Democratic National Committee Research Articles

Don't Forget Solidarity

A decade before Abram Hewitt defeated Henry George's bid for mayor of New York in 1886, he delivered a more lasting blow to the American Left. A prominent northern congressman and chair of the Democratic National Committee, Hewitt played a central role in negotiating the notorious Compromise of 1877, which conceded victory in a contested presidential election to the Republican Party in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops that had occupied the former Confederacy since the Civil War. That arrangement freed Southern Democrats to use fraud, intimidation, and outright terrorism to deprive most African Americans and many poor whites of the right to vote; it also gave wealthy landowners and industrialists unchallenged hegemony in the South and tremendous influence in the nation as a whole. When leftists won elections in New York and other northern states, whether as Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, or Progressives, their influence was constrained severely by the disenfranchisement of working-class voters and the weakness of organized labor in the "Solid South." Not until a coalition of civil rights organizations, interracial unions, women's clubs, and left-wing groups set out to "re-align" the Democratic Party during the Second World War did the Left begin to transcend the legacy of 1877.

Call Her a Citizen: Progressive-Era Activist and Educator Anna Pennybacker (review)

Reviewed by: Call Her a Citizen: Progressive-Era Activist and Educator Anna Pennybacker Rebecca Montgomery Call Her a Citizen: Progressive-Era Activist and Educator Anna Pennybacker. By Kelley M. King. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010. Pp. 284. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781603441858, $39.95 cloth.) This work provides a complex portrait of a remarkably accomplished woman who, if she had been born male, no doubt would have attained positions of even greater public authority and power. Anna Hardwicke Pennybacker (1861–1938) [End Page 97] was born in Virginia but spent most of her life in Texas. Trained as a teacher, she enjoyed a successful career in public schools and authored a popular textbook on Texas history in the 1880s. After her husband Percy’s death in 1899, she channeled her considerable writing, oratorical, and organizational skills into work with numerous women’s and political organizations. Pennybacker held prominent positions in, among other groups, the Texas Federation of Women’s Clubs, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Chautauqua Women’s Club, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the Democratic National Committee. All of these organizations highly prized her skillful use of persuasive speech and print media for educational, publicity, and fundraising purposes. Pennybacker’s value as a leader was enhanced by her sharp political acumen. She had an expert grasp of timing and strategy that made her particularly effective at handling controversial issues. For example, as president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs she bridged the divide between conservative southern white women and women’s rights activists by muting her advocacy of woman suffrage enough to keep conservatives in the fold, while showing just enough support for the issue to appease suffragists. Although this alienated some members of the suffrage movement, she reconciled with both the Texas and national factions by assisting in their campaigns after stepping down from the presidency. She similarly negotiated the race question by accepting the legitimacy of white supremacy without resorting to the racist rhetoric employed by southern suffragists such as Kate Gordon of Louisiana. Once ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment appeared inevitable, she worked with the Democratic National Committee to educate women voters and secure their support for the party of the South. It was only after World War I that her diplomatic skills failed her. She participated in international relief work and publicly endorsed the League of Nations and World Court, but was unable to find an effective middle ground in women’s organizations between ultra-patriotic groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution and advocates of disarmament and peace. This is by far the most complete and critical account of Pennybacker’s public life published to date, although there are a few areas in which it is lacking. The introduction does not contain the sort of overarching thesis on the significance of her life needed to ground the reader in the narrative. Admittedly, the author discusses in her conclusion the difficulties of formulating such a thesis, but simply providing some initial generalizations as to Pennybacker’s place within Southern progressivism would have been helpful. The book also fails to explain the place of Mexican Americans in the racial politics of Texas progressivism. The author notes that Pennybacker’s history textbook referred to “lazy and insolent Mexicans” who challenged Anglo property rights (52), but there is no effort to explain how Hispanics figured into either public education or the suffrage issue. Despite these omissions, Call Her a Citizen makes important contributions to the history of education, Texas, and progressivism through its exhaustive examination of Pennybacker’s activism. Its account of the roles she and her husband played in pedagogical reform and the professionalization of teaching breaks new ground in Texas educational history. Moreover, by tracing Pennybacker’s journey from school teacher to political operative the author broadens the concept of education and reminds us of its connections to personal and political power. Although [End Page 98] Pennybacker’s life may defy easy generalization, this study should inspire other historians to give it the attention it deserves. Rebecca Montgomery Texas State University-San Marcos Copyright © 2011 The Texas State Historical Association

Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum

In the summer of 1968, as the Democratic National Committee prepared to roll into Chicago, the city's Museum of Contemporary Art was entering into an unusual partnership—an “experimental friendship”—with an organization called CVL, Inc. What's remarkable about this organization was that it was the new incarnation of a notorious street gang known as the Vice Lords.

What Do We Want in a Presidential Primary - An Election Law Perspective

Although the 2008 presidential primaries were in many ways a resounding success in terms of turnout, attention, and sheer excitement, many noted the pressing need for reform. States were rushing to hold their primaries sooner than ever, giving rise to "Super-Duper Tuesday," where twenty-four states had their primaries on the same day. The Democratic nominee at one point looked like it might be decided by the votes of so-called "Superdelegates"-party regulars beholden to no one. As the Democratic nomination contest wore on, Rush Limbaugh, in "Operation Chaos," encouraged his "dittoheads" to raid the party primaries of the Democrats, tilting the vote against Obama, the presumptive nominee. And there were continued grumblings about the disproportionate influence Iowa and New Hampshire had on the whole process. Fortunately, reform is in the air. The Democratic National Committee's "Commission for Change" has released its proposals for altering how the Democrats run their primaries. It is unclear how, if at all, the Republicans will follow suit. But how are we to evaluate such proposals? What do we want in a presidential primary? My Article, borrowing from the vital field of election law, proposes a set of values by which we should evaluate the presidential primaries. By investigating the various players in the nomination process-voters, parties, and the state-I isolate three major sets of "constitutional values" that are implicated in the presidential primary system: (1) the right of voters to an effective and meaningful vote, (2) the interests of the political parties in their autonomy and ideological purity (as well as in electoral victory), and (3) the concern of state and federal governments that the nomination process be legitimate, competitive, and produce a candidate who is capable of governing. Finally, I propose a master value-that of "deliberation"-that both explains and unifies the various competing values at play in the primaries. And I analyze the two major proposals for reforming the primaries, a national primary and a series of regional primaries, as well as the recommendations of the Democratic National Committee, in light of the goal of achieving "deliberative primaries." Last question-and I'm not sure if you even have a sense or if it's even appropriate to speculate-but do you think the new rules will favor a certain type of candidate? Does it favor a candidate who surges early like in the old Iowa and New Hampshire model, or a candidate who is strong regionally, or a candidate with wide but not deep support across the whole country? Rules do matter ....

