Abstract: If the quality of democracy incorporates values beyond simple majority choice, then is intra-party democracy likely to further or to impede the advancement of these other values? We address the relationship between internal party democracy, as indicated by the inclusiveness of parties' selectorates, and the realization of two associated democratic values — the extent of both competition in the nomination process and representation among the lists of candidates that emerge. Although we analyse these relationships within party, our interest in them is primarily for their system level impact. We find that the three democratic values of inclusive participation, competition and representativeness are unlikely to be simultaneously maximized. Rather, the relationships among these values may be non-linear, or even negative. In particular, the parties that are most internally democratic produce lists of candidates that are least representative and experience only medium levels of competition.

Abstract: At first glance, the outcome of the 2008 presidential election would appear to be very difficult to predict. For the first time in over 50 years, there will be no incumbent president or vice president in the race. Instead, the Republican Party, which has seen its popularity and electoral fortunes plummet since 2004, is pinning its hopes of retaining control of the White House on Arizona Senator John McCain—an individual who has frequently clashed with his own party's leadership. And McCain's Democratic opponent will be Illinois Senator Barack Obama, the first African American ever to receive a major-party presidential nomination.

Abstract: In January 1953, the newly-elected Senator John F. Kennedy hired a young Nebraskan lawyer named, Theodore Sorensen as his legislative assistant. Sorensen quickly rose up the ranks in JFK's senate office, from research aide to speechwriter to campaigner and advisor, eventually working closely with JFK on his speeches and books, including "Profiles in Courage", and encouraging JFK's interest in the vice presidential nomination. Though JFK's pursuit of that nomination fell short at the 1956 Democratic Convention, he had emerged as a prominent national figure; and JFK and Sorensen traveled over the next three years to all fifty states exploring his prospects for the presidential nomination in 1960.Upon his election, Kennedy appointed Sorensen as his Special Counsel, a role that allowed him to serve as the President's own lawyer, speechwriter, and trusted confidante. Sorensen recounts in thrilling detail his experience advising JFK through some of the most dramatic moments in American history, including the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, when JFK requested that Sorensen draft a letter to Khrushchev at the most critical point of the world's first nuclear confrontation. Sorensen was immersed in everything from civil rights to the decision to go to the moon, and he also had a hand in JFK's most important speeches.

Abstract: This study explores the implications of political weblogs for theories of mediated public deliberation. Guided by contemporary questions surrounding the internet and the public sphere, we examine blog and newspaper coverage of the nomination and confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court of Samuel Alito with an eye toward further development of theories of mass deliberation. Specifically, we pursue questions concerning volume of coverage, ideological polarization, and interactive features in the blogosphere, using newspaper coverage as a point of reference. Data come from content analyses of newspaper stories mentioning Alito in the headline or lead paragraphs from the initial nomination announcement through final confirmation, as well as archival impressions of blog posts featuring hyperlinks to the newspaper stories. Our analysis suggests that blogs may enhance as well as complicate processes of mediated deliberation. We conclude by discussing empirical and conceptual implications of these findings for future research on the role of blogs in the contemporary public sphere.

Abstract: Chapter 1 The Invisible Primary in Presidential Nominations, 1980-2004 Chapter 2 The Re-Emergence of the Iowa Caucuses: A New Trend, An Aberration, or a Useful Reminder? Chapter 3 How Television Covers the Presidential Nomination Process Chapter 4 Television Advertising During the Presidential Nomination Season Chapter 5 African Americans and the Presidential Nomination process Chapter 6 Presidential Nomination Finance in the Post-BCRA Era Chapter 7 Voting in the Presidential Primaries: Lessons from Three Decades of Exit Polls Chapter 8 What the Founders Intended: Another Look at the Origins of the American Presidential Selection Process

Abstract: Victoria C. Hattam Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 273 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31922-3 During the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama invited us to change the way we think ...

