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris. So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: Wright And Ridiculous

It would be a travesty if Barack Obama’s campaign gets knocked off course because of his former preacher, writes top columnist Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post.

“Of all the strange features of this presidential race, the tarnishing of Barack Obama has got to be the most ridiculous. First Obama was accused of anti-religious elitism. Then he was accused of identifying with the underclass anger of his spiritual mentor. Excuse me, but which is it? Am I supposed to believe that Obama is a supercilious elitist or a menacing ghetto radical? Is he contemptuous of religion or too close to a religious leader? Obama’s critics don’t bother to say. Meanwhile, real character issues go relatively unheeded. [...] The Obama-Wright “revelations” are really a revelation about our political culture: About its failure to distinguish the important from the trivial and about the inevitability that the race card will eventually be played against a black candidate. If the once formidable Obama campaign is knocked off course by these “revelations” in tomorrow’s primaries, it will be a travesty.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: Barack Obama on Israel’s 60th Independence Day

In a statement yesterday, Senator Barack Obama congratulated Israel on its 60th Independence Day. “The United States will always stand with Israel to ensure it can defend itself against threat of terrorism and violence, from as close as Gaza and as far as Tehran,” Barack Obama said.

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: how technology changed old-style political conventions

Michael Barone wrote in the last issue of USA Today about the impact of cellphone and BlackBerry on politics and especially the U.S. elections:

“Democrats are wringing their hands about the convention carnage that could visit the Mile High City. Yet in reality, we probably won’t get that 20th-century old-style convention. Why not? 21st-century technology will cut them off at the pass.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: How Not to End the War

Responding to Zbigniew Brzezinski,  Max Boot, foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign, writes in The Washington Post that “an early American departure is the last thing that most Iraqis or their elected representatives want”, and urges the U.S. to learn from the mistakes made in Vietnam.

“Why am I not reassured by Zbigniew Brzezinski’s breezy assurance in Sunday’s Outlook section that ‘forecasts of regional catastrophe’ after an American pullout from Iraq are as overblown as similar predictions made prior to our pullout from South Vietnam? Perhaps because the fall of Saigon in 1975 really was a catastrophe. Another domino fell at virtually the same time - Cambodia.

Estimates vary, but a safe bet is that some two million people died in the killing fields of Cambodia. In South Vietnam, the death toll was lower, but hundreds of thousands were consigned to harsh ‘reeducation’ camps where many perished, and hundreds of thousands more risked their lives to flee as boat people. [...] I, for one, hope that we do not betray our allies in Iraq as we did in Southeast Asia”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: The Problems With All-Mail Elections

Voting technology, long the purview of heated debate among the political and advocacy communities, is the focus of a blog entry from the Moritz College of Law - Ohio State University.

“With the Clinton and Obama camps at odds over whether to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, the idea of holding an all-mail election has emerged as a possible solution. The New York Times reports today that Democratic Party officials are ‘close to completing a draft plan’ for a mail-in primary in Florida that would take place in early June. Proponents of all-mail voting often cite Oregon’s experience in support of their arguments. If they can do it, the argument goes, why can’t we?

Given that Democratic Party rules set clear standards for having delegates recognized, which Florida and Michigan just as clearly failed to abide by, it seems obvious that the delegates selected through those states’ prior primaries shouldn’t be recognized. At the same time, there are reasons to be very cautious about exporting all-mail elections to these states, especially in a hotly contested and undeniably important race like this one. Here are a few of those reasons.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: President Bill Clinton’s April Joke

United States presidential election, 2008: Herbert Hoover’s Ghost Haunts Markets

In a her Bloomberg column, Amity Shlaes finds that Bear Stearns evokes the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it.

“Within 24 hours, Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, was weighing in with his own 1930s comparison. Roosevelt had pulled a country out of Depression and united it; President George W. Bush was doing the opposite, he said.

