The Robert H. Jackson Center offers internships for college students as a major part of its educational mission. Internships are not limited to students with pre-law ambitions, although it is expected that most applicants will come from that field. All students currently enrolled at Allegheny College may apply. An interest in research and writing is the most important qualification for the internship.

Interns will work directly with the staff of the Robert H. Jackson Center as they determine their project. Each project will allow the intern to experience the legal profession through the life and career of a major figure in the history of the United States, Robert H. Jackson. Areas of work are subject to discussion and will reflect the skills and interests of the intern and the needs of the Jackson Center. Some possibilities include the following:

• Working with the Jackson Center webmaster to expand the information offered on the www.roberthjackson.org web site related to the life and accomplishments of Robert H. Jackson.
• Researching local newspaper files and Chautauqua County Court records.
• Developing time lines and or scripts based on the Jackson Center’s archived cablecasts and videotapes of interviews and speeches. This will be directly related to the long-term goal of producing educational materials and programs related to:
  • Jackson’s 20 years as a country lawyer in Chautauqua County
  • Jackson’s years with the Roosevelt administration, first as Solicitor General, then as Attorney General of the United States
  • Cases in which Jackson wrote opinions during his years as Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court
  • Prosecution of the Nuremberg War Trials, which Jackson served as Chief Prosecutor
• Working with the Jackson Center archivist to review and document the Center’s extensive documents and video collection.

Summer interns work between Memorial Day and Labor Day for a period of up to 12 weeks on a flexible schedule that will be determined between the intern and the intern coordinator. The intern coordinator serves as a “coach” and there are regular opportunities to meet with administrative and staff members on a range of issues and topics pertaining to the intern’s assignments and interests.

Allegheny College has an agreement with Jamestown Community College to provide housing for the duration of the internship experience at the Jackson Center.  For roughly $100/week, interns have access to a small apartment with kitchen and bath on the JCC campus, complete with full access to the amenities of the community college.  The residence halls are approximately a 5 minute drive from the Jackson Center. Once you have been notified of your acceptance as an intern, you will need to reserve a space in the JCC residence halls.  To do so, please contact Jim Fitch in Allegheny College’s ACCEL office (jfitch@allegheny.edu).

Application can be made by e-mailing a personal statement and resume by March 16, 2013 to:

Mary Solberg

Program Coordinator

Center for Political Participation

msolberg@allegheny.edu

PERSONAL STATEMENT OF APPLICATION

In your personal statement, please reflect on 1) how this internship opportunity will serve your academic or career goals, 2) how this experience builds upon your previous experiences and academic program of study, 3) in what ways you think you might be useful to the Jackson Center (including what kinds of projects you would like to pursue), and 4) whether you will require housing at Jamestown Community College (this will not have an effect on your candidacy).  Please keep the personal statement to one to two double-spaced pages and include email and phone contact information as well as the names, titles, and e-mail addresses of two on-campus references whom we may contact.

“Public service is at risk of losing a generation and our democracy will suffer. As a liberal arts college nearly as old as America itself, Allegheny cannot abide that outcome.” –Allegheny College President James H. Mullen Jr.

 “As someone who works with young Americans…I am so pleased that our honorees, David Brooks and Mark Shields, share an abiding belief in democratic deliberations. They are passionate about their positions, but they recognize that we all have to work together.  They are both proud partisans, but their convictions do not stop them from critiquing their own positions or the positions of their fellow partisans.” –Daniel M. Shea, Director of the Center for Political Participation

 “I don’t know in a nation as big and brawling and as wonderfully diverse as ours how we resolve our differences except through the political process and the care, the commitment, the passion, the creativity of those who can craft compromise and forge consensus.” –Syndicated columnist Mark Shields, recipient of first Allegheny College Prize for Civility in Public Life

 “Many great colleges teach subjects; they don’t always teach character.” —New York Times columnist David Brooks, recipient of first Allegheny College Prize for Civility in Public Life

By Mary Solberg

      The inaugural Allegheny College Prize for Civility in Public Life was awarded Feb. 21 to two nationally recognized journalists who “represent the best instincts of American public life.”

