Rarely in American politics is there a confluence of events that creates a dramatic clash of issues. The Texas textbook controversy and two recent federal court cases pitted opposing interest groups against each other—with illuminating results.

The Religious Right and Censorship

Protestant evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christians share a common belief in the inerrancy of the Bible and a constellation of attitudes based on localism, conventional moral standards, traditionalist family values, and vocal “Americanism” (Guth, 1983, p. 64). Traditionally, evangelical and fundamentalist church members and their leaders have been among the least politically active groups in America. These sects are dominated by adherents who are more rural and less wealthy than other nonfundamentalists, and are led by conservative, nonpolitical pastors. The many fundamentalist denominations are congregationally based, and historically have remained quite separate as a result of infighting and rivalry over interpretation of scripture.

By the mid-1970s, however, government policies on affirmative action, Supreme Court decisions on abortion, civil rights and school prayer, and social movements among women, gays and anti-war protestors threatened fundamentalists' traditional beliefs and values. Fundamentalist leaders began to speak out, reflecting their followers' fears. Groups began to appear that translated fundamentalist values into rhetoric and then into political action. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts, James Robison, Rex Humbard and others took their message to vast audiences as their church services and religious talk shows began appearing on hundreds of television stations. As the evangelists' audiences grew, the content of the shows grew more political, as the preachers urged their viewers to act on their beliefs.

There is probably no subject which has been studied more thoroughly by political scientists than American presidential elections. A vast literature has developed examining the effects of attitudes toward the parties, candidates, and issues on voter decision-making in these quadrennial contests (for a comprehensive review of this literature see Asher, 1988). Despite the proliferation of literature on this topic, however, relatively little research has addressed what is perhaps the most basic question about presidential elections: who wins and who loses?

A few scholars have developed models for predicting the national outcomes of presidential elections. Brody and Sigelman (1983) proposed a model based on the incumbent president's approval rating in the final Gallup Poll before the election. This extremely simple model yielded an unadjusted R2 of .71. Hibbs (1982) proposed a different bivariate model based entirely on the trend in real per capita disposable income since the last presidential election. This model yielded an unadjusted R2 of .63. Thus, neither of these bivariate models proved to be highly accurate.

Lewis-Beck and Rice (1984) have developed a forecasting model which combines economic conditions and presidential popularity, Their model, which uses the president's approval rating in May and the change in real per capita GNP during the second quarter of the election year to predict the popular vote for president, yields an unadjusted R2 of .82.

In conversation with a German Daron in 1807, Thomas Jefferson remarked that, “when a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself a public property.”

Recalling Jefferson as the intellectual father of American democracy, we may read this comment as an approving aphorism—a tenet of political philosophy. But Jefferson was, at the time, also an embattled president. He had suffered personal attacks as scurrilous as any in his day or ours.

So the remark may have been less an affirmation of democratic ideal than a recognition of political reality. Its tone implies resignation. Whether or not a public figure had a right to privacy and individuality, Jefferson seemed to regard at least some loss of both as inevitable.

In a free society with a free press, the demands of public life inevitably exceed the functional obligations of office. It is not enough for elected officials to make a straightforward accounting of the public business—the inarguably proper province of the public's right to know. The politics of a democracy also demand contact on a personal level. The public has a right to know what sort of people are running its affairs.

The general topic of this symposium—the interplay between public careers and private lives in the selection of presidential candidates—is important. Many debates around dinner tables undoubtedly followed the disclosure by the Miami Herald of Gary Hart's time spent with Donna Rice. In the United States especially, as Tocqueville pointed out 150 years ago, we tend to believe that the law speaks with insight, even if not necessarily with finality, on issues of public importance. This explains, I suspect, my presence in this forum. The embarrassing reality, though, is that the law of privacy is at best tangential to the concerns behind the symposium.

I might best fulfill my task—to comment on the legal regulation of disclosures of private facts regarding public figures—in a sentence: The very fact that public figures are by definition “newsworthy” means that in fact they forego any legal protection against the publication of true facts about them, however embarrassing or offensive such publication might be. There is simply no case law supporting the claim of a public figure seeking political office to enjoy a “right of privacy.” The courts rightly have held that the recognition of any such right would disserve the democratic process itself, for it would inevitably deprive the public of truthful information relevant to deciding who should exercise public responsibilities.

The signs are abundant that many of the institutions and processes of American politics are becoming increasingly direct. As communication technologies erode the mediating roles played by secondary leadership, citizens and public officials interact directly with each other more intensively and more frequently.