Abstract: This case study analyses the efforts of the transnational party groups in controlling the legislative decision-making process inside the European Parliament. The case study focuses on one of the most important and contested pieces of European legislation: the services directive. The study addresses the choice of the rapporteurship for the legislative proposal through comparing the trade-offs between policy preferences, party loyalty and expertise in the nomination process. Further, the study analyses the party group internal conflict patterns, which emerged in the first reading of the proposal. The results show that party group voting loyalty and preference proximity to the party might have been a decisive factor in the nomination of the rapporteur for the services directive. The two largest party groups were also able to secure a compromise solution, which determined the final outcome of the intra-institutional decision-making process.

Abstract: In this article, Anies Al-Hroub, assistant professor of educational psychology and special educational needs at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, and David Whitebread, senior lecturer in psychology and education in the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, discuss the identification, by teachers, of children who are gifted in mathematics and who also experience reading difficulties or specific learning difficulties The findings reported here are based on research carried out in three state schools in Jordan, and reveal the extent to which teachers accurately nominated the ‘dual-exceptional’ children studying in their classes The paper reviews the issues and evidence relating to teacher nomination of these children and examines the quality of teacher nominations by comparing them with identification procedures using psychological and dynamic testing Anies Al-Hroub and David Whitebread reveal that the accuracy of the teacher nominations recorded in their research was highly variable and explore a series of factors influencing the processes of teacher nomination They argue that teacher nomination is an essential first element in the identification process and can be easily improved The authors call for professional development for teachers in order to raise awareness and to enable them to provide support for children with complex special educational needs more effectively

Abstract: One of the more entertaining pastimes during the presidential campaign is the "veepstakes," or speculation about who the presidential nominee will select for a running mate. While much of this speculation occurs after the nomination has been decided (Alter 2004; Feldmann 2004; Kennedy 2004; Lehigh 2004; Starr 2004), speculation about the 2008 selec tions had begun as early as 2007 (Cain 2007; Klein 2007; Mackowiak 2007; Sanderson 2007). Most are grounded in a good understanding of what presidential candidates look for in a running mate, but one writer has not unfairly referred to the veepstakes as a "largely fact-free parlour game" (Harding 2004). Perhaps there is a better way. After all, we have long understood the basics of vice presidential selection. This under standing has come to us by way of prac titioners, observation of vice presidential candidates in the past, and even some few scholarly studies (e.g., Goldstein 1982; Sigelman and Wahlbeck 1997; Mayer 2000). Moreover, political scien tists are no strangers to predictive mod els, especially those dealing with presidential elections. For example, the October 2004 issue of this journal fea tured seven forecasting models of the 2004 election; this issue, of course, fea tures 10 such articles. Many of the par ticipants in that symposium also contributed to an edited volume forecast ing the 2000 presidential election (Camp bell and Garand 2000) as well as to the October 1996 issue of American Politics Quarterly dealing with the election of 1996.1

Abstract: Studies of the 1970s and 1980s viewed the political party insiders as having little influence on the selection of the presidential nominees. Recent studies, however, find a significant effect for party elite endorsements in presidential nomination campaigns. This study presents a theory of elite influence in the postreform presidential nomination system and analyzes patterns of elite party endorsements to address questions of when and why elites converge on a preferred candidate. Both party- and candidate-centric factors appear to affect elite endorsements of presidential candidates. Elite elected officials are mainly motivated to have a nominee with electoral appeal. Fewer elite Democratic elected officials endorse presidential candidates, they endorse later, and they tend to divide their endorsements among the presidential candidates to a greater degree than do elite Republican elected officials.

Abstract: Of the many vital functions that political parties serve in American democracy, selecting candidates for public office is near the top of the list. Giovanni Sartori (1976) cites this purpose as their chief defining element—claiming that, at a minimum, a party is a “political group that presents at elections, and is capable of placing through elections, candidates for public office” (64). Moreover, understanding how parties vet, groom, select, and promote candidates is central to empirically evaluating the strength of political party organizations, the quality of elected policymakers, and ultimately the effectiveness of government. For scholars of American politics, this has led to fruitful lines of research on the processes that the Democratic and Republican Parties use to select their candidates—namely the conventions, primaries, and caucuses that nominate individuals for various federal, state, and local offices. For example, many have investigated the effects of reforms to the presidential nomination process in the early 1970s (Aldrich 1993; Hagen and Mayer 2000; Reiter 1985; Wayne 2000), some arguing that it took power of choosing candidates away from the party organizations and towards other institutions like the press, interest groups, and small ideological factions (Polsby 1983) with potentially negative consequences for governance.