     In presenting the award to syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks, Allegheny President James H. Mullen called on youth across the country to follow their example.

     “That is the hope of today, that through this award and our college’s focus on civility we might empower young people across the nation, that we might help them—help all of us—find the faith and the courage to engage in the public arena with civility and respect and to honor those who by their example show us the way,” President Mullen told those gathered at the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C.

         The civility prize will be given each year to two winners, one from each side of the ideological spectrum, who show noteworthy civility while continuing to fight passionately for their beliefs. An awards panel—made up of such luminaries as former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, and American Council on Education President Molly Corbett Broad—reviewed many nominees in politics and journalism before selecting Shields and Brooks.

     Corbett Broad attended the morning ceremony in the Holeman Lounge of the National Press Club along with student fellows and staff of the Center for Political Participation, Allegheny alumni, and members of the college’s board of trustees. Said Corbett Broad: “The values undergirding this award—the free, vigorous, and respectful pursuit of ideas—align perfectly with those of American higher education. I extend sincere congratulations to David Brooks and Mark Shields on this honor, and applaud Allegheny College for shining a spotlight on the need for civility in our public discourse.”

     In accepting the civility honor, both Brooks and Shields, who debate the issues of the day once a week on PBS NewsHour, recognized the influence of PBS NewsHour executive editor Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, anchors of the former MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, later known as PBS NewsHour. MacNeil and Lehrer, they said, taught them the fine art of civility in public discourse despite the difficulties of disparate viewpoints.

     “I stand here today, and I think David would agree, as proxies and surrogates for Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, who started the NewsHour, who started with a very simple premise and that is that in every discussion that one’s involved, the person on the other side probably loves the country as much as you love our country, that they care about their children’s and grandchildren’s future as much as you do, they treasure the truth as much as you do. You don’t demonize somebody on the other side,” Shields said.

     Brooks, a conservative, said he and Shields had “serious disagreements” over the years on the Iraq War. Several years ago, during the Florida presidential election recount, Brooks jousted with his liberal friend, E.J. Dionne, on a weekly NPR broadcast.

     “I think that while we went at each other sometimes, it never damaged or diminished our friendships during that whole period,” Brooks explained. “To go through that with someone strengthens you, as it should political rivals.”

     Center for Political Participation Director Daniel Shea joined President Mullen in honoring Brooks and Shields, saying the journalists “share an abiding belief in democratic deliberations.” Added Shea, “They are passionate about their positions, but they recognize that we all have to work together. They are both proud partisans but their convictions do not stop them from critiquing their own positions and the positions of their fellow partisans.”

     Shea also told the National Press Club gathering that the CPP is working diligently on its upcoming conference on civility, which is expected to draw in about 200 college students from throughout the country. Pathway to Civility: National Conference of College Leaders will be held at Allegheny May 15-17, focusing on young people’s commitment to causes and candidates, as well as “the necessity for respectful dialogue.”

     To see the full coverage of the National Press Club award presentation, go to this link:  Civility Prize

###

By Mary Solberg

  For Silas Russell, a 2007 graduate of Allegheny College, the Occupy Wall Street movement is personal. It is, he says, “a movement of ordinary people” like him and the 20,000 Pennsylvanians for whom he works as a political organizer for SEIU PA, Pennsylvania’s largest union for health care workers.

     “People need to take back power,” Russell told a luncheon gathering Nov. 10 at Quigley Hall on the Allegheny College campus. “We cannot have an economy that is controlled from the top.”

     In his work, Russell sees firsthand the effects of an unstable economy and how the average worker struggles to maintain financial security.  Little wonder that the Occupy Wall Street movement appealed to him; he was intrigued with its call to equalize the financial playing field in America. In the early fall of 2011, he started working as an organizer for Occupy Pittsburgh, camping out the first week in a park on Grant Street in the Steel City.

     “At this point,” he added, “the movement is too big to fail.”

     By the looks of the packed audience at Quigley’s Henderson Auditorium, the movement is too big to be ignored, too. Fittingly titled “Occupy Quigley,” the panel discussion included Russell, who came from Pittsburgh for the day, and Political Science Professor Bruce Smith, and Economics Professor Russell Ormiston. While attentive to the two professors, students were clearly intrigued by Silas Russell and his activism. Several stayed afterward to talk to Russell about Occupy activities in Pittsburgh.

