May 23

Ten days after graduation for the Class of 2006, I'm at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery about 50 miles southeast of Louisville, Kentucky. I come here every year at this time for three or four days, usually in the company of one or two of my colleagues at Rhodes College. The Abbey is a place of extraordinary serenity and beauty, both the buildings and, especially, the grounds. In secular terms, I'm here to decompress from the academic year and recharge my batteries for the summer. But I am a Christian as well as an academic, so I'm also here in hopes of stepping briefly outside linear time and into sacred time, where every day recapitulates the monks' centuries-old cycle of prayer, song, study, and work.

Gethsemani, like most Christian monasteries, is governed by the Rule of St. Benedict, which was written in the early sixth century, about 1,500 years ago. As a political scientist I'm totally impressed. One of our standard claims in American politics courses is that the United States has the world's oldest written constitution in continuous operation. Hah! Although it doesn't call itself a constitution, the Rule's animating purpose is to establish the institutions and processes that will enable monks to live together in a self-sufficient community whose purpose is to fulfill certain ideals. Sounds like a constitution to me.

What kind of political system does the constitution, er, Rule of St. Benedict create? The U.S. Constitution rests on the bedrock of separation of powers; the Rule vests all governing authority in the abbot. The American president is, to a greater or lesser degree, checked by Congress and the Supreme Court. The abbot of a monastery is checked by, well, God, who will “hold him to account for all the souls in his care … on Judgment Day.” I wonder which check more effectively restrains bad behavior.

Reading through the Rule, I notice some other interesting provisions. Our Constitution states qualifications for office in terms of age, residency, and citizenship; the Rule says the abbot “must be virtuous, sober, and merciful; and always hold mercy before justice.” Practically speaking, our Constitution values seniority in Congress; the Rule admonishes the abbot to consult widely because “the Lord often reveals the best course to a younger monk.” Every political scientist knows that Machiavelli counseled the prince that “it is better to be feared than loved.” I wonder how many realize that Machiavelli was targeting Benedict's advice to the abbot: “He should try to be loved, more than feared.”

My favorite part of the Rule, of course, is the opening sentence of Chapter 53: “All guests to the monastery should be welcomed.” It's the reason why when I and many others look for a quiet, austerely beautiful place to spend a few days, the door is open, the bed is made, and the table is set.

June 9

I send in my chapter on the politics of tribal recognition to Bird Loomis and Allen Cigler, hoping that it will pass muster for inclusion in the seventh edition of their classic reader, Interest Group Politics. The chapter is a spin-off from my politics of gambling research of the past seven years. Until the advent of Indian casinos, no one paid much attention to how groups of claimants secured federal recognition as historic tribes. Nowadays, however, bids for recognition trigger outbreaks of group politics involving casino investors, local activist groups, state governments, and established tribes, in addition to the claimants themselves. I've been working hard on the research, the writing, and the thinking for this chapter off and on for the past several months, which makes it all the more gratifying when Bird emails me his approval.

June 12

A few weeks ago a colleague at another fine college asked if I'd be willing to be considered for a deanship there. Surprising myself (I've spent nearly 30 years avoiding administrative positions), I didn't say no. I didn't say yes either, but I did express a willingness to take the next step. The next step is now, when the phone rings. The call is from a representative of the search firm that's working with the college.

We have a great conversation. I tell him that I am perfectly happy at Rhodes, which is true, but that the prospect of a new challenge at a new school in a new city is an exciting one. He tells me good things about the school, none of which ring false based on what I already know, and I offer a couple ideas about how it might become even better. He tells me that interdisciplinary teaching in the liberal arts is a new priority there, which makes me think that my experience teaching in and writing about Rhodes's interdisciplinary Search course (formally titled The Search for Values in the Light of Western History and Religion) might be helpful. I still have many more reasons to stay than to go, and they have many more reasons to hire someone with administrative experience than to hire me. But I accept an invitation to take the next next step: dinner with the search firm consultant at the APSA meeting in Philadelphia.

July 5

One of my main activities this summer is to supervise eight-week research projects by three undergraduate fellows of the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies. Today we are in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library. The students—Taylor Brown, Emily Donelson, and Jonathan Wright—are working on health care, family and medical leave, and welfare reform, respectively. As far as I can tell from looking at the log of previous library users, they are the first three scholars of any vintage to do serious, sustained research in the recently released Clinton papers.