Abstract: The 1896 Democratic National Convention simultaneously proposed a radically new trajectory for American industrial expansion, harshly repudiated its own incumbent president, and rudely overturned the party's traditional regional and social hierarchy. The passion that attended these decisions was deeply embedded in the traditional alliances and understandings of the past, in the careers and futures of the party's most prominent leaders and most insignificant ward heelers, and in the personal relations of men who had long served together in the halls of Congress. This passion was continuously on display in the Chicago Coliseum, shaped by the rhythm of parliamentary ritual and the physical architecture of the convention hall. William Jennings Bryan anticipated the moment when pathos would be at its height and chose that moment to give his 'Cross of Gold' address, thus harnessing passion to his personal ambition and winning the presidential nomination.

Abstract: The Constitution clearly states that the president "shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint" individuals to positions in the executive and judicial branches; yet the process may sometimes seem murky. While much has been written about the confirmation phase of those appointments, far less attention has been paid to the pre-nomination process - until now.In this groundbreaking book, Mitchel Sollenberger takes readers behind the scenes to explain what happens before presidents publicly announce their nominees. A comprehensive history of this process, his book shows how political practice has shaped the use of a power that the Constitution declared must be shared by the executive and legislative branches.Drawing on unpublished letters and papers of presidents, senators, and other public figures, Sollenberger unravels the way this struggle has been viewed and resolved from George Washington's day to the present. He reveals the extent to which the political process has shaped the outcomes of particular appointments and how these outcomes have reflected the fundamental principle of shared power. Along the way, he sheds new light on issues related to express and implied power, the validity of the unitary executive model, the tension between politics and professionalism, and the limits of originalism and textualism in interpreting the appointment process.Sollenberger documents how the president and Senate have worked with or against each other in managing the prenomination process, examining both the tradition of the president's consulting with senators and the Senate's numerous ways of killing a nomination. He also shows how the two branches have often sought compromise rather than test public patience, yet another testament to the genius of our system of checks and balances. And while past observers of the process have looked most closely at judicial appointments, Sollenberger casts a much wider net, while critiquing the "spoils era," civil service reform, and implications of the Pendleton Act before concluding with George W. Bush and his appointment of Michael Brown to FEMA.The first major study of the prenomination phase, Sollenberger's work asks important questions about our constitutional balance of powers and shows us how the appointments clause should ideally operate in a republican form of government.

Abstract: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's unpopularity at home and abroad and the looming threat of recession would have made a gripping drama of the 2008 presidential election campaign even without the ground-breaking emergence of the first credible black and female candidates for the White House. But the defeat of the Democratic establishment's front-runner, Hillary Clinton, by a little-known freshman Senator of mixed ancestry suggested that this was to be the year of the insurgent, just as the Republicans rallied to the least loyal and most contentious of their candidates, the maverick Senator John McCain. The extraordinarily attractive and articulate Senator Barack Obama re-wrote the rule book on winning primaries and caucuses with the help of Silicon Valley and an unprecedented turnout among black and young voters, before veering sharply to the centre once the nomination was secured. Orthodoxy returned at the conventions, with Obama picking a safe centrist as running mate and McCain choosing a Christian conservative, although generating great excitement by nominating a woman and undermining the usual democrat advantage among female voters. And for all the talk of a ‘new politics’, the year of the insurgents came down at the end, as US elections usually do, to a handful of swing states and the money and organization to win them.