     During a question-and-answer segment, Kimberly Langin ’13 asked Russell if he thought the Occupy movement was anti-capitalist.

     “Occupy is a movement that wants to have capitalism work for everybody,” Russell said.

     For Professor Smith, Occupy Wall Street makes him sentimental for his own days of activism. “It’s in the American gene,” he explained. “It’s radical, it’s democratic. It’s Jeffersonian.”

     For any movement to be successful, Smith added, it needs three things: skilled organizers, meetings that continue on a regular basis after the initial weeks, and promotion of public policies that address the majority of people, in Occupy’s case, the 99 percent of Americans for whom it claims to speak for.

     “Absence of leadership is not good, and actions like stomping on the flag can sully the movement,” Smith said.

     Professor Ormiston views the Occupy movement “through the lens of the American worker.” From 1979 to 1990, union membership in the United States fell by one-third, creating the issue of income inequality that Occupy is protesting.

     “From 1945 to 1979, the social contract was that if workers worked hard they’d be rewarded,” Ormiston explained. “From 1979 to 1981, a new mode of thinking came to the fore [with more imports from Asia and with the firing of striking air traffic controllers].”

     The gradual decay of unions has affected the power of the American worker, but no one—even the Democrats—haven’t addressed the tough questions on how to help. In the past couple decades, there haven’t even been any significant protests of this decline. As Ormiston said, “We don’t protest erosion.”

     That erosion, combined with the recent economic recession, has created the perfect environment for a movement such as Occupy to appear. The Occupy movement, Ormiston explained, “has changed the conversation.”

By Mary Solberg

Does the Tea Party matter? If you ask Vanessa Williamson, she’d say yes and no. OK, so maybe that’s not as definitive an answer as political pundits would hope for, but it pretty much sums up the complexity of the movement.

Williamson, co-author of the forthcoming book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press), told a packed audience at Quigley Hall, Allegheny College, that while the Tea Party’s popularity is declining now, it has had a lasting impact on American politics.

“The Tea Party motivated older conservatives to vote, it helped move the Republican Party to the right, and it reinvigorated the Republican Party at a time of crisis,” Williamson said at the Sept. 22 lecture.

Conversely, though, the Tea Party’s popularity has declined from September 2009 when 70,000 activists converged on Washington, D.C., Williamson added, saying, “That was really the peak of Tea Party activism. But as more people have become aware of what the Tea Party is, its popularity began to decline.”

In 2010, the Tea Party did not elect conservatives in moderate areas, and may not even have increased the Republican landslide in the midterms, Williamson said. Nevertheless, the movement has had an impact, particularly in light of the emergence of Tea Party candidates, ongoing news coverage and its prevalence in major polls and surveys. Perhaps the most significant acknowledgement of its impact was this fall when CNN joined the Tea Party in hosting a Republican primary debate in California.

Williamson, a doctoral candidate in government and social policy at Harvard University, captivated her audience—ironically—with her straightforward discussion of the Tea Party. Instead of presenting a pro or con presentation on the controversial organization, Williamson’s viewpoint as an academic came off as refreshing. She discussed what it was like to interview Tea Party members throughout the country.

Audience members asked Williamson about the makeup of Tea Party activists and what she thought of them. The people she interviewed reminded her of kindly grandparents.

“The Tea Party is made up of mostly older white people who own their own homes and have pensions. They weren’t hit hardest by the Great Recession, but there’s a real element that the American dream was betrayed for some of them,” Williamson said.

Unfortunately, she maintains that many Tea Party members, while educated, are misinformed on issues. Williamson blamed an intense polarization of values in America today, where people seek like-minded people and groups that espouse only what they believe in. No one has to prove a point, in other words.

“They believe in things that are just not facts,” Williamson said, adding, “There is no accountability.”

Herb Klions, a retired psychology professor from Allegheny, was in the audience and asked Williamson if she thought the Tea Party would have taken a different direction had Hillary Clinton, now secretary of state, beat Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

“I think the Tea Party would have been a little different. The symbolism would not have been as potent, but conservatives still would have been upset,” Williamson said.

