Word: fishkin
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Enter the man who may have finally invented a better mousetrap: political scientist James Fishkin, chairman of the government department at the University of Texas. He calls his innovative method for bridging the chasm between electors and the elected "a deliberative opinion poll." The voters will get a chance to see how it works on national public television next January...
...Fishkin begins with a telling critique of political polling, the main tool that the candidates and their handlers use to divine the will of the voters. As he argues in his forthcoming book, Democracy and Deliberation (Yale University Press; $17.95), "On many issues, about four out of five citizens do not have stable . . . opinions; they have what the political psychologists call 'non-attitudes' or 'pseudo-opinions.' " Fishkin's point is that traditional sampling does not allow those polled to discuss the issues, nor do the polltakers provide more than cursory information. The result, all too often, is a statistically impeccable...
...Fishkin proposes a bold antidote: flying a random sample of the entire electorate to a single place, where they would meet face-to-face with the presidential candidates and debate the issues. Then, and only then, would the group be polled on its preferences. Such a reform, if effected, would combine the democracy of the modern primary system with the firsthand knowledge of candidates that old-time party leaders brought to the nominating process...
Sound farfetched, the kind of Rube Goldberg scheme an armchair academic would concoct, oblivious to political realities? Not at all. The Public Broadcasting Service has quietly embraced Fishkin's idea and plans to televise six to eight hours of excerpts of the exercise during the weekend of Jan. 17-19, a month before the 1992 campaign formally begins with the Iowa caucuses. Named the National Issues Convention, the three-day, $3.5 million conclave in Austin holds the potential to shape the late-starting, who's-running-anyway Democratic race and provide a forum for the Bush Administration to field-test...
...first black students to attend Yale Law School. "I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger," Clemens wrote to the dean in the 1885 letter, which has been authenticated by Yale Scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. "But I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs; & we should pay for it." Like Huck, Clemens remained true to his word on important matters: he paid for McGuinn's board until his 1887 graduation. McGuinn went...