Abstract: A s the 2008 presidential nominating process got underway, Iowa's coveted status as first-in-the-nation appeared in creasingly in jeopardy, as states engaged in aggressive frontloading throughout 2006 and 2007. In the past, late March primaries in large states like Florida, New York, and California were irrelevant to the electoral outcome. To avoid a repeat in 2008, Florida moved its primary to Janu ary 29 and California moved to what is now being called "super duper Tuesday" on February 5 when nearly two dozen states will hold primaries. Under pressure from extra-early voting in Florida and other front-loading states, as we write this the Iowa caucuses are to be held on Janu ary 3, two days after New Year's. It seems possible that as a result of the nominating season becoming more condensed, there may be an increase in the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, the opposite of what the states moving earlier wanted. If the first nominating events are now the starter's gun in a 50-meter dash rather than a mile run, who gets off the starting blocks first may well matter even more. As Hull (2007, 66) argues, Iowa's impact on New Hampshire and the national nomi nation process is a "wild, wired one." In this rapid sea of a changing nomination process we take a close look at the Iowa electorate, both statewide registered vot ers and a subset of likely caucus attend ees, to shed light on the underpinnings of support for the presidential candidates in the early stages of the 2008 campaign, using unique rolling cross-sectional data to track opinion change over time. Because Iowa has been a swing state in recent presidential elections, statewide attitudes towards presidential candidates should be relatively consistent with na tional opinion. However Iowa caucus attendees represent only a small subset of registered voters-generally 10-15%; 20% at best.' Scholars have argued that primaries and caucuses create ideologi cally polarized party nominees because the composition of the electorate ex cludes independents and moderates and varies demographically from general election voters (Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope 2004; Donovan and Bowler 2004; but also see Norrander 1989). We draw on two unique statewide University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll surveys conducted in late March 2007 and late July through early August 2007, including representa tive samples of Democratic and Republi can likely caucus attendees. We examine how the population of caucus attendees differs from statewide registered voters, and whether the Iowa caucuses are repre sentative of the state as a whole as we examine the demographic and issue bases of candidate support in Iowa.

Abstract: Every state wants to be “the” state that selects the next president. Every state wants the attention of the presidential candidates and wants its voters to have a say in the presidential nomination process. But since the early 1980s, presidential nomination events in more and more states have essentially been meaningless as the parties' nominations have effectively been wrapped up before citizens have cast their primary ballots or attended their local caucuses.

Abstract: On the morning of October 30, 2007, Hillary Clinton led Barack Obama, her closest challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, by a comfortable margin in every significant national poll. That night, however, Senator Clinton, debating in Philadelphia, wandered into an ambush. Asked for her opinion of then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's plan to allow illegal immigrants to apply for driver's licenses, she first seemed to support the idea and then, under withering attack from Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, almost immediately backed away from her tepid endorsement. Writing shortly after the debate, Mark Halperin (2007) of Time magazine opined that “[i]f [Clinton] loses the nomination, tonight will go down in history as the first step to her defeat.”

Abstract: To explore the influence of primary results during the 2008 nomination process we leverage a previously unused methodology—the analysis of prediction market contracts. The unique structure of prediction markets allows us to address two unexplored questions. First, we analyze whether primary results affect candidates’ chances in the general election, as candidates who take strong positions during the nomination contest may be unable to easily appeal to centrist voters in the general election. We also assess whether states with early primaries, such as Iowa and New Hampshire, have a disproportionate effect on the nominating process. We show that the length of the primary season has a minimal impact of the electability of candidates in the general election, and that some states have a disproportionate impact on the nominating process. However, the states that have the largest impact are not necessarily New Hampshire and Iowa, the states that have often been assumed to be the most influential because of their early position on the primary calendar.

Abstract: For 18 years, Joseph Lieberman has represented the State of Connecticut in the U.S. Senate, gaining seniority and becoming popular enough in his state and party to be nominated for the Vice Presidency in 2000. However, due to his perceived closeness to President George W. Bush and his support for the war in Iraq, Lieberman faced an unexpected challenge in the Democratic Primary and ultimately lost the party's nomination to political upstart Ned Lamont. A multimillionaire who could finance his own campaign, Lamont was aided in his insurgency by a host of bloggers in Connecticut and across the nation who took it as their mission to defeat Lieberman. This article will examine the role bloggers played in Ned Lamont's primary campaign as sources of financial support, logistical assistance, and as a place for like-minded individuals to find a community to support his candidacy. In this way, blogs became a “virtual political party” for Lamont who was able to create a support system for his candidacy when the entire Democratic establishment was backing Lieberman. This campaign could provide a template for future candidates challenging party establishments and demonstrates that many of the traditional party functions can be replaced by the Internet.