Williamson, whose primary research interest is the politics of taxation, co-wrote her Tea Party book with Theda Skocpol of Harvard. Before studying at Harvard, she served as the policy director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. She received her bachelor’s degree in French language and literature from New York University, and her master’s from NYU’s Institute of French Studies.

To pre-order The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, go online to Oxford University Press or Amazon.com.

####

Meadville, Pa. – Sept. 13, 2011 – As part of research on the viability of local political parties in the United States, the Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College released the results of a new poll of nearly 500 local party officials from across the nation. 

Overall, the picture seems bright for local party organizations.  A vast majority of the party leaders surveyed (78 percent) believe their party committee is doing better than in the past.  “Given the vital role that local parties play in our democracy, it’s good to hear they are doing well,” said Daniel M. Shea, director of the CPP and lead author of the study.

Democratic and Republican party leaders generally agreed on a range of issues, from the use of particular technologies to the types of activities party committees should sponsor.  “In many respects, there was a great deal of consensus,” Shea said.  

There was, however, one glaring exception:  whether they believed elected officials should stand firm on their principles or try to find areas of compromise when grappling with difficult issues.  Seventy-eight percent of Republican leaders contend that elected officials should stick to their principles and not seek compromise solutions, while 12 percent of Democratic chairs said the same.   Conversely, 88 percent of Democratic chairs thought politicians should find compromises.  Just 22 percent of GOP leaders held a similar view.  “There are always modest partisan differences when you talk to local party leaders,” Shea said. “Yet this disparity is stunning.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Shea expressed concern about what these results might suggest for future budget negotiations in Congress. “It is hard to imagine middle-of-the-road solutions springing from Congress when 8 out of 10 local GOP party leaders expect their elected officials to stand firm,” he said.  “And you can bet all members of Congress pay close attention to these party chairs, given the next primary election is always just around the corner.”

A related finding was that 78 percent of the chairs believe Americans are more polarized than in the past, and 65 percent believe their own communities are more polarized than in previous years.

In 2010 the CPP conducted three polls on political civility in an attempt to gauge what the average American voter was thinking. The new poll, conducted this summer, went directly to the leaders of local party committees.   They were asked numerous questions about their organizations and their personal views regarding the tone of politics in general.  

Other key findings of the summer survey include: 73 percent of the chairs say that politics has become less civil in the past few years and 68 percent believe nasty politics is harmful to our democracy.   On a more encouraging note, the CPP study found that 90 percent of party leaders polled believe that aggressive but respectful politics is still possible.  

This summer’s Survey on Local Party Vitality was conducted via e-mail through Survey Monkey, Palo Alto, Calif., between July 15 and Aug. 1.  Questionnaires were sent to approximately 1,500 Democratic and 1,500 Republican local party leaders.  In all, 475 party leaders returned the survey, yielding a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent.  Fifty-eight percent of the respondents were Democrats; 42 percent were Republicans.

Read/download survey data:

Survey on Local Party Vitality: Survey Frequency | Party Crosstab

###

MEADVILLE, PA—The Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College hosted its largest ever Model Campaign USA program this year, with 180 area high school students and teachers gathering on campus for a mock campaign on May 4.

     Several high school teams won awards recognizing their achievements in conducting exemplary political campaigns. The award for Best Overall Campaign went to McDowell High School, Erie.

     “These students from our high schools, and from Allegheny, are the future leaders of the United States, and are now better equipped to conduct themselves and treat others with dignity and civility,” said Suzanne Sitzler, director of the McDowell Honors College of Leadership and Service.

     Model Campaign USA is a semester-long program, held every other year, to teach high school students the art and ethics of political campaigning. Allegheny political science students have been visiting participating high schools since the end of January, teaching such things as demographics, polling, press relations, direct voter contact and fundraising. The program culminates with the final competition day, when judges decide which high school conducted the best campaign and which ones excelled in such areas as targeting, ethics, and best use of social media.

     CPP Director Daniel M. Shea, Ph.D., said this year’s event marked the sixth time the center has sponsored the campaign program.