You get the picture: Bush is like Hoover, the do-nothing. Democrats are like Roosevelt, the activist. It’s worthwhile to go back to that Depression period to see what people actually did or didn’t do and who resembles whom. The reality differs from the cartoon.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: The Smart Way Out of a Foolish War

Top strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, now foreign policy adviser to Senator Barack Obama, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that a “sensibly conducted disengagement will actually make Iraq more stable over the long term.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: Rethinking President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative

In an op-ed in The Boston Globe, Democratic Representative of Massachusetts John Tierney, and military expert and author of The Edge of Disaster Stephen Flynn write that the best way to mark the anniversary of President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ speech would be a debate about its relevance post-September 11.

“The silver anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ speech came and went quietly this week. However, the research program to develop ballistic missile defense still remains a big-ticket item a quarter-century later.

For 2009, the White House is requesting $12.3 billion to develop ballistic missile defense. This is on top of the more than $120 billion taxpayers have already spent since 1985 to develop a system that still has yet to be realistically tested and may never be operationally effective.

Over the past decade, security experts have warned that the most likely way a nuclear weapon will find its way into the United States is hidden in the cargo of a ship or smuggled across US borders.”

Read full story.

***

Address to the Nation on National Security by President Ronald Reagan, March 23, 1983

My fellow Americans, 

The calls for cutting back the defense budget come in nice, simple arithmetic. They’re the same kind of talk that led the democracies to neglect their defenses in the 1930’s and invited the tragedy of World War II. We must not let that grim chapter of history repeat itself through apathy or neglect.

This is why I’m speaking to you tonight - to urge you to tell your Senators and Congressmen that you know we must continue to restore our military strength. If we stop in midstream, we will send a signal of decline, of lessened will, to friends and adversaries alike.

Free people must voluntarily, through open debate and democratic means, meet the challenge that totalitarians pose by compulsion. It’s up to us, in our time, to choose and choose wisely between the hard but necessary task of preserving peace and freedom and the temptation to ignore our duty and blindly hope for the best while the enemies of freedom grow stronger day by day.

The solution is well within our grasp. But to reach it, there is simply no alternative but to continue this year, in this budget, to provide the resources we need to preserve the peace and guarantee our freedom.

Now, thus far tonight I’ve shared with you my thoughts on the problems of national security we must face together. My predecessors in the Oval Office have appeared before you on other occasions to describe the threat posed by Soviet power and have proposed steps to address that threat. But since the advent of nuclear weapons, those steps have been increasingly directed toward deterrence of aggression through the promise of retaliation.

This approach to stability through offensive threat has worked. We and our allies have succeeded in preventing nuclear war for more than three decades. in recent months, however, my advisers, including in particular the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have underscored the necessity to break out of a future that relies solely on offensive retaliation for our security.

Over the course of these discussions, I’ve become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence. Feeling this way, I believe we must thoroughly examine every opportunity for reducing tensions and for introducing greater stability into the strategic calculus on both sides.

One of the most important contributions we can make is, of course, to lower the level of all arms, and particularly nuclear arms. We’re engaged right now in several negotiations with the Soviet Union to bring about a mutual reduction of weapons. I will report to you a week from tomorrow my thoughts on that score. But let me just say, I’m totally committed to this course.

If the Soviet Union will join with us in our effort to achieve major arms reduction, we will have succeeded in stabilizing the nuclear balance. Nevertheless, it will still be necessary to rely on the specter of retaliation, on mutual threat. And that’s a sad commentary on the human condition. Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability? I think we are. Indeed, we must.

After careful consultation with my advisers, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I believe there is a way. Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?

I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century.

Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it’s reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn’t it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.

In the meantime, we will continue to pursue real reductions in nuclear arms, negotiating from a position of strength that can be ensured only by modernizing our strategic forces. At the same time, we must take steps to reduce the risk of a conventional military conflict escalating to nuclear war by improving our nonnuclear capabilities.

America does possess - now - the technologies to attain very significant improvements in the effectiveness of our conventional, nonnuclear forces. Proceeding boldly with these new technologies, we can significantly reduce any incentive that the Soviet Union may have to threaten attack against the United States or its allies.

As we pursue our goal of defensive technologies, we recognize that our allies rely upon our strategic offensive power to deter attacks against them. Their vital interests and ours are inextricably linked. Their safety and ours are one. And no change in technology can or will alter that reality. We must and shall continue to honor our commitments.