“I WANT TO BECOME A PART OF HISTORY”: FREEDOM SUMMER, FREEDOM SCHOOLS, AND THEFREEDOM NEWS

If we are concerned about breaking down power structure, then we have to be concerned about building our own institutions to replace old, unjust, decadent ones which make up existing power structure. --Charles Cobb, Schools Coordinator, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1964 (1) For many young African Americans in Mississippi, Civil Rights Movement did not enter their lives until famous Freedom campaign in 1964, a decade after U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. (2) The most publicized aspect of Summer was voter registration drives, and people throughout nation watched on television campaign's crescendo in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in late August during Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, and black and white Mississippians testified before Democratic National Committee's credentials committee and protested seating of all-white delegation representing Mississippi's Democratic Party. (3) But Summer's ambitious campaign was not just about right to vote and political participation. Summer volunteers and local people sought in many ways, such as through opening of free and independent of state control. These autonomous institutions employed unique strategies and programs to educate young black Mississippians about their past and present to prepare them for a more promising future. school students took advantage of these radical sites of learning to conduct an intellectual coup against the state, which was depriving them of information and training for individual and collective liberation. (4) schools were designed not just to educate students, but to motivate and activate them. The schools provided unique opportunities for young Mississippians to participate in civil rights organizing activities. While some African American youths were involved in civil rights campaigns before Summer, they were often subject to direct reprisals for their actions in form of school suspensions and expulsions, as was case with school children participating in demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 and 1962 and Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Youth activism was limited to local civil rights campaigns where students played supporting roles to adult leadership. But youths who attended freedom schools took lead in creation of school and participated in organizing activities led by civil rights workers in Mississippi. (5) school students were offered opportunity, many for first time, to enjoy literature and pursue intellectual freedom. They used newspapers to join in ongoing dialogue about meaning of freedom, full citizenship rights, and increased access to educational opportunities. Most black Mississippians were victimized by discriminatory and impoverished system of black public schooling that failed to provide sufficient resources for acquisition of basic literacy skills. Education was always important to black Mississippians, but it had been severely restricted and significantly underfunded following black political disenfranchisement in Mississippi beginning in 1875. Historian Christopher Span discussed schools opened by African Americans prior to emancipation. The freed-people in Mississippi created schools in church basements or abandoned buildings that provided important opportunities for literacy training for African American children and adults. These privately funded normally funded by church groups or philanthropic foundations, were prominent in Mississippi before end of Reconstruction, and offered employment opportunities for black teachers and a more religiously based curriculum. (6) Some schools, funded by industrial capitalists, placed restrictions on courses of study and programs offered, especially after expansion of Hampton-Tuskegee model of normal and industrial education in late 19th century. …

Advocate's Small-State Wins Get Big-Time Attention

Advocate's Small-State Wins Get Big-Time Attention

Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement's First Generation: Virginia Foster Durr

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] You think you are the first generation who's ever done this; you ought to go out and learn some things. Louisville activist Anne Braden, whose own work with southern progressive movements began in the 1940s, offered that advice to Sue Thrasher, a Braden protege and student organizer in the 1960s. That call to learn from an earlier generation inspired Thrasher, along with historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and fellow student activist Leah Wise, to begin recording in the early 1970s the memories of veteran southern progressives. At the time of the project's inception, all three women were working in Atlanta for the newly formed Institute for Southern Studies. In 1973 Hall left for the University of North Carolina, where her commitment to recovering voices from the South's earlier radical traditions became one of the driving impulses behind her founding of the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP). Two years later, that ongoing interest in learning from first-generation Civil Rights activists, combined with a new SOHP initiative on southern women, brought Hall and Thrasher to the Wetumpka, Alabama, home of Virginia Foster Durr. Like her longtime friend Anne Braden, Durr stood as a living embodiment of what Hall would later term the Long Civil Rights Movement. (1) Born in Alabama in 1903, Durr grew up in Birmingham hearing stories of her slaveholding ancestors. Though the family's wealth had declined significantly by the early twentieth century, Durr formed an early identification with elite society that never completely faded, even as she later fought against institutions of race and class privilege. You could not be around Virginia without acknowledging and just observing that she did lay claim to coming from aristocracy, Thrasher recalled. Durr took pride in her aristocratic roots but also demonstrated an early unwillingness to play the role of the stereotypical southern belle. Her entry into political activism came in the early thirties, when she and her husband, Alabama attorney Clifford Durr, moved to Washington, D. C. There Clifford served in the Roosevelt administration, while Virginia became active with the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, especially its work to abolish the poll tax. In association with other like-minded New Dealers, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Durr became in 1938 one of the founding members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, one of the South's first interracial organizations that actively opposed segregation. Her work for voting rights continued throughout the 1940s, and she served as a lead organizer for the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, all the while raising four daughters. She was an ardent supporter of Henry Wallace's 1948 bid for the presidency on the Progressive Party ticket and ran that same year for the United States Senate as the Progressive Party's candidate from Virginia. In 1951 the Durrs returned to Alabama, where Clifford established a law practice in Montgomery. For a time, Virginia scaled back her political activism, partly in an effort to shield her family from reprisal. Yet, in 1954, she came under public scrutiny when Senator James Eastland, from Mississippi, called her to testify in New Orleans before his Internal Security Subcommittee. Eastland failed to draw convincing links between Durr and subversive activity; her chief sin, as Durr later put it, was not in being a Communist but rather in refusing to become an anti-Communist. The publicity surrounding the hearing, however, did expose Durr as an opponent of segregation. From that time on, she made little attempt to conceal her racial politics and became an active supporter of the emerging Civil Rights Movement, most famously giving aid to Rosa Parks during the years surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With Clifford at her side, Virginia sat with Hall and Thrasher for initial interviews in the spring of 1975. …