     “It’s always a success and it’s great to see these young people develop a real interest in politics. They find out that it’s not just for older people, and that they can have an impact in the political arena,” Shea added.    

     Allegheny President James Mullen delivered a rousing speech to the seven regional high schools that participated in this year’s competition, challenging students to get involved in the political process.

     “I hope you take the conversations and lessons you learned today and think about running for office yourself someday,” Mullen said, adding, “And when you do, demand civility. In too many cases, politics is about negativity and mean-spiritedness. It’s not going to change unless your generation steps up.”

     Students were given tasks throughout the day and created their own video commercials and press releases. Using Facebook and Twitter, many students explored the benefits of social media in furthering their campaign platforms.

     Julianna Twigg of Wilmington Area High School in New Wilmington, Pa., said she wasn’t sure what to think of Model Campaign until everything came together on competition day.

     “I had a lot of fun with Model Campaign,” Twigg said. “When I first signed up, I wasn’t sure how I would like it, but now that I’m here, I’ve definitely learned a lot about politics that I didn’t know before.”

     Besides Wilmington and McDowell, other high schools that participated this year were: Cambridge Springs, Fort LeBoeuf, Grove City, Meadville, and Rocky Grove.

     Here were the 2011 award recipients:

• Cambridge Spring High School, Team A—Best Press Relations
• Fort LeBoeuf High School, Team C—Best Electronic Media, Best Direct Voter Contact       
• Fort LeBoeuf High School, Team D—Best Polling
• Grove City High School—Best Targeting
• McDowell High School—Best Overall Campaign, Best Ethical Standards, Best Fundraising
• Meadville High School—Best Use of Social Media
• Rocky Grove High School—Best General Strategy
• Wilmington Area High School—Best Public Relations

Here are links to the YouTube campaign commercials generated by the high schools this year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO_vjCj053k
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deM1FKnqPgU
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fck3Xws4Xi0
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xvl3vA5TvDg&feature=youtube_gdata_player
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyU6C5pLUp0
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwi5_fBRRaU&feature=player_embedded
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h55Xpay04E&feature=youtu.be
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u4Fd0c5vrc&feature=related
 
https://www.youtube.com/user/MrJamiereynolds11?feature=mhum#p/a/u/1/A5P6SSmdvJg
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx1xmDvQi5E
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk—XQvK1A&feature=email

The Center for Political Participation has been at the forefront of a nationwide effort to stem the growing problem of nasty politics.

Since last April, the CPP has conducted three national surveys to determine just what Americans think of this declining political discourse. (You can click the links to the right to access all of the surveys/data.) And last May, the CPP hosted Pathway to Civility: A National Conference of College Leaders. Students from throughout the country came together and hammered out a 10-point guideline toward more civil dialogue.

Allegheny College has taken another significant step by establishing the Allegheny College Civility Award (which also can be accessed in links to the right). This is an award to recognize a national political figure who has shown authentic courageous civility in an important moment and/or those who have demonstrated steadfast civility throughout their career.

Stay tuned for the naming of the Civility Award recipient.

    If you want to do something to abate the suffering of the people of Haiti during the most recent cholera epidemic, then donate to the Center for Political Participation’s “Help Haiti Heal” project.  The CPP is honoring the legacy of President John F. Kennedy, who proposed 50 years ago to start a war on poverty.

     Beginning Sunday, Nov. 21, and continuing through Dec. 16, the CPP will collect items that will go directly to Bernard Mevs Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  Bernard Mevs is one of the last hospitals left standing after the devastating earthquake there last Jan. 12.

     Allegheny College graduates Elizabeth Lemley Stanley ’05 and Briana Rusiski Kelly ’01 were at the hospital  last June with Project Medishare. The organization was founded in 1994 by doctors from the University of Miami  School of Medicine, a non-profit dedicated to sharing its human and technical resources with its Haitian partners.  Stanley and  Kelly are asking that students, faculty and staff, as well as the entire Meadville community, donate any basic-need items, including:

• toothbrushes, toothpaste, sanitary wipes, shampoo, soap, bandages, Q-tips, sheets, blankets, even old slings and crutches
• clothes (t-shirts, new packaged undergarments)  that are clean and in good shape
• flashlights
• hygiene and personal items.