I clearly recognize that defensive systems have limitations and raise certain problems and ambiguities. If paired with offensive systems, they can be viewed as fostering an aggressive policy, and no one wants that. But with these considerations firmly in mind, I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

Tonight, consistent with our obligations of the ABM treaty and recognizing the need for closer consultation with our allies, I’m taking an important first step. I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves. We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage. Our only purpose - one all people share - is to search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear war.

My fellow Americans, tonight we’re launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history. There will be risks, and results take time.

But I believe we can do it. As we cross this threshold, I ask for your prayers and your support.

Thank you, good night, and God bless you.

United States presidential election, 2008: The U.S. Democrats’ Super Disaster

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, columnist John Yoo says superdelegates wield too much control over the Democratic contest.

“Until recent weeks, one of the least understood aspects of the Democrats’ primary contest was the role of superdelegates. These are Democratic Party insiders, members of Congress, and other officials who can cast ballots at the party’s national convention this summer. But now these unelected delegates are coming in for a close inspection, because neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama can win their party’s nomination without superdelegate support.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: America The Beautiful

A poetic response to Barack Obama’s pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who insulted the United States of America, the only democracy, who is able to defend the liberal values of the Western civilization.

In Honor of Master Sgt. Woodrow Keeble, First Sioux Inducted Into Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes

Elvis Presley - America The Beautiful

Written as a poem by Katherine Lee Bates in 1893 and later set to the tune of “Materna” by Samuel Augustus Ward, this single was recorded by Elvis Presley during the midnight show at the Las Vegas Hilton on December 13, 1975. It was the B-side to My Way, and it id not chart. It is available on Forgotten Songs of the 70s; Live In Las Vegas Box Set, and The Silver CD Set, Elvis Presley, which is where this version is from.

Lyrics

O beautiful, for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

O beautiful, for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law!

O beautiful, for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
‘Til all success be nobleness, and ev’ry gain divine!

O beautiful, for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea!

United States presidential election, 2008: Modernizing Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century - An Agenda for the Next U.S. President

A new report from the think tank Center for Global Development (CGD) examines the current scope of U.S. foreign aid and makes policy recommendations for the next U.S. president on how to best target U.S. giving.

“In this new essay, adapted from a forthcoming CGD book The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President, CGD senior fellow Steve Radelet analyses the recent increases in funding and new organizational changes such as the MCC, PEPFAR, the growing role of the Department of Defense, and the F process. He then proposes a five-point strategy for modernizing U.S. foreign assistance: develop a National Foreign Assistance Strategy; create a new cabinet-level department for development policy; rewrite the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act; place a higher priority on multilateral assistance channels; and increase the quantity and improve the allocation of funding.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: Prepare for the Iraqi Humanitarian Crisis

A commentary by foreign policy expert Elizabeth Ferris from The Brookings Institution says even under the best circumstances, the next U.S. president will face a “humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq,” noting some five million Iraqis are still either refugees or internally displaced.

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: 3 a.m. phone call

The debate continues between Democratic front-runners Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton over which candidate is best prepared for a “3 a.m. phone call” telling the next president about a crisis.

Obama’s foreign policy adviser Susan Rice said in an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday that neither of the Democratic candidates is “ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call,” and that none of the three candidates have experience in such a scenario.

The communications director for presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain, Jill Hazelbaker, said Thursday: “We agree wholeheartedly that neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama have the experience or judgment necessary to lead the United States in the struggle against violent Islamic extremists who seek our destruction, or to address the complex global environment that our next president will face.”

The Clinton campaign also seized on Rice’s comment: “With one of his top foreign policy advisers acknowledging yesterday that he is not ready to take the 3 a.m. call…Senator Obama’s time would be better spent making the case for why he can do the most important job in the world just three years out of the state senate,” said a Clinton campaign memo released Thursday.

United States presidential election, 2008: A Malaise Election

In this malaise election, should candidates be focusing on economic concerns or foreign policy?

Columnist Sebastian Mallaby discusses the role of both in the 2008 election in the Washington Post.