The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Party Competition (review)

Reviewed by: The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Party Competition Taeku Lee (bio) The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Party Competition, by Thomas P. Kim. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. xvi + 208 pp. $71.50 cloth. ISBN: 1-59213-548-X. $23.95 paper. 1-59213-549-8. In a letter to Francis Hopkinson in 1789, Thomas Jefferson remarked, "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all." Thus this "Founding Father" of the new American republic professed his belief that the interests of political parties were averse to the public interest and to the independent decision making necessary for the proper flourishing of democracy in the United States. Yet his personal convictions notwithstanding, the irony in Jefferson's remark is that he is commonly credited with founding the "party of the common man," the Democratic-Republican Party. The further irony is that over the course of history, we have come to view political parties (to some extent, misguidedly) as the controlling institutional [End Page 115] gateways that mobilized and incorporated large waves of immigrants to the United States, especially white ethnics migrating in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, today we cannot conceive of electoral politics in America outside of the role played by political parties. Parties organize and simplify the inordinate complex decisions voters need to make down to two major candidates and mobilize voter registration and turnout, and the political party a person identifies with remains the most important determinant of individual voting decisions. Political parties, however, play a vastly different role with racial and ethnic minorities in general and with Asian Americans specifically. Janelle Wong finds that emerging panethnic groups like Latinos and Asian Americans vastly underparticipate in politics vis-à-vis whites in no small measure because parties no longer bring these newcomers to America's shores in droves onto voter rolls. Claire Jean Kim further finds that Asian Americans in particular are valorized in some contexts as "model minorities" and ostracized in other contexts as "perpetual foreigners." In The Racial Logic of Politics, Thomas Kim puts these various pieces together into a powerful and damning account of how Asian Americans have been systematically excluded in two-party competition in the United States. Kim's core argument is that there is a structural logic to two-party politics that motivates parties to be actively hostile toward the inclusion and incorporation of Asian Americans. This antipathy, Kim claims, is not a matter of "coincidence, bad luck, or simple anti-Asian prejudice" (6). There are two key elements to this argument. First, following other scholars who see wisdom and insight in the median voter theorem, Kim sees both Democrats and Republicans as caught in a deadly spiral of political competition to build a majority electoral coalition. Second, Kim sees Asian Americans as racialized, whereby "Asian bodies have been framed as irreducibly illiberal alien foreigners that threaten the American body politic" (27). The conjoint result here is that parties seeking to build majority coalitions have little cause to reach out to a segment of the electorate that is viewed as illiberal and every reason to actively dissociate themselves from that group. The empirical body of The Racial Logic of Politics is filled with a rich chronicling of the 1996 campaign finance scandal involving numerous Asians in the United States whose legal standing to express their political viewpoints through campaign contributions was deemed suspect without sufficient vetting or evidence. Kim's discussion of the regrettable rush to judgment by the Democratic National Committee's so-called internal investigation, the deafening silence of prominent Democrats on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and the collateral damage this affair had on the political prospects of Matt Fong and Bill Lann Lee are excellent and well tailored to his core arguments. [End Page 116] The book also includes a riveting recounting of race-making through the construction of Census Bureau categories. The key aim of this chapter is not to further fortify the argument about the structural logic of party competition. Rather, Kim seems motivated in this chapter to demonstrate the possibilities for Asian American political agency "through quintessentially...