This is our second research trip to the library, and Taylor, Emily, and Jonathan have already mastered some of the tricks of the trade. Here are three: Use the library's online finding aids to identify the boxes in which you want to work, then email the staff archivists so they can have them waiting for you when you arrive. While you're at the library, spend most of your time identifying the papers in each box that are useful so that you can copy them in haste and study them at home in leisure. Go to college at Bruce Lindsey's alma mater.

That last bit of advice is mostly facetious, but not entirely. Bruce was Clinton's right hand during the 1992 campaign and his eight years as president, and he is Clinton's right hand today. This afternoon, in between trips to New York and Africa, Bruce sat down for an hour with my students and gave a free-wheeling interview on the topics of their research. We did it in Clinton's office in the Clinton Presidential Foundation, adjacent to the library and museum. The students spent the rest of the day on cloud nine.

July 9

Having reached the climax of the most important, elaborate, and extended competition in all of sport, international soccer decides that the way to break a 1-1 tie in the World Cup championship game between Italy and France is … to play a different game: the penalty kick shootout. Consumed by seemingly impotent rage, I suddenly remember that a friend has started a webzine, a perfect outlet for the sort of righteous indignation I'm feeling, assuming I can express it civilly. (The webzine, called Rokovoko after the island “not down on any map” in Moby Dick, describes itself as a “zine of arts, letters, and living.”) I calm down before posting 500 words on how to fix not just soccer, but also baseball, football, hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and golf. Ah, that feels better. (The URL for the piece is: http://rokovoko.blogspot.com/2006_07_09_rokovoko_archive.html.)

July 10

I've been spending entirely too much time on an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education's Review section about Lyndon B. Johnson's waxing and waning reputation since he left the presidency. The peg for the piece is the August 1 publication of historian Randall Woods's new and admiring biography, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition. It's over 1,000 pages long, but that's not the problem. The problem is that to place Woods's book into the context of LBJ historiography I need to read all the other major biographies, especially those by Robert Caro (three volumes and more than 2,600 pages) and Robert Dallek (two volumes, nearly 1,500 pages).

Reading and evaluating these books is as enjoyable as it is time-consuming, and so I've done it. But that still leaves the problem of what to say about them. The bad news is that I spent several days last week writing without any confidence that I was heading anywhere. The good news is that today it all came together, both the ideas and the words to express them, and I now know that in a day or two I'll have an essay of which I can be proud. The feeling is akin to the exultation that comes when you've been driving around in circles in a strange neighborhood, then see a familiar landmark and know that you've found your way.

One thing about the piece worries me: I interviewed Randall Woods by phone, enjoyed talking with him, generally admire the book, and make sure to praise everything about it that I find praiseworthy in my review. But I also take him to task on a couple matters and I'm afraid that his overall reaction to what I've written will be disappointment at best, resentment at worst. (Clearly I lack the big-time reviewer's instinct for the jugular.) I go back through the piece and make sure that none of my critical phrases are gratuitously harsh and that as much of my praise as possible is “blurbable”—that is, could be used by the publisher to promote the book.

July 12

The LBJ piece is done. I email it to my editor at the Chronicle Review, Alex Kafka, and 30 minutes later he sends me an enthusiastic response. It will run in the August 11 issue, which Alex says is their pre-APSA Annual Meeting issue, along with a piece by Swarthmore political scientist and Annual Meeting co-chair Rick Vallely, whose work I greatly admire.

July 13

Helping to further integrate athletics and academics has been an interest of mine ever since I chaired a task force on varsity athletics at Rhodes for President Bill Troutt in 2002, then helped to launch one of the group's chief recommendations: a Faculty Associate program that pairs at least one professor with each team in a kind of informal advisory relationship. Serving as faculty associate for the baseball team these past two years has been pure pleasure for me, and it has given the players a chance to interact with a professor outside of class during seasons in which they spend an average of 25–30 hours per week on their sport while carrying a full course load.

A chance meeting with Rhodes Vice President Bob Johnson in the weight room yesterday morning triggered a burst of creative energy. Bob suggested we get together today to talk about how Rhodes can make additional progress on integration, and in preparing for our meeting I worked up a memo proposing three initiatives. One is to ramp up recruitment and training for the Faculty Associate program, in part by assuring professors that participating will “count” as service when the college evaluates their performance in that area. Another is to see if we can host a Mellon Foundation-inspired “Integration Institute” for the colleges in our conference that will focus on the issue of integrating athletics and academics at Division III schools like ours. The third is to launch a Sports and Society lecture series at Rhodes, bringing in two or three speakers per year who can talk about sports-related subjects in ways that will interest the entire community, especially varsity athletes. Bob is enthusiastic about all these ideas and about a leadership role for me in helping to implement them. President Troutt commits funds to invite three speakers this academic year, starting in October with New York Times reporter Warren St. John, the author of a wonderful book on the nature of fandom called Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania. The next step will be to meet with our new provost, historian Charlotte Borst, to seek her advice and support.

July 15

I spent the weekend and most of today tinkering with the manuscript of How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation, and now I send it to LSU Press for copy editing. Every week's news seems to generate a new development in one state or another that I have to take into account. The most recent are lottery advocate Don Siegelman's defeat in the Alabama Democratic gubernatorial primary, a court decision to allow video gambling machines at Arkansas' race tracks, and the release of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee's report on how shady lobbyist Jack Abramoff fleeced Southern tribes that wanted either to sponsor gambling or to stop another tribe from sponsoring gambling. One of the hardest things for political scientists writing a book is to know when to stop. Most of us study moving targets—that is, phenomena that are continuously unfolding. I know the time has come to wrap up How the South Joined the Gambling Nation, but I also know that it will be impossible to stop tinkering until the book is actually at the printer.

July 19

The third edition of Charles Bullock and Mark Rozell's The New Politics of the Old South arrives in the mail and—yes!—there, starting on page 187, is my chapter on Tennessee.

I'm a Jersey boy, but I have been interested in Southern politics and history since I went south to William and Mary for college. After I graduated, I spent a year teaching at Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina, another year as a VISTA volunteer in Augusta, Georgia, five years in graduate school at Johns Hopkins (I regard Baltimore as a mostly Southern city), and 26 years (and counting) teaching at Vanderbilt and Rhodes, both of them in Tennessee. For four years when I was in Nashville and for 14 years here in Memphis, I have been the political analyst for the local NBC station in each city. In other words, I've spent most of my life following Southern politics and a good part of it talking about Southern politics on television, but until recently I have generally skirted it as a subject for teaching and research.

In terms of public policy in the South, that changed when I began work on the gambling book. But in terms of Southern parties and elections, it wasn't until last year that I bit the bullet and decided to develop a course on the subject. I will teach it for the first time this fall.

Now it's time to draw up the syllabus. Happily, I have the Bullock and Rozell collection and an excellent new textbook by Clemson political scientist J. David Woodard, The New Southern Politics. As a third book, I can't imagine anything other than V. O. Key's 1949 classic Southern Politics in State and Nation. Apart from its brilliant theoretical analysis of the shortcomings of one-party, one-race politics, Key's vividly written chapters on each Southern state will serve as a good reminder to students born in the late 1980s that the South hasn't always been Republican.

July 25

Charlie Cook—congressional elections guru, Louisiana native, and, most important, Rhodes parent—and I are trying to decide on a book we can do together. All thought of a big American government textbook is quickly ruled out on the life-is-too-short principle. But the idea of mobilizing the best scholars and journalists in the South to do a biennial guide to Southern politics gets us both excited. I mention my good experience at LSU Press, Charlie says they've been trying to get him to write a book for years, and we're off and running.

July 29

I spent the last few days finishing the other assignment that came out of my May meeting with Alex Kafka in Washington. It's a piece on congressional elections for the Chronicle Review's occasional “Must Read” page. The idea is to identify the two or three books that an interested non-specialist, must read to get up to speed on an important subject of current interest. For months (and for months to come), every news story about the November elections has centered on whether the Democrats will recapture Congress. Those who say yes focus on national political forces like President George W. Bush's unpopularity, while those who say no focus on local forces, especially the power of incumbency.

After using the first few paragraphs of my article to distill the arguments on both sides, I offer the sixth edition of Gary C. Jacobson's The Politics of Congressional Elections as the book that includes the best discussion of national forces and the Almanac of American Politics, 2006