Suchergebnisse

For the first time since 1960, the religion of candidates for national office became an election issue as Al Gore named Joseph Lieberman, a Jewish senator from Connecticut, to be his vice presidential running mate. Polls over the past forty years have indicated a greater willingness of Americans to vote for nontraditional candidates for major national office, but these expressed opinions have remained purely hypothetical. With Lieberman's candidacy, we can test whether attitudes toward Jews affected support for Lieberman's vice presidential candidacy. Reviewing a variety of polls, but focusing on the 2000 American National Election Study, I find that attitudes toward Jews affect feelings toward Lieberman. Importantly, the American public appeared warmly disposed toward both Jews and Lieberman. Further, being a member of a group which research on anti‐Semitism has identified as at times displaying anti‐Semitic attitudes fails to affect attitudes toward Lieberman. Rather, basic political orientations, such as partisanship and ideology, more strongly affect attitudes toward Lieberman. The liberalization in public opinion about who is qualified to serve as president appears a true phenomenon and not merely the expression of socially acceptable responses to survey questions.

Despite a barrage of bad news in 1998, Bill Clinton still enjoyed strong and rising popularity with the public. Many have sought to explain this paradox. My intention is to describe the new news environment that began to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Four trends describe the news environment of the new media age. First, the news media have become increasingly competitive and decentralized. Second, reporting styles have changed. News is now softer and increasingly negative. Third, the public now consumes less news from traditional outlets than it once did. Fourth, public regard toward the news media has declined. To a degree, this news environment insulates the president from news, which helps explain Clinton's popularity rise in 1998 despite bad news. But this news environment also impedes the president's ability to lead the mass public. As a result, the president's governing style has changed. Instead of focusing their efforts on leading the nation, presidents spend more time targeting select constituencies. This narrow "going public" style reinforces the polarization in the political system, while also alienating the broad middle from American politics.

I raise two questions in this article. In light of the scandals of the Clinton years, have the standards used to rate presidents changed or not? Second, do experts and informed citizens rate presidents similarly, and do they rely on the same criteria in their ratings? I use a C‐SPAN poll administered in 2000 to experts, and through the Internet to the citizenry, as the data to address these questions. Results find great temporal stability in how presidents are rated. Furthermore, in applying a predictive model developed by Simonton, I find stability in the factors that predict presidential greatness ratings. In particular, experts and informed citizens rate presidents similarly and use similar criteria. Substantively, the most important and consistent predictor of presidential greatness is the number of years that the president served in office. This finding brings us full circle to a question that motivates much scholarship on the presidency: why do presidents get reelected for a second term?