The Public Relations Work of Journalism Trailblazer and First Lady Confidante Lorena Hickok, 1937–45

This article draws on both primary and secondary sources to help understand the evolution of the public relations profession through a biographical analysis of Lorena Hickok, a reporter who was the first woman to have a front-page byline in the New York Times and to hold a PR position in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. In examining her lesser-known public relations career at the World's Fair from 1937 to 1940 and at the Democratic National Committee from 1940 to 1945, the authors found that she implemented asymmetrical public relations and relationship maintenance strategies, which were both forms of a developing managerial function in the public relations field. Information about this period of her work adds to the history of women in political public relations.

Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks

What is a party? This article presents the argument that rmal party apparatus is only one part of an extended network of interest groups, media, other advocacy organizations and candidates. The authors have measured a portion of this network in the United States systematically by tracking lists of names transferred between political organizations. Two distinct and polarized networks are revealed, which correspond to a more liberal Democratic group and a more conservative Republican group. Formal party organizations, like the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, tend to receive information within their respective networks, which suggests that other groups serve to funnel information towards the formal party.

Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process

The 2008 presidential nomination was marked by the most aggressive frontloading in recent history; the process was a mess from the outset. Frontloading is the trend in recent presidential nominations in which states schedule their primaries and caucuses near the beginning of the delegate-selection season to have a greater impact on the process. In 1976, 10% of the delegates had been chosen by March 2. In 2008, 70% of the delegates had been chosen by that same date. As part of their ongoing efforts to address frontloading and other problems, both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) revised the schedules and rules for 2008 presidential primary elections and caucuses.

Reforming Presidential Nominations: Rotating State Primaries or a National Primary?

As part of their ongoing efforts to address frontloading and other perceived problems, both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) proposed revised schedules and rules for 2008. The major changes for the Democrats were that two new states were allowed to join Iowa and New Hampshire in violating the official February 5 start date. The idea was that these states—Nevada from the West and South Carolina from the South—would enhance participation by more diverse populations (Latinos and African Americans). While the Republican rules called for states to lose half of their delegate vote if they violated the timing rules, the Democrats implemented a “death penalty” requiring any state violating the timing rules to lose all of its delegates. The New York Times called these changes the biggest shift in the way Democrats have nominated their presidential candidates in 30 years. Yet in the end these changes did little to lessen frontloading, as 70% of all delegates were actually chosen by the beginning of March. Two large states (Michigan and Florida) defied both national parties and voted before February 5.

Curse of the mummy: Oral affliction or archival aphasia

In 1973 a reel of magnetic tape was handed over to the US National Archives containing 18¼ minutes of silence. This gap takes place during a conversation between President Richard Nixon and J.R. Haldeman (White House Chief of Staff) three days after the break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Although the muteness of both the tape and the man defied efforts to conjure up truth in 1973, fear of disturbing the remaining magnetic particles that clung to the gap was immediately understood and so the tape was permanently removed from circulation and archived. There it has lain undisturbed in cryogenic sleep for over 30 years waiting for that moment when the kiss of technological progress will re-awaken it and restore its capacity to speak. This article contends that the tape-gap is already pre-emptively inscribed within the mnemonic archive of the machine and is in fact not silent but fully enunciatory.