Abstract: Over two dozen academic and popular books, four score scholarly journal articles in a variety of disciplines, and countless pieces in popular periodicals have analyzed, criticized, and/or examined either the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices in general or the confirmation (or rejection) of a specific nominee. In The Character of Justice Trevor Parry-Giles, associate professor in the University of Maryland’s Department of Communication and affiliated faculty member with the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership, joins this vibrant, multidisciplinary conversation. In the book Parry-Giles defends the Senate’s prerogative to scrutinize a nominee’s published record, judicial philosophy, and political ideology while also offering extended analyses of the public discourse (media reports, congressional testimony, letters to newspapers, and the like) of seven nominations (Louis Brandeis, Charles Evans Hughes, John J. Parker, Thurgood Marshall, Clement Haynsworth, G. Harrold Carswell, and Robert Bork). Given the book’s scholarly aspirations, Parry-Giles devotes less emphasis to defending what some believe has become an overly and inappropriately politicized process. Drawing on a wealth of extant scholarship, Parry-Giles observes early on that in the century between the Senate’s rejections of John Rutledge in 1795 and two of Grover Cleveland’s nominations in 1894, presidents and their supporters did not strenuously criticize these decisions. In fact, ParryGiles writes, “missing from presidential reactions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were complaints about the politicization of the confirmation process or calls for presidential prerogative in the appointment of justices” (20). Complaints about the confirmation process are, readers discover, largely a twentieth-century phenomenon, having emerged at roughly the same time as our modern rhetorical or imperial presidency.

Abstract: Institutions whose members fail to reflect the diversity of the population are often taken to be unrepresentative of citizens' policy preferences and potentially undemocratic (Mansbridge 1999; Pitkin 1978). For the courts to be viewed as legitimate, they must be at least marginally representative of the racial composition of the public. The symbolic representation of minority judges "has a positive and legitimizing effect on the functioning of a democracy" (Walker and Barrow 1985, 597). Institutional legitimacy is particularly essential for the judiciary because it "has no influence over either the sword or the purse" (Hamilton 1788). Furthermore, if minority judges decide cases differently (Scherer 2004-05; Welch, Combs, and Gruhl 1988), it is especially imperative to understand what drives minority nominations to circuit courts. Even though extensive work has been done on minority representation in Congress (e.g., Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran 1996; Canon, Schousen, and Sellers 1996; Lublin 1997a, 1999), minority representation on circuit courts remains relatively unexamined outside of qualitative studies (e.g., Goldman 1997). The primary value of this research article is that it demonstrates that some of the potential influences believed to affect presidents' nomination decisions have little impact, whereas others have surprisingly large effects. When presidents and their advisors are deciding whom to nominate to openings on the U.S. courts of appeals, to what extent do they take into consideration or even give priority to signals from other political actors? Senators, especially home-state senators, immediately come to mind as a potential influence on these decisions. Various characteristics of a state (e.g., the size of the minority population, minority economic influence, and minority representation in the congressional delegation) may also generate pressure on presidents to nominate minority judges and on senators to approve them (Gryski, Zuk, and Barrow 1994). A reading of Goldman's (1997) work on how various presidents have gone about nominating federal judges can take researchers down a variety of paths with respect to a particular combination of influences because of the lack of clear guideposts as to what affects presidents making this decision, Some quantitative studies indicate which factors might affect presidential decision making on the diversification of circuit courts. For example, Bratton and Spill (2002) show that gender diversification of state supreme courts is responsive to a variety of conditions, such as the method of appointment in a state. However, relatively little is known about how minority nominations are generated for appointments to the U.S. courts of appeals--a gap that is especially surprising given that the U.S. courts of appeals, which lie immediately below the Supreme Court in the judicial hierarchy, are effectively courts of last resort for each party in nearly every federal case (Carp and Stidham 1998). In fact, the Supreme Court usually reviews less than 1 percent of the cases that are appealed to it each year from the U.S. courts of appeals (Songer, Sheehan, and Haire 2000). (1) Because circuit courts play such a prominent role in the federal judicial system, knowing what determines who is on the circuit courts is imperative to better understanding American politics. In analyzing minority nominations to the U.S. courts of appeals, I employ a strategic model of presidential decision making. That is, I account for how presidents combine their own preferences with information about the preferences of other potentially influential individuals and institutions to arrive at a particular nomination. Strategic models have been used to show that presidents are strategic in deciding whether to issue an executive order (Deering and Maltzman 1999), in nominating Supreme Court justices (Moraski and Shipan 1999), and in determining whether to go public (Canes-Wrone 2001). …

