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Campbell discusses role on RNC advisory panel
By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor
Why were the Republicans successful in the 2002 mid-term elections? Where do the Democrats go from here in 2004? How can the Republican National Committee (RNC) be "lightened up" and encouraged to see beyond strictly political issues?
These are just some of the questions the RNC's Academic Advisory Council tries to answer, according to council member James Campbell, professor and director of undergraduate education in the Department of Political Science. Campbell's assessment of the Bush administration's political stances was part of an informal presentation at yesterday's meeting of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee.
In 2001, Campbell was invited to serve on the RNC council, which has met about three times since Bush was elected. Campbell's research interests include elections, political campaigns and voting behavior; American political parties; election forecasting; electoral systems; political behavior and public opinion; presidential-congressional relations; American political thought, and campaign financing. Part of the overall goal of the council, Campbell said, is to encourage political scientists to make their research more accessible and comprehensible to everyday people.
The council, consisting of 10-12 members, and the RNC share data and research, and present papers as part of an effort to inform political strategists affiliated with the Bush administration. Campbell said that Bush's chief political advisor—the "intellectually curious" Karl Rove—"wanted this to occur for the current administration." The Clinton administration also had relied on an academic advisory council.
"The idea is to essentially get some broadening of the staff and outside input into their political operations," Campbell said about the Saturday morning meetings with the hierarchy of Bush's political staff. "We don't deal very much with policy at all, mostly just politics. It's handled very much like an academic conference—there are a number of panels," he added. Council members can offer advice on policy initiatives or share highly technical data related to targeting specific kinds of voters, he said.
"I've published a couple of papers using their data. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement," he said of the vast store of otherwise inaccessible (to the general public) data held by the RNC.
Campbell also bases much of his election research on data collected from every election since 1952, which is held at the University of Michigan, and the National Science Foundation-funded national election study covering the past 20 years of U.S. elections.
During the advisory council's first meeting after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Campbell said policy initiatives were discussed that could have maximized Bush's sky-high approval ratings and possibly made some headway against a Congress that typically drags its feet.
Although the common conception might be that both political parties are moving toward a centrist position, Campbell maintained that is not the case. There is a polarization of both parties, he explained, but to get anything accomplished in a bipartisan fashion, they must move to the center.
"Partisanship still matters," Campbell said, noting that while there was some convergence of the parties during the 1970s, they have become more divided since the 1980s. "The Democratic and Republican labels actually mean something when it comes to the roll-call vote," he pointed out.
As for what the Bush administration will do when it comes to such issues as education and concerns about loss of privacy due to increased national security, Campbell offered no inside scoops, but said that he believed that the current White House wants to return control of K-12 education as much as possible to communities, with more school choice for parents and a modest increase in education spending. The trade-off for increased national security, he said, may be some loss in privacy.
And to answer the question, "Why are democrats so disorganized," Campbell replied: "It's the aftermath of Clinton. There is no obvious leadership for the party." It's also likely, Campbell pointed out, that the U.S. wouldn't be heading toward war if Al Gore were in the White House.