Commentary on Welch's Early and Important Work Separating Out the Effects of Constituency and Campaign Contributions on Congressional Roll-Call Votes

Writing mote than 20 years ago, W. P. Welch used a probit model to attempt to isolate the effect of campaign contributions on roll-call from other influences like the legislator's constituency, party, and ideology. The literature on the relationship between campaign contributions and legislative votes is extensive, with often-inconsistent findings. It is typically the case contributions from interested groups are correlated with roll-call favorable to the contributor's interests. Studies include a wider range of variables find this relationship is so simple. Interest groups contribute to members who are already often predisposed to support their position. If the group has a local presence, then members may be with the group because of constituency pressures. Party and ideology also must be factored into the analysis (Ansolabehere, Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003; Chin 2005; Roscoe and Jenkins 2005; Wawro 2001). Welch's (1982) article presents a conceptual framework in which to consider the of campaign contributions from an interested group votes by legislators on past or future legislation. Welch links this transaction to what he labels exchange theory. His framework includes assumptions were well grounded in the understanding of congressional elections and campaign finance at the time. His overall conclusion was although contributions are significant, they were the least important determinant of legislative voting (Welch 1982, 493). What other determinants were more important? He finds variables like dairy production (a measure of constituency interest), ideology, and party are all stronger predictors of the vote on milk price supports than campaign contributions. Welch's article is cited in sociology, economics, and political science journals. While this essay will explain its central argument about the relative influence of campaign contributions on roll-call votes and vice versa, it is also the case Welch is frequently cited in studies of legislative behavior, interest groups (especially agricultural groups), and, more broadly, about campaign finance. Context of Welch's Article The conventional wisdom that interest groups 'buy' influence by contributing to political motivates Welch's analysis (Welch 1982,487). At the time of publication, the issue of campaign contributions from interest groups had become more salient because of the Watergate investigation of a botched burglary of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. The investigation had uncovered large illegal contributions to the Committee to Reelect the President (CREP) during the 1972 election cycle (Corrado and Mann et al. 1997,283). Watergate galvanized Congress to reform the way federal elections are financed. New regulations in the form of a set of 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) imposed contribution and spending limitations, mandated disclosure, and established an enforcement agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), to over see the new regulations. Welch indirectly mentions FECA in his opening paragraph when he states the public belief interest groups buy influence is a reason for Congress either publicly to finance congressional campaigns or to place a limit on the amount of monies a candidate may receive from political action committees (Welch 1982, 178). While Welch finds only modest independent effects campaign contributions, in his words not a major influence, he does find those who received contributions in the 1974 election cycle were more likely to vote higher milk-price supports in 1975. Similarly, those who voted with the milk producers in 1975 were more likely to receive contributions from the Dairy PAC during the 1976 election cycle. Consistent with what we know about legislative specialization and interest-group behavior, he finds contributions to the Agriculture Committee members were higher, other things being equal. …

"We are neither male nor female Democrats": Gender Difference and Women's Integration within the Democratic Party

This article explores the organization of women within the Democratic Party in the postwar period, using the unexpected dissolution of the party's Women's Division in 1953 to examine the way women active within the party apparatus understood their partisan engagement. These women embraced a gender-neutral approach emphasizing selflessness, and abandoned collective strategies to influence policy or extract gains for women. By the early 1960s, the women's organization had deteriorated not only because of the machinations of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair and the weakening of the DNC as a whole but also because of the women's own limited vision of their participation. Women made significant contributions to the life of the Democratic Party in the 1950s, but their abandonment of collective expression in the party in the name of gender neutrality and service contributed to the irrelevance of the remaining women's organization, particularly as women organized to assert collective pressure elsewhere. This article exposes the difficulties facing women who participated in mixed-sex organizations and adds to the dialogue regarding postwar women's political activism.

Gilbert Burnham

Gilbert Burnham

Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 "Asian Donorgate" Controversy in Perspective (review)