As this gale has moved through our political system, different scholars have noted their own particular “straw in the wind.” By far the most attention has been given to the declining capacity of party as a mechanism mediating between voters and office holders (Polsby, 1983; Kirkpatrick, 1978). A different viewpoint comes from Samuel Kernell, who has revised Richard Neustadt's work on the presidency by arguing that presidential power is increasingly secured and exercised through public opinion influence (Kernell, 1986). Those who have studied the activities of incumbent Congressmen and Senators note that they have also extended their direct contact with constituents: not only have the flows of mail into and out of congressional offices increased markedly over the past two decades, but the establishment of C-Span has brought congressional business into literally millions of homes (Abramson, Arterton, and Orren, 1988). Moreover, in a constant search for new ways of contacting citizens, congressmen are in the forefront of experimentation with cable television, satellites, VCRs and computer communications (Arterton, 1987).

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then 1988 presidential nominating politics was a gold mine for editorial cartoonists. Exaggeration and distortion are the cartoonist's stock-in-trade, Colin Seymour-Ure (1986, 168) tells us, and—with Gary Hart's dalliance, Joseph Biden's plagiarism, Pat Robertson's direct line to God, Robert Dole's tantrums, Jesse Jackson's ego, and George Bush's image problems—there was much to exaggerate and distort in the 1988 races.

Like other journalists, editorial cartoonists follow and interpret campaigns for the public. Like columnists, cartoonists openly praise or condemn candidates and campaigns. But the power of pictures sets cartoonists apart from other editorialists. According to Doug MaHette of the Atlanta Constitution, the fundamentals of cartooning are distortion, hyperbole, and subjectivity. Cartoons, he writes (1988, 158), “distort and reflect reality like fun-house mirrors.” Seymour-Ure (1986, 170) agrees: “The comments and insults conveyed by the graphic imagery of a cartoon have a crudity and offensiveness that might well be unacceptable if spelt out in words.”

As long as editorial cartoonists have caricatured politicians, politicians have feared for their public images. Thomas Nast helped topple Boss Tweed in the 1870s by repeatedly drawing him and his ring as corrupt. “Stop them damn pictures!” Tweed reportedly roared after an especially tough Nast cartoon appeared in 1871. Vice President Bush may have harbored similar resentment when he recently complained about Gary Trudeau's representations of him in “Doonesbury.” A particularly painful stab of the Trudeau pen was placing Bush's manhood in a blind trust.

An implicit understanding, seldom bluntly articulated, has come apart. The federated sovereign states, nearly four centuries in building since the first European colonizations, are grappling with a dilemma not only in institutional processes and structures but also about consensus on dominant ideology.

Nothing illustrates the strange unraveling of federalism's implicit and pragmatically informal truce better than the present Great Textbook Controversy. In essence, it is a new states' rights fuss about super states versus small states versus a national insistence on uniform high standards in public education.

Public educational institutions have long represented the American Dream to our nation of newcomers and ever-mobile population. The First Amendment's No Establishment “Wall” meant that parents of diverse value systems could build a new community consensus around common needs at the school. By mid-twentieth century the U.S. high school had become the most important rite of passage into full U.S. citizenship and adulthood. No wonder, then, that each “blow” to the most cherished and legitimizing institution of individual communities has aroused such emotion. The local high school was the way into the great continental economy and culture.

April 4, 1988 marked the end of the most divisive and tumultuous period in the history of Arizona politics. For the first time in its seventy-six years as a state, Arizona, and the nation, witnessed the removal of a sitting governor, Evan Mecham, by conviction on impeachment charges by the Arizona Senate. Evan Mecham was the first governor in United States history to be confronted with a recall, impeachment and criminal indictment simultaneously. Although removed from office, the impact of Mecham's fifteen-month administration will permeate the social and political fabric of Arizona, as well as cloud its national image, for many years to come. This essay will briefly examine the concept of recall as an exercise in direct democracy, and the factors and context surrounding the recall drive and impeachment proceedings of Governor Evan Mecham.

The Recall and Arizona's Provision

The recall is one of three aspects of the concept of “direct democracy,” the others being referendum and initiative. According to Wilcox (1912, p. 169) the initiative and referendum are instruments in the exercise of “pure democracy” which supplement representative government—the initiative is direct participation on the part of citizens in legislative action, while the referendum is an exercise in veto action. Conceptually, however, the recall is different. It does not involve direct citizen participation in the legislative activities of government, but is concerned with their ability to remove officials, principally elected but in some rare instances appointed, from office before the end of their term. As Wilcox stated, recall “… is simply the guaranteed right of the people to discharge their public servants when the public servants cease to be satisfactory to them” (Wilcox, 1912, p. 169).

