At the Fall 2008 Hoover Retreat, Morris Fiorina and Daron Shaw analyze the state of John McCain's campaign two weeks prior to election night.
Bio
Morris P. Fiorina
Morris P. Fiorina is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Formerly he was the Frank Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he taught from 1982-1998. From 1972-1982 he taught at the California Institute of Technology.
Professor Fiorina's research focuses on legislative and electoral processes with particular emphasis on the ways in which political institutions and procedures facilitate or distort the representation of citizen preferences.
He has just published Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope (Pearson Longman, 2004).
Daron Shaw
Before accepting a position at UT, Professor Shaw worked in several political campaigns as a survey research analyst. Shaw also served as a strategist in the 2000 and 2004 presidential election campaigns. He teaches American Government, Campaigns and Elections, Political Parties, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior, and Applied Survey Research.
He is a member of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Election Studies Board of Overseers, the editorial board for American Politics Research, and serves on the national decision team for Fox News and on the Advisory Board for the Annette Strauss Institute.
In 2008, Shaw's book Unconventional Wisdom: Facts and Myths about American Voters (co-authored with Karen Kaufmann and John Petrocik) will be published by Oxford University Press. This comes on the heels of his 2006 book, The Race to 270 which was published by the University of Chicago Press. In addition, Shaw has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, Political Communication, PS: Political Science, Party Politics, Presidential Studies Quarterly , and American Politics Research.
Along with Roderick Hart, he co-edited Communications in U.S. Elections: New Agendas, a 2001 book featuring innovative research in the field of political communication.
Mr. Fiorina's contrarian argument is transparently silly. It goes like this: Things are so bad that the next president is likely to screw things up, therefore the democrats should consider ceding the presidency to McCain. By 2012, he will have screwed up things even more so that the democrats can rule for a long time. But why should a democrat be more successful in 2012 after McCain messed up the economy, bankrupted the country, "bombed Iran and things like that"?
For intellectual discourse I'd choose Stephen Colbert over the Hoover Institution any time.