Reviewed by: Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 “Asian Donorgate” Controversy in Perspective Pei-te Lien Racial Politics in An Era of Transnational Citizenship: The 1996 “Asian Donorgate” Controversy in Perspective. Michael Chang . ( Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.) Aptly titled, this book has a singular purpose to help readers understand the conditions, facts, and meanings surrounding the 1996 campaign finance scandal to Asian (and other) Americans. Through a critical reading of the various discourses and the associated political practices related to the "Asian Donorgate," Chang produces a solid and inspiring contribution to the growing literature on the contemporary political experiences of Asian Americans. The book offers not only a rare treat to the politically concerned about the paradoxical and situational racial status of Asians in American politics, but a candid discussion of the dilemmas for community political organizing and empowerment given the opportunities and pitfalls that arise from globalization and the availability of transnational capital. Specifically, the author deconstructs events and discourses in the four-year period that begins with allegations of illegal campaign money raised by John Huang and several other naturalized Chinese Americans for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during President Clinton's reelection campaign in 1996. His research ends with the release of Dr. Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized Taiwan-born nuclear scientist who was laid off and jailed for 9 months because of unfounded espionage charges. The choice of the two time-points was to reveal the pattern of shifting discourses and the consequences the former had on the development of the latter. By analyzing the ways that Asian American citizens were racialized as perpetual foreigners during this time period, the author shows "how citizenship and race in globalization play a critical role in locating Asian Americans as simultaneously marginal and central to mainstream American ideologies of nationhood" (3). The discreetness of the author in his approach to the sensitive subject matter is evinced by the opening pages, when he scrupulously defines the increasingly popular but much abused and often misunderstood terms of globalization, flexibility, transnationalism, flexible citizenship, diaspora, and hybridity. The same kind of prudence is seen in the organization of the book, which has a section on [End Page 111] research design and another on conceptual framework, and a "map" within subsequent chapters to prevent readers from getting lost in the jungle of complex ideas. Built upon themes of "shifting discourses," "neo-orientalism," "transnational citizenship," and "political agency and the public sphere," the book clearly articulates the flexible meanings of citizenship and challenges to community incorporation and empowerment regarding a highly transnationally-affiliated population. Besides the main methodology of discursive analysis, the author adopts sociological and anthropological approaches to data collection which involve elite interviews and archival research of governmental reports and news media coverage. The book's primary theoretical framework is critical transnationalism, which specifically opposes celebratory discourses of transnationalism that wishfully foresee the end of world divisions and inequality in the era of globalization. Rather, as informed by prior conceptions of transnational citizenship, racial formation, and dual-domination and extraterritoriality, the author views as inevitable the emergence of new forms of power hierarchies that may transcend national borders but still maintain the structures of inequalities within each nation-state and other social and political boundaries. In addition to critiquing the traditional Eurocentric "foreignizing" discourses adopted by mainstream American media and politicians in the "Asian Donorgate" events that deny the possibility of dual citizenship and loyalties to the majority-immigrant community, the book expresses serious concern about the deepening class and political divisions as a result of unequal access to transnational capital and transborder mobility in the post-1965 Asian American community and the challenges that this reality imposes on community-organizing and strategies for sovereignty and empowerment. Herein lies the value of the theory of a progressive sense of citizenship, which exposes the problems of distinguishing "aliens" from "citizens" in the assimilationist notion of normative citizenship in the age of globalization and proposes an alternative model of citizenship that appreciates the multicultural diversity brought in by individuals who maintain transnational affiliations. Whereas the author delivers powerful and repetitive attacks against the utility of the assimilation paradigm and the...

Assessing Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections

Throughout the 2006 midterm elections, the press wrote about the conflict over campaign strategy between Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his counterparts in Congress, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emmanuel, the heads of the Senate and House campaigns, respectively. Schumer and Emmanuel, as well as other Beltway strategists, disagreed with Dean's "fifty state strategy" to build the party across the nation, arguing that DNC funds should focus on the races targeted by the congressional parties. This essay explains, in part, why Dean's popularity suffers in Washington – even after decisive Democratic victories – and why he continues to have support outside the Beltway. It also provides preliminary evidence that Dean's fifty-state strategy paid off in terms of increasing the Democratic vote share beyond the bounce of a national tide favoring Democrats.