     The goods collected in the next month by the CPP will be sent to Project Medishare for Haiti at the University of Miami, which will then forward everything directly to the hospital.

     Donations can be dropped off at the lobby of the Campus Center, beginning Sunday, Nov. 21, or at the CPP office at Brooks Hall during the week. Call Mary Solberg at 814-332-6202 for more information, or e-mail msolberg@allegheny.edu

     Allegheny College is a member of Harvard University’s National Campaign for Political and Civic Engagement. The CPP and other schools that belong to the consortium are undertaking several projects to mark the JFK 50^th: National Campaign Service Day on Nov. 21.

Editor’s Note: Here is Matt Lacombe’s column in its entirety:

Young Voters and the ‘Rally for Sanity’

November 5, 2010 By Matthew Lacombe

Last week Inside Higher Ed published a column by Scott McLemee entitled “Rude Democracy,” which discussed Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity and apparent trends indicating a lack of political engagement among young people. McLemee’s argument was both intelligent and important, but I believe there’s another side to the story of Stewart’s rally, political civility, and turnout among college students and young voters in the 2010 midterm election.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans were very successful in the midterm election, gaining control of the House of Representatives and cutting into the Democrats’ majority in the Senate. While the politically active on campuses across the country will surely devote much discussion to the results of the election and their implications over the proceeding days and weeks, it’s less likely they’ll discuss the execrable turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds.

Early exit polling done by CBS News indicates that young people made up roughly 9 percent of all voters in the midterm election. In 2008, young people made up 18 percent of the electorate. Why?

Political scientists and campaign consultants offer several theories. Americans are more likely to vote when enthusiasm abounds for the candidates they support and young people tend to support Democrats. Young people historically don’t turn out for midterms. Barack Obama’s candidacy in 2008 was uniquely galvanizing for young voters. The agenda of Congress and the president has not adequately addressed energy policy — a very important issue to college students – and media coverage of the health care reform bill (which did quietly include benefits for young people) focused mostly on the concerns of older voters. Thus, young people seem to have concluded that voting isn’t worth their time right now.

I, however, believe that something deeper may explain young people’s disengagement in 2010. Scott McLemee, in his “Rude Democracy” piece, discusses Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity in light of a book written by the Georgia Tech political scientist Susan Herbst (which is also titled Rude Democracy).

Herbst studied the views of young people and found that “72 percent of students agreed that it was very important for them to always feel comfortable in class.” Herbst argues that “Contrary to the image of college being a place to ‘find oneself’ and learn from others, a number of students saw the campus as just the opposite – a place where already formed citizens clash, stay with like-minded others, or avoid politics altogether.”

Based on Herbst’s study, McLemee, writing prior to the sanity rally, argued that, while Stewart’s rally was likely to draw lots of young people and provide them with a fun weekend, “the anti-ideological spirit of the event is a dead end. The attitude that it’s better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor — this is not civility. It’s timidity.” Clearly, McLemee believes that the unwillingness of young people to engage in political debate – argument – is not a political virtue, but rather a democratically harmful form of indifference.

Before accepting McLemee’s assertion, though, I think several important questions need to be answered. Why do the students in Herbst’s survey feel that it isn’t possible to persuade others? Could it be that such a belief is the product of an uncivil political culture? If students had political role models who successfully persuaded others in civil and respectful ways, would they be more inclined to view the political arena – and the classroom – as a space in which the clash of ideas can occur and yield positive results?

Personally, I can think of two positive things Stewart does; first, he encourages young people to refuse to subscribe to the currently pervasive ultra-partisan view of politics that fosters incivility and acts as a barrier to progress; and second, and more basically, he brings some level of political awareness through humor to people who might otherwise be totally apathetic and ignorant. Stewart’s influence, in my view, doesn’t breed timidity (as McLemee asserts), but rather increased youth engagement of the type that rejects a toxic political culture.

It also seems possible that the “Obama Effect” I mentioned earlier, holding that young voters turned out in 2008 because of their admiration of the current president, is at play. I’m worried that young people, perhaps naively, viewed Candidate Obama as a post-partisan role model and that President Obama’s lack of success thus far may further discourage engagement among young people who believed he had the ability to catalyze change without acting like every other “scumbag politician” they’ve come to dislike.

Moving forward, two things are clear. First, the perspective of young people has the power to change the nature of partisanship; if we, as a generation, continue to subscribe to the ideals of the Rally to Restore Sanity, we have the potential to improve the tone of politics.

Second, however, the burden most certainly falls on us; politicians are not going to pander to a portion of the electorate they don’t believe will turn out to vote, so if we want to transform Stewart’s rally from a sunny Saturday on the Mall into a new political reality, we’ve got to make our voices heard.

Matthew Lacombe is a senior at Allegheny College, in Meadville, Pa., and a student fellow at Allegheny’s Center for Political Participation.

A survey of 1,000 Americans nationwide suggests a wide majority believe it is unacceptable for groups to spend heavily on political advertising in districts where they are not located, a phenomenon dubbed “outside money.”

Two-thirds of those polled say they oppose this practice, while 26 percent support it.

Recent published reports in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other major media outlets have noted that television spending by outside groups has more than doubled from what was spent at the same time in the 2006 midterm elections.   

An analysis published earlier this week in Politico.com reported that, “Never in modern political history has there been so much secret money gushing into an American election.  By Election Day, independent groups will have aired more than $200 million worth of campaign ads using cash that can’t be traced back to its original source.”

“While it might be true that outside groups have the legal right to flood these races with ads, many Americans are concerned that it distorts the democratic process,” said Daniel M. Shea, director of the Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College, which developed and commissioned a poll, “Nastiness, Name-calling & Negativity: The Allegheny College Survey of Civility and Compromise in American Politics,” in spring 2010.

Shea expressed concern with the volume of money being spent by outside pressure groups in local races.  In Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, where Allegheny is located, numerous outside groups have hammered the airwaves with ads for and against both the Democratic and Republican candidates.

“On one level, outside money is not entirely new.  We’ve seen this before.  But the amount of money that is being spent by national groups is unprecedented.  As the head of an organization designed to promote grassroots campaigning, I worry that outside money will lead all citizens, but especially young citizens, to question the value of their own engagement,” said Shea

Much of Allegheny’s spring poll centered on issues related to the tone of politics, and its results have been widely circulated in the news media.  But the poll also queried about the outside money issue.  “We knew it would be a big issue this fall, and, sure enough, it is one of the most important issues of this campaign season,” said Shea.

Group spending has become the focus of attention since a January U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The High Court lifted restrictions on corporate spending in elections. Corporations, including nonprofit ones like labor unions, are no longer restricted when it comes to financing radio and television commercials that focus on voters and identify a political candidate.

The New York Times reported that in the weeks leading to this November’s hotly contested House and Senate races, many nonprofit advocacy organizations have begun to be more aggressive, explicitly asking voters to cast their ballots for or against candidates. “The vast majority of these political commercials are billed as ‘issue advocacy,’ said Shea, “but they are more easily recognized as attack ads.”

According to Shea, this latest twist on campaign financing laws speaks to the incivility permeating politics today.  An overwhelming majority of Americans polled last spring said they perceived an increasing rancor and hostility in politics. A second survey, conducted two weeks ago by the CPP, indicates that the majority of Americans believe civility has gotten worse, in large part due to the nature of campaigning.

“It’s no wonder,” Shea noted, “that four times as many Americans see the tone of campaigning as much more negative this year, than those who see the election as more positive. The floodgates are open, and we’re a torrent of nastiness and negativity.”

Self-described independents expressed the most opposition to outside election spending, at about 72 percent. Self-described Democrats and Republicans both oppose the practice, at about 65 percent, respectively.

Self-described conservatives, liberals and moderates oppose outside spending by about 65 percent, while a full 75 percent of Americans aged 50 and older oppose it, too. About 63 percent of Americans who earn more than $100,000 and 69 percent of those making less than $25,000 oppose outside spending.

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• Americans Oppose Outside Money
• Nastiness, Name-calling & Negativity