Abstract: The authors examine whether early state polls, particularly New Hampshire, have been more accurate in predicting the eventual presidential nominees. The authors conclude that New Hampshire poll results have become better bellwethers and propose that the more informed nature of the state’s electorate may be a reason for the accuracy of the results.

Abstract: Based in part on a forecasting model, this article reviews the current state of the 2008 presidential nomination races and offers some predictions about who will win the Democratic and Republican nominations.

Abstract: From 1980 to 2000 the candidate that raised the most campaign funds before the start of the primary season tended to win the party nomination. Adkins and Dowdle (2002) found that the positive effect of candidate performance (as measured by national poll results, change in candidate viability, and length of candidacy) and campaign organization (as measured by the amount of money the candidate’s campaign spent on fundraising, size of the candidate’s electoral constituency, and whether the candidate self-financed his campaign) explained much of the variation in fundraising in the months before the Iowa caucuses that make up the money primary. In this research two OLS regression models were generated to examine whether developments such as frontloading and campaign finance reforms, which occurred prior to the 2004 nomination cycle, demonstrated change or continuity in presidential money primary. Overall, the results suggest a great degree of similarity, even though candidates may now be running harder to raise more money in a shorter period of time.

Abstract: FOR REASONS that will become apparent subsequently, or not at all, I will start with an argumentum ad nominem. Alexy, from the Greek alexios, means defender and hence apologist or polemicist in defense of law. The latter point is best made anagrammatically. Alexy has lex or law at its core. Indicatively not any law but ‘a’ lex or law, and as a prefix the initial ‘a’ allows us some choice. It could mean a first law, or a singular law. More adventurously, we could be Greek about it and interpret the initial ‘a’ as meaning ‘away from’ or ‘out of’ law. Alexy then means alegal rather as atheism means without God. That latter interpretation is nominally too strong, however, because of the suffix ‘y’, whose primary meaning is that of ‘having the character of’ or ‘being inclined towards’. The suffix thus indicates a fondness for law, an inclination towards that which should be defended, a commitment or at the very least an ambivalent attachment to legality. That is not all; it never is. Taken together, prefix and suffix form ‘ay’, from the Latin aevum meaning eternity and thus an attention to law in the long term or sub specie aeternitatis. As the Latin is not much remembered we can be permitted further to include the more usual vernacular meaning of ‘ay’. Here it means sorrow or pain, as in the colloquial or comic book ‘ay, ay, ay’. The root of ‘ay’ as sorrow is the Spanish ay de mi or woe is me. Thus, by extension, woe is law or sorrow must befall the legal utterance that fails to meet the correctness criteria of legal discourse as spelled out so lucently in Alexy’s theory of interpretation. The name offers a number of possibilities but all are variants upon the heartland of the word, its lex, its ambivalent desire to be lexy. It is of course the ambivalence, the polysemy or semantic possibility of the word that is attractive. The name suggests not simply an attachment to law, but also a sorrow or affect which questions that attachment and is the overriding figure