The Rise and Decline of Presidential Populism

At a Democratic Leadership Council meeting in the summer of 2002, centrist leaders of the Democratic Party took Al Gore to task for his use of populist rhetoric during the 2000 presidential campaign. Ed Rendell, the current governor of Pennsylvania and the former Democratic National Committee Chairman, bemoaned: “We wish Al had refined the message and not used the ‘poor people versus the rich’.” Striking a similar note, Joseph Lieberman charged that Gore's populist language made it difficult for the Democratic ticket to gain the support of middle-class, independent voters who did not see America as “us versus them,” and that these verbal attacks were to blame for Gore's failure to win the popular vote by a more convincing margin. The apparent backlash against Gore's use of populism is the latest manifestation of a transformation that has characterized presidential rhetoric over the past several decades. Put simply, the language of populism, which in the nineteenth century constituted one of the most formidable rhetorical weapons in the arsenal of Democratic presidents, has faded and been displaced by a more consensual language. This trend contrasts with the striking, though limited, embrace of populism by such Republicans as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

The California Plan: A 21st Century Method for Nominating Presidential Candidates

The traditional schedule of presidential primaries and caucuses is simply that—a tradition—one which evolved piecemeal over a period of decades, without any systemic architecture. Iowa and New Hampshire always go first because . . . they are Iowa and New Hampshire. Originally, the other states’ primaries and caucuses were spread fairly evenly throughout the spring season, leading up to the nominating conventions in the summer. Whereas now there are only a handful of states that do not hold presidential primaries, prior to the McGovern reforms in the early 1970s, only a third of the states held such primaries. In those pre-reform days, instead of the delegates of a state being chosen in one day as in a primary election, they were usually selected in the course of a long process beginning with precinct caucuses, running through district or county caucuses, and culminating in state conventions. The process of selecting a party’s presidential candidate was the aggregation of decisions made in thousands of smokefilled rooms. Such a process did not lend itself to as much media attention nor to a sense of a candidacy building momentum. Rather, there was more the sense that the delegate selection processes in each state were relatively isolated, exerting little influence on each other. In such an environment, there was little perceived advantage in a state choosing its delegates early. The McGovern reforms changed this process. Over the next two decades, more states switched to primaries, which attracted more media attention. The concept of campaign momentum took shape; with increasing frequency, candidates without sufficient momentum dropped out of the race before the national conventions. Eventually, states realized that they could exert more influence over the process and the candidates, as well as attract more campaign expenditures and media coverage, if they moved their primaries to the beginning of the season. The more the system shifted from caucuses to primaries, the more incentive it created for front-loading. This was the unintended, adverse consequence of the McGovern reforms. The first significant break with tradition came in 1988, when a bloc of southern states decided to hold their primaries on the same Tuesday in March, calling it “Super Tuesday.” But any state or region of the country can play that game, and in the years since many have. In 1996, California (a region in its own right) moved its presidential primary from the first Tuesday in June to the second Tuesday in March; still not content with that, the most populous state in the union moved its primary to the first Tuesday in March four years later. California was joined by 11 other states, creating a “Mega Tuesday” in which a third of all conventional delegates were awarded. Also in 2000, a bloc of western states moved their primaries to the Saturday between Mega Tuesday and the South’s Super Tuesday. Front-loaded extravaganzas such as Super Tuesday and Mega Tuesday are the weapons of mass destruction in presidential politics. They kill candidacies by the score. Both Bill Bradley and John McCain conceded their parties’ nominations on March 8, 2000, the day after Mega Tuesday, before the Western Regional Primary and Super Tuesday even took place. Until 1976, New Hampshire held the first primary of the season on the first Tuesday in March, an event that began the campaign in earnest. In 2000, however, the first Tuesday in March marked not the beginning of the campaign, but the end. Even so, we have yet to see the worst of it. For 2004, the Democratic National Committee “has lifted its window restriction on protecting New Hampshire and Iowa,” meaning that states are now free to schedule primaries and caucuses before these two traditional events. It does not seem at all unrealistic to predict that some year (perhaps 2008 or 2012) we will recover from our New Year’s Eve hangovers to find that we have already nominated our presidential candidates!