Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The 2000 Presidential candidate debates were a pivotal event in that year's campaign. Gore was expected to benefit from the events, but polls showed that Bush's popularity that grew after the debates. One hypothesis stated that Bush benefited from lowered expectations while Gore was held to a high standard. Another potential contributor is the constructed nature of the debates. I argue the production (camera placement, editing) worked in favor of Bush in the second debate.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Paper will describe court decisions citing Bush v. Gore as authority

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The United States has a long geopolitical tradition of distrust, anxiety, and violence vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and particularly with regard to nations, peoples, and cultures that it considers to be 'foreign' or 'other.' Often, this anxiety and aggressiveness toward the 'other' manifests itself in US foreign policy and national security circles in the form of outright violence, terror, and war. The present posture of the Bush-led White House and the Pentagon with regard to the non-Western world, and the Middle-East in particular, is indicative of this general tendency. It is also reminiscent of other eras of US foreign policy (under Theodore Roosevelt, World War II, the early 1950s, etc.) when the fear of the 'other' mobilized all sorts of tense and at times aggressive policies. America's current geopolitics of terror and its specific instantiations in places like Iraq or Afghanistan or through the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack are all part of a long but (fortunately) discontinuous history of fear and aggression, one often leading to the other, in America's views of itself and its manifest destiny in relation to the rest of the world. This paper tries to make sense of the role that fear and aggression play in past and present American geopolitical designs by looking at the way popular novels throughout the 20th century (but in pre and post-WWII years in particular) helped shape the American public's psyche about the meaning of US national security and the mission of US foreign policy in a world presented as dangerous, insecure, uncertain, and full of enemies. Pulp fiction novels, and their main themes of violent crime, sleazy sexual intrigue, bloody struggles with strangers and foreigners, and sci-fi technological horror and terror, offered for many years (even if less so today) easily accessible popular conduits through which American citizens learned about their world and the place of the United States in it. In this paper, I draw upon popular geopolitical critical analyses to argue that the type of public sentiments that at times today the current US leadership relies upon in its (re)molding of a post-September 11 US-centered global geopolitics is based upon the presence for decades in the United States of a pulp fictional literary genre of writing, reading, and thinking that serves (still today) as the necessary discursive and textual backdrop for many Americans' beliefs about the world out-there. I look at the pulp fiction genre closely and detail some key novels and stories, and I suggest that this literary style has prepared the American public to accept governmental policies geared toward applying violent means and brutal force when dealing with the 'other' and the 'foreign.'

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Previous scholarship on public opinion and the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court has advanced competing claims about the impact of specific decisions on support for the Court. While some studies have found that specific decisions have strongly affect confidence in the Court, others, including Gibson, Caldeira and Spence, suggest that the empirical data confirms the expectations of Legitimacy theory, which posits that the Court has a relatively strong “reservoir of goodwill” that immunizes it from potentially “legitimacy-threatening” decisions. In this paper, we analyze data from the 2000 and 2004 Annenberg National Election study to examine the impact of the Bush v. Gore on legitimacy in the Court, using new and different measures of diffuse support or institutional loyalty, and of specific support. While our findings appear to confirm Gibson and his colleagues’ hypotheses and findings generally, with respect to the long-term resilience of the Court, we find that in the short term, the decision did indeed affect the foundations of specific and diffuse support for the Court, as partisanship, race, and ideology both emerge after (but not before) the decision as significant predictors of specific and diffuse support in the Court.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper examines Al Gore's rhetoric during the presidential campaign of 2000; specifically, the paper explores his campaign discourse and strategy between January 1 and November 7, 2000. The study serves to advance an understanding of populist language and approaches within a political campaign context. Further, the rhetoric of Gore is offered as a case study in neo-classical and feminine style discourse.