“If 1992 was the last malaise election, what are the lessons for this one? Putting the economy ahead of national security worked for Bill Clinton, and the formula looks even better this time. Far more than in the 1990s, voters suspect that U.S. global engagement underpins a world they do not like: Living standards for most Americans are stagnant, and although globalization is not the main culprit, it is certainly the main scapegoat. McCain seems to want to frame this election as a choice between experience and naiveté on national security. But exit polls suggest voters care less about national security than they do economic security.”

Read full story.

United States presidential election, 2008: Implications of Economic Trends for Workers, Families, and the Nation

Former senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers Alan D. Viard says annual income stats mislead when assessing middle class well-being.

TESTIMONY - February 13, 2008
United States House of Representatives - House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education

Chairman Obey, Ranking Member Walsh, Members of the Subcommittee; it is an honor to appear before you today to discuss, “Implications of Economic Trends for Workers, Families, and the Nation.”

I would like to make three major points:

Despite the rise in inequality during the last few decades, real incomes have risen significantly in the middle of the income distribution. Real incomes have also risen at the bottom of the income distribution, although at a very slow pace.

The existing federal tax system is highly progressive, with a small group of high-income taxpayers bearing a large portion of the federal tax burden.

Due to economic mobility, annual income can be a misleading measure of wellbeing. A significant portion of households with low incomes in any given year experience large income gains in later years.

Real Incomes Have Risen in the Middle of the Income Distribution

Some observers have claimed that the middle class has experienced falling living standards in recent decades, as their incomes have failed to keep up with inflation. The best evidence demonstrates, however, that real incomes have risen significantly in the middle of the distribution, although not as rapidly as at the top of the distribution. Real incomes have also risen in the bottom of the distribution, although those gains have been extremely small.

To assess this issue correctly, it is necessary to use a measure of the overall economic status of middle-income Americans. Incomplete measures can yield misleading results.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ measure of average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory workers has often failed to keep pace with inflation. At best, however, that measure reflects households’ before-tax cash wage income, which is only part of the picture. To obtain a comprehensive measure of the economic resources available to households, it is necessary to include their other sources of income–fringe benefits, property income, and government benefits–and to subtract their tax payments. Even the Census Bureau’s measure of household money income is incomplete, because it omits fringe benefits, in-kind government benefits, and capital gains and does not subtract tax payments.

Click here to view the complete testimony.

United States presidential election, 2008: The Verdict of Super Tuesday

An op-ed by Michael Barone

Former editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, and author of Our First Revolution: the remarkable British uprising that inspired America’s founding fathers (Crown Publishers, 2007)

Well, Super Tuesday is over, and now we have two major party presidential nominees. That’s the lead sentence I thought five weeks ago I’d be writing for this column. But the 33-day round of caucuses and primaries that seemed likely to produce decisions after 23 states voted on Super Tuesday have failed to deliver.

True, John McCain appears to have a relatively clear flight path to the Republican nomination. The invaluable realclearpolitics.com Website, as I write, credits him with 697 delegates to 244 for Mitt Romney and 187 for Mike Huckabee.

But the McCain aircraft can expect some turbulence before it gets its wheels down. Vocal conservatives, led by talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, insist that McCain isn’t a proper conservative and isn’t much of a Republican.

They have something of a point. McCain opposed most in his party on campaign finance and the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts. He opposes it now on climate change legislation and the future of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. But McCain has his arguments, too. No one has been a stauncher supporter of the war on Islamist terrorists (and he calls them by their rightful name). He not only supported the successful surge strategy in 2007, he has been urging something like it since the summer of 2003.

The best argument McCain can make to disgruntled conservatives is that he is a fighter. He has sometimes fought them, and after the 2000 primary campaign he never really stopped fighting George W. Bush until, some time in 2003 and 2004, it became clear to him that the Democrats with whom he was sometimes making common cause were determined to produce defeat in Iraq.

He should look ahead and tell conservatives that he will be fighting with them–for victory in Iraq and against Islamist terrorists everywhere, to prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, to install conservative judges on the Supreme Court, to keep the Democrats from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. He can argue that he is like a United States Marine–no better friend, no worse enemy–and in the years ahead he is determined there will be no better friend for the causes they hold dearest.

Mike Huckabee, McCain’s only remaining opponent, won five surprise victories in Southern states on Super Tuesday, but remains a single-digit candidate or close to it among primary voters who don’t classify themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians.

And McCain has been lucky. Not only did he triumph in the winner-take-all primaries in the Northeast engineered for Rudy Giuliani, he also beat Huckabee by 1 percent for all 58 delegates from Missouri and shut out Romney in (according to the latest returns) 50 of California’s 53 congressional districts. If there is a God, She was looking after McCain’s interests on Feb. 5.

She was not looking after Hillary Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s, though. They came out of Super Tuesday effectively tied in delegates, with realclearpolitics.com giving 1,012 to Clinton and 933 to Obama. The races in the next two weeks favor Obama, and the Texas and Ohio contests on March 4 favor Clinton.

Clinton may end up with a lead thanks to super delegates–public and party officials with convention votes–or with whatever Puerto Rican politician controls its 63 votes after its caucus in early June. If so, she would have squelched a candidacy that has aroused more enthusiasm and, to paraphrase its candidate, audacious hope than any other this year.

Clinton and Obama have split the Democrats into rival tribes–blacks versus Latinos, young versus old, upscale versus downscale, Kennedys versus Clintons. They may eventually smooth over their differences as Democrats have before. But right now, the Clinton and Obama campaigns’ paths seem headed in a direction dangerously close to the intraparty equivalent of the 2000 Florida controversy.

Democratic voters in contests to come and Democratic super delegates may want to select the candidate with the best chance of winning. But that’s a difficult assignment. Hillary Clinton polarizes general election voters right down the middle, which means (a) she can win and (b) she can lose. Barack Obama, with his soaring rhetoric about what unites Americans, has a higher upside potential but also, with his lack of experience, a lower downside potential, as well. Look for a long and harrowing contest.

Reprinted with kindly permission of The American Enterprise Institute.

United States presidential election, 2008: Super Tuesday

Twenty-four U.S. states hold presidential nominating contests today, making it the busiest single day in the history of the U.S. presidential election.

Some analysts, pointing to polling data, anticipate Senator John McCain will emerge from Super Tuesday with a dominant position heading for the Republican party’s nomination.

The Democratic contest between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama appears to be much for tightly contested than the GOP race and could continue for months past Super Tuesday, say analysts.

The New York Times breaks down what to look for as the results come in on Tuesday night.

The Washington Post looks at eight questions Super Tuesday might answer, from whether either race will end today, to whether Obama can garner Latino votes.

The U.S. race has not only captured attention at home. As the Financial Times reports, many Europeans and Indonesians are supportive of Obama, and the Vietnamese like McCain, a Vietnam War veteran and former prisoner of war. Overseas American voters from both parties are also headed for the polls.

The Wall Street Journal says Tuesday’s voting will come down to issues of personality and character rather than “big ideas” or policy.

United States presidential election, 2008: ADL launches discussion guide for John F. Kennedy’s “A Nation Of Immigrants”

Press Release

New York, January 31, 2008 - In an effort to broaden understanding of immigration policy among high school students, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) developed a discussion guide to accompany A Nation of Immigrants, President John F. Kennedy’s landmark essay, which has just been reissued with a new introduction by Senator Edward M. Kennedy and foreword by Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. The guide makes available to teachers and educators lessons and ideas that can be implemented in the secondary level classroom, and provides tools to help guide student reading, facilitate discussion and build critical thinking skills.

“This guide is an invaluable teaching tool that will enhance classroom discussion about an important and timely topic,” said Abraham H. Foxman. “It is especially important today, as anti-immigrant, xenophobic sentiments have entered the mainstream discourse“.

“It is critical for our youth to have a thorough understanding of immigration issues and to appreciate the important role immigrants play in our country’s past, present and future.”

When A Nation of Immigrants was first published in 1958, the country was locked in a fierce debate over the direction of our immigration policies. Today, as the issues of immigration and immigrants have taken center stage, the essay is as relevant as when it was written by John Fitzgerald Kennedy 50 years ago at the request of ADL.

That is why the Anti-Defamation League and Harper Perennial are reissuing this landmark essay on the contribution of immigrants to American society. With a new introduction by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (Harper Perennial, January 200 offers inspiring suggestions for immigration policy and presents a chronology of the main events in the history of immigration in America.

“The reissuing of A Nation of Immigrants on its 50th anniversary is not only commemorative but has great relevance for us today,” Abraham H. Foxman writes in the Foreword to the new edition. “Then, as now, nativism, bigotry and fear of competition from foreign labor were dulling the collective American memory of its own immigrant history and its ideals,” writes Mr. Foxman. “Then, as now, hate groups were beating the drums of anti-foreigner slogans and tried to sway the public and elected officials toward a restrictive immigration policy.”

A Nation of Immigrants was written by Kennedy in 1958 after ADL reached out to the then-junior senator from Massachusetts asking him to highlight the contribution of immigrants at a time when the country was locked in a debate about the direction its policy should take. As the last manuscript President Kennedy ever wrote, the book was first published posthumously.

“The history of this monograph is deeply intertwined with the story of America’s struggle for a fair and compassionate immigration policy,” said Mr. Foxman.

Through ADL’s network of 30 regional offices, there will be a series of local programs and events centered around the release of the new book and the Introduction and Foreword.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who has been at the forefront of calls for meaningful immigration, has described his brother’s essay as a seminal document in the struggle for immigration reform.

“Every time the Senate takes up the issue of immigration reform, I re-read my brother’s book for inspiration,” Senator Kennedy said last year in remarks to ADL’s National Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C. “The words he wrote half a century ago ring just as true today.”

In his essay, John F. Kennedy wrote of immigration: “This was the secret of America: a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers, people eager to build lives for themselves in a spacious society that did not restrict their freedom of choice and action.”

United States presidential election, 2008: Much Ado About Nothing in Florida for Hillary

Senator Hillary Clinton won a comfortable majority of votes over her main competitor, Senator Barack Obama, in Florida, but the vote will not count for any delegates.

The Democratic Party boycotted the Florida primary months ago for moving up its primary date. Attention now moves to the February 5 “Super Tuesday” primaries in more than 20 states.

Check out the op-ed by top columnist Dana Milbank in the Washington Post.

George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address 2008

President George W. Bush delivers his State of the Union Address Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, at the U.S. Capitol. White House photo by David Bohrer.

In his final State of the Union address, President George W. Bush pressed for unity on the Iraq War and his economic stimulus plan. George W. Bush said his final year in office will be focused on sustaining military progress in Iraq and signaled he will maintain a sizeable U.S. military presence there.

On the economic front, George W. Bush urged Congress to pass his economic stimulus plan without adding new spending, saying the package could play a critical role making the United States more competitive internationally. Bush also reiterated his position on Iran with a warning: “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf.”

The state-run Iranian PressTV reported that Bush’s “rhetoric echoes anti-Iran hysteria” in the United States. China’s Xinhua news network focused on the economic aspects of the speech. Al-Jazeera examines Bush’s defense of his Iraq strategy, while the Israeli paper Haaretz reports on his appeal for the formation of a democratic Palestinian state.

Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama both criticized President George W. Bush for what they say is an attempt to ensure that the next president will not be able to withdraw from Iraq. In an interview with MSNBC after the address, Obama said Bush has been “foreshadowing” endless war. Obama said he “would have liked to see that we had a plan to exit from Iraq.”

In a statement, Hillary Clinton said Bush “isn’t satisfied with failure after failure in Iraq; he wants to bind the next President to his failed strategy by unilaterally negotiating with the Iraqi government about the future of the U.S.-Iraq security relationship, including the possibility of permanent U.S. bases in Iraq.”

All three of the Democratic candidates also criticized Bush’s economic stimulus plan, which, John Edwards said, “leaves out tens of millions of Americans who need help the most.”

Republican candidates generally praised Bush’s speech. Mitt Romney said on NBC that Bush “recognizes that Washington has been unable to deal” with problems including al-Qaeda and immigration. “This was a President saying, ‘You know what? Washington ought to get the job done.’”

Senator John McCain said Bush was “correct in his assessment” of the threat of radical Islamic extremism.

In a press release, Mike Huckabee said Bush’s speech reaffirms that “difficult as it has been, we are making progress in Iraq and Afghanistan,” and called on Americans to “take pride in the accomplishments of our warriors, under the superb leadership of General Petraeus.”