Michael Nelson

Richard Ellis always votes no. Since moving to Oregon in 1990 to teach political science at Willamette University, Ellis has been asked to pass judgment on 74 statewide initiatives, an average of more than 12 per election. Initiatives are proposed laws or constitutional amendments placed on a state’s ballot by citizen petition (that’s how they […]

Last June, before Hobbits and Harry Potter began crowding out all other arts coverage, The New York Times ran a front-page story about The Chronicles of Narnia, the seven-volume series of children’s fantasy books written by the English novelist C.S. Lewis in the 1950s. The article was called “Marketing ‘Narnia’ without a Christian Lion” — […]

The November 1, 1948, issue of Life magazine is a collector’s item because of a picture on page 37 that is captioned, “The next president travels by ferry over the broad waters of San Francisco bay.” The picture is of Thomas E. Dewey. Of greater significance is an article that begins on page 65 called […]

Until the election of George Bush the elder in 1988, no incumbent vice president had been elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. (Bush opened his first post-election news conference by saying, “It’s been a long time, Marty.”) Yet it also is true that, starting with Harry S. Truman in 1945, five of the […]

T he electoral college is a constitutional time bomb that has been ticking for more than a century. It finally exploded on election day. Unkind as it is to say so–hasn’t Al Gore suffered enough?–it’s only fitting that it blew up in the Democrats’ face. The explosion, of course, was Gore’s apparent loss to George […]

Here’s the best news to come out of the otherwise screwed-up 2000 election: The political juggernaut that during the last third of the twentieth century transformed the states from staunch foes of gambling into gambling’s chief sponsors has slowed to a crawl. The voters of Arkansas rejected a lottery-casino ballot measure, joining the voters of […]

Americans are ideological conservatives and operational liberals. That was the finding of social psychologists Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, who based much of The Political Beliefs of Americans, their classic work about public opinion, on a massive survey they conducted during the fall of 1964. As ideological conservatives, Americans are skeptical about the “role […]

Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, by John A. Farrell. Little, Brown and Company, 776 pages, $29.95. Jimmy Breslin called Tip O’Neill “a lovely spring rain of a man” and John A. Farrell proves Breslin right in Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. Farrell, a prizewinning veteran reporter for The Boston Globe, has written a […]

Indian Gaming: Tribal Sovereignty and American Politics, W. Dale Mason. University of Oklahoma Press, 330 pages, $29.95. The Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small Native American Tribe Created the World’s Most Profitable Casino, Kim Isaac Eisler. Simon and Schuster, 267 pages, $25.00. Without Reservation: The Making of America’s Most Powerful Indian Tribe and Foxwoods, […]