Abstract: Experience has been a dominant issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. In what initially was thought to be an open contest, the range and types of candidate experience varied substantially: sitting and former senators, representatives, and governors, a former mayor, and a first lady. By April, the campaign had narrowed to three candidates: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in a tight race for the Democratic nomination and John McCain having secured the Republican nomination. The contrast in Washington-based experience among these three is striking. McCain leads in elective service with four years in the House of Representatives and just over 20 years in the Senate. Clinton is in her eighth year in the Senate, Obama in his fourth year. Experience prior to elective government service in Washington is also identified as relevant for accrediting candidacies. McCain's military background, including his time as a prisoner of war, is judged to be authentication for serving as commander in chief. It was while serving in the Illinois state senate that Obama announced his opposition to the Iraq War, arguably demonstrating his judgment even before election to the U.S. Senate. And Clinton's time as first lady (1993-2001) is relied on as providing superior preparation to be chief executive on "day one"--essentially making her an heir apparent akin to a vice president. Each of these rationales for candidacy and election has strengths and weaknesses. McCain has length of service, but he has never held a major executive position and would be 72 years old when sworn in. Obama has the freshness of youth but, equally, limited time as a U.S. senator and no elective executive background. Clinton's reliance on heir apparentness intimates familiarity with White House operations but raises questions about a first lady's role and accountability in making decisions. The stress on experience justifies a review of the historical record. This article treats these questions: Is the 2008 presidential election an open contest? How common are open contests? When have they occurred? What are the types of heirs apparent as candidates? What explains the increase in vice presidents as heirs apparent? Which presidencies have been successful? How might the historical experience of experience apply to 2008? The answers to these questions lead to this conclusion: The experience that appears to count for a successful presidency is that realized in, not near, the Oval Office. Historical Record of Heirs One must drop back to 1952 for a race lacking either an incumbent president seeking reelection or a sitting vice president running as an heir apparent candidate. Is the 2008 presidential election an open contest? It has been labeled as such, but Hillary Clinton's version of heir apparentness suggests otherwise. Her time as first lady is said to validate her candidacy to an extent equal to, perhaps even greater than, what has traditionally been set forth by vice presidents. For in the Clinton case, the endorsement of and active campaigning by her ex-president husband bolster her candidacy. Two historical facets are of interest: (1) the frequency of open contests and (2) the types of heirs apparent. First, a definition: As understood here, an open contest is one lacking a president seeking reelection, a sitting vice president as a candidate, a candidate who has been endorsed as a successor (as, for example, Theodore Roosevelt's endorsement of William Howard Taft in 1908), or a self-declared heir apparent based on prior White House experience (as with Richard Nixon in 1968). Open contests, by these criteria, are relatively rare. Just 11, or one-fifth, of the 55 elections since 1789 have lacked an heir apparent, discounting the first election, when George Washington was the presumptive candidate. Nine of these 11 open contests occurred in the nineteenth century, primarily because of the lesser role of the vice president then. …

Abstract: In 1989 South African jazz composer and trombonist Jonas Gwangwa used the opportunity of an internationally televised interview,1 on the occasion of the Grammy awards in the United States, to declare on behalf of the leadership of a then exiled African National Congress (ANC): ‘I serve the people of South Africa under the leadership of the African National Congress These nominations and awards are also recognition of our people's struggles and liberation' (Sowetan 12-08-92) Gwangwa had received a nomination for a Grammy for the song ‘Cry Freedom' in the category ‘Best Song Written Specifically for a Motion Picture', and two nominations for an Oscar (USA): one for ‘Best Music, Original Score', and one for ‘Best Music, Original Song' He received further nominations for the category ‘Best Film Score' in Golden Globes (USA), BAFTA (UK), Ivor Novello (UK), and Anthony Askwith Award (UK), and an ‘Award of Recognition' from Friends of the Black Emmys (USA) All these accolades were for the film Cry Freedom!2 They may well have given Gwangwa an opportunity to further his international career, especially in the United States,3 but at that time he chose to continue working for the ANC and to find his expression by using music politically rather than in commercial music circles As Caiphus Semenya puts it: ‘there is another side to Jonas … he is extremely politically conscious … his music craft and his political craft are intertwined' (Author's interview, 2003) South African Music Studies Vol 26-27 2006/7: pp 47-70