We expect to find calculating, even Machiavellian, politicians in Cook County, Illinois or Placquemines Parish, Louisiana. It comes as something of a surprise to find them in Johnson County, Iowa, but with the quadrennial recurrence of the Iowa caucuses lowans become subtle calculators of their own advantage. Around caucus time, Iowa is a land of political strategists.

In the following pages, I summarize my notes from several days spent observing the strategies of politicians, the media, and citizens in Iowa in 1988.

In 1920, John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner reported the results of an experiment with an eleven-month old infant, “Albert B” (Watson and Rayner, 1920). Their study of this single subject was methodologically flawed and produced ambiguous results. Nevertheless, it became the psychology textbook classic case of conditioned emotional responses. With the exception of Pavlov's dogs, probably no story has been cited more often than that of “Little Albert.”

I was led to the Little Albert story as the result of an earlier study of genetics textbooks. Some years ago, I began work on a history of the “nature-nurture” controversy. One aspect of this project involved an analysis of textbook treatments of the genetics of intelligence. I had expected to find a rough continuity of views from the 1920s until the late 1970s, when the effects of the Cyril Burt scandal should have been fully felt in genetics texts. (The claim of a high heritability for I.Q. was supported primarily by Burt's [fabricated] studies of separated identical twins. Leon Kamin identified serious problems with Burt's results in 1974, although actual fraud was not proved until 1979 [see Kamin, 1974; Hearnshaw, 1979].)

How—and how well—does the modern process of vice presidential selection work? What can be learned by considering the nominations of Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen by the Democrats and Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana by the Republicans in 1988?

Most students and practitioners of American politics agree as a matter of principle that vice presidents should be chosen with their constitutional role as presidential successor uppermost in mind. Nine vice presidents, more than a fifth of those who have held the office, have succeeded to the presidency. (They served as president for forty-two years, twenty-nine of them in this century). During one recent period from 1945 to 1977, vice presidents who became president by succession occupied the Oval Office fully half the time. Illnesses, impeachment proceedings, and assassination attempts have made succession an active possibility during twenty of the nation's forty presidencies (Goldstein 1982, 207-08). Every postwar vice president except Walter F. Mondale has become the subject of unusual public concern because of some event or condition that raised the possibility that he would succeed to the presidency.

To the extent that the concern for presidential succession is taken seriously, it implies two governance criteria for evaluating the vice presidential selection process. The most important governance criterion is the competence of nominees for vice president to be president. Historically, six of the nine successions have occurred during the vice president's first year in office, suggesting that even the best on-the-job training is no substitute for a wise initial choice.

Congress is once again considering the possibility of enacting national voter registration reform. The Universal Voter Registration Act—introduced by Alan Cranston (D-CA) in the Senate and by John Conyers (D-MI) in the House—would require the states to establish both day-of-election registration and mail-in registration, and it would also require “all Federal agencies and all State, county, and municipal agencies receiving grant-in-aid monies” to offer voter registration to the public. Jesse Jackson has since taken up support of the bill, and Governor Dukakis, no champion of registration reform in his own state, acceded to Jackson's demand that it be endorsed by the Democratic party platform. And then there is a second bill being shaped by Representative Al Swift (D-WA) which would require states to make voter registration an automatic part of processing people for drivers' licenses and identification cards in motor vehicle offices. This bill may also be expanded to include other federally-assisted state agencies, such as unemployment and welfare.

Certainly something should be done. Just a shade more than half of Americans will go to the polls in November 1988, compared with turnout levels between 75% and 95% in other western democracies. High turnout is made easy elsewhere because citizens are placed on registration lists automatically when they come of age, or they are registered periodically by government-sponsored door-to-door canvasses. In the United States, by contrast, only 63% of those eligible are registered; more than 65 million are not, and two out of three of them are below the median income.

This past January, I conducted a class on “Presidential Elections: The New Hampshire Primary” with 13 students from Middlebury College. We spent one week in Middlebury, primarily watching presidential debates held this summer and fall. On January 11, we headed to New Hampshire. I have ten strong impressions of the New Hampshire presidential primary:

Penetration: The political process in New Hampshire is open and accessible. Each student had at least one “brush with greatness.” A Dole volunteer was the lead driver in Dole's motorcade before and after the January 15 Dartmouth debate, and was in Dole's holding room before and after the debate. A Bush volunteer drove George Bush's truck, went to Bush's estate in Maine, and was within 10 feet of Air Force Two her first night on the job. A Kemp volunteer met Kemp and Hart her first night in New Hampshire.