Trying to see into the Mind's Eye

Most pundits would agree the presidential race has tightened up considerably since the first debate between Obama and Romney on October 3, but Gallup went one big step further in posting a seven-point lead for Romney in last week's poll, which came out after the second debate. This seems to fly in the face of what many pundits considered a victory for Obama. "Why is that?" the Washington Post asked Frank Newport of the Gallup Poll,

“I think we’re still seeing leftover positive support for Romney and I don’t think we’re seeing impact yet from the second debate,”

Since the Gallup Poll is a 7-day tracking poll, there is apparently a lag in the results, unlike other daily tracking polls. Nevertheless, these numbers have given Romney and his supporters a huge boost, while it has left Team Obama scratching its collective head.

"Gallup" apparently still considers itself a fiercely independent polling service even if the Gallups no longer own any part of the poll. The family sold the poll to a Nebraska data collecting service back in 1988, after the death of George Gallup in 1984, and since then it has essentially been made into a worldwide marketing tool, taking advantage of the time honored name. Gallup, Inc. was established in 1958, combining the various polling services created by Mr. Gallup.

Here's a Christian Science Monitor article from earlier this year on the nature of Polling.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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