University of Michigan Press Blog

Moderates, the debt ceiling, and the future of the Republican Party: Sara Fitzgerald, author of 'Elly Peterson,' weighs in

A couple of months ago, The Washington Post mused, in a front-page story on the presidential campaign of Jon Huntsman Jr., “Can a Republican moderate survive?”

I smiled when I saw the headline because you might think I was crazy to set out to write a book that would be titled Elly Peterson: “Mother” of the Moderates.  It’s not as if the moderates are holding a national convention, with chapters in every state and city these days!

The current Republican establishment is not very interested in "moderates," and Democrats are not very interested in things that are labeled "Republican." And for someone like Elly Peterson who abandoned the Republican Party and eventually labeled herself an "independent," ... well, perhaps there's a support group somewhere on Facebook that fits the bill.

In the case of Huntsman, a former governor of Utah who stepped down as Barack Obama’s ambassador to China to seek the presidency, his aides were concerned early on that he might be labeled a moderate--the "M-word" one called it--because that is apparently viewed as cause for immediate disqualification among the voters likely to turn out in Republican presidential primaries.

They are probably right.

"Interest Groups" Author Examines Supreme Court's Stand on Public Financing

Guest blogger Robert G. Boatright is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Clark University and the author of Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform in the United States and Canada, available now from the University of Michigan Press. Here he considers the Supreme Court's decision to strike down an Arizona campaign finance law.

On June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court ended its term by handing down its decision in the Arizona Free Enterprise Club PAC v. Bennett case.  By a 5-4 margin, the Court struck down a provision of Arizona’s campaign finance system that allows publicly funded candidates to receive state funds to match the spending of privately funded opponents.  While there is much one could argue with in the Court’s decision, the decision was unsurprising and its immediate implications for campaign finance at the federal level are likely nonexistent.  Yet the decision has been met with applause from those who support further deregulation of U.S. campaign finance, and with consternation from the supporters of state involvement in reining in campaign spending.  It is not the decision itself that matters, but the fact that the decision is the fourth is a series of decisions in which the Court has continued to chip away at campaign finance restrictions.  It provides further encouragement to those who would continue to challenge spending restrictions, disclosure laws, coordination restrictions, and other types of limits on campaign spending.

I make this claim not as a student of constitutional law (for I am not one), but as a student of American interest groups and election politics.  In my recent book, Interest Groups and Campaign Finance Reform in the United States and Canada, I explain the responses of American interest groups to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002.  This has been a tremendously unsettled decade for election finance, and we need to consider the Court’s decision in this context.

Read two UM Press novels FREE on Facebook this summer!

Starting today, July 18, all you have to do is "like" the University of Michigan Press Facebook page and you'll have access to ongoing chapters of two brand-new novels. Check in every week and you'll have read all of both books by the end of the summer!

Barbara Kingsolver said she read Marjorie Cole's Spell on the Water and "couldn't put it down." It's about a woman struggling to put her family back together in a small town after her husband's death.

Becky Thacker's Faithful Unto Death is a historical whodunit, based on true events in her own family. Set in a tiny town in Northern Michigan, it traces the mysterious death of the mother of five: illness, murder, or suicide?

There is no charge for viewing the ongoing segments of either book (not that we wouldn't love for you to buy copies for yourself, of course).

Check them out online today!

Q&A with Jennifer Gabrys, author of Digital Rubbish

Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics describes the materiality of electronics from a unique perspective, examining the multiple forms of waste that electronics create as evidence of the resources, labor, and imaginaries that are bundled into these machines. By drawing on the material analysis developed by Walter Benjamin, this natural history method allows for an inquiry into electronics that focuses neither on technological progression nor on great inventors but rather considers the ways in which electronic technologies fail and decay. Ranging across studies of media and technology, as well as environments, geography, and design, Jennifer Gabrys pulls together the far-reaching material and cultural processes that enable the making and breaking of these technologies.

Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer in Design and Convener of the Masters in Design and Environment in the Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London.

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