David Hill

“Ball-watchers. They’re just a bunch of ball-watchers.” That’s the label coaches and former players use to label the typical couch-potato football fan. While most fans try to follow the ball on every play, the expert’s field of view widens to pay attention to defensive schemes, pulling linemen, downfield blocking and a host of other things nowhere near the ball. I wish most political pundits had a wider field of view. Instead, they are more like the typical football fan, focusing only on the ball.

The venerable Gallup Organization surprises us this week by digging deep into its enormous treasure trove of surveys to deliver a tantalizing analysis of trends in the ideologies of the electorate. I’m talking about Lydia Saad’s scrutiny of the surprising resilience of conservatism in America today.

As I write this column on Tuesday, I am keeping an eye on Apple’s stock. I’m a shareholder, you see, and proud that I held onto AAPL shares I own. My financial adviser suggested weeks ago that I sell off my Apple stock because share prices exceeded analysts’ targets, more than doubling what I paid last year.

We’re in the season where private polls for candidates and parties are testing the pretext for candidacies. Will you be more or less likely to vote for a candidate with decades of experience in government? Would you find a political newcomer attractive? How appealing is a candidate with a military background? A woman? There are dozens of vocational, regional and demographic identities that fit most candidates, and we need to know which ones are most appealing to voters when we do a candidate rollout.

One of the dark secrets of the polling trade is that our historical roots are deeply intertwined with the social psychology of propaganda. Many of the first opinion researchers were paid to understand how we could better motivate soldiers and citizens to sustain our efforts in wartime. 

It is now evident that the widely prophesized national partisan realignment is not going to happen. The election of Barack Obama did not cause a huge and permanent shift to the Democrat Party. Instead, it appears that the longer-term trend toward dealignment is still operant. Neither political party is making much headway, independent candidates are popping up at the state and local levels, and potential independent or third-party presidential candidate Ron Paul is up to something worth monitoring.

President Barack Obama’s recent speech to America’s schoolchildren broke a cardinal rule of politics: Don’t get your friends into trouble. Why didn’t the brain trust advising the president figure this out before they embroiled public school districts across America in an awkward political mess? My guess is they wrongly thought the speech and controversy surrounding it were of no significance.

The latest edition of The Chronicle Review (a magazine of the Chronicle of Higher Education) features an intriguing article, “Taking the Right Seriously.” The jumping-off point for this piece is the University of California’s announcement that it’s launching a Center for the Comparative Study of Right Wing Movements. The essay that follows, penned by Columbia University’s ideologically androgynous Mark Lilla, lauds Berkeley’s move in half-hearted fashion while urging that conservatism be approached as a genuine intellectual tradition rather than a social psychopathology.

Well, it’s finally on. Kay Bailey Hutchison has officially thrown her Rangerette hat into the ring and is a full-fledged candidate for governor of Texas. The only thing that would seem to stand in her way is a well-coiffed secessionist cowboy, incumbent Rick Perry.

Regionalism may be the last remaining prejudice that is “politically correct.” It’s perfectly acceptable to attack someone for being a Southerner. In describing the Senate hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, for example, NPR titled its report “Sotomayor Grilled by Southern-Fried GOP.” The piece goes on to inform readers that “only one of the seven states represented by Republicans [on the Judiciary Committee] is a state that fought for Mr. Lincoln in the Civil War.” Not satisfied to leave their bigotry there, the package goes on to discuss certain senators’ “rich accents” that have “soft and expressive inflections of the South, even as they provided the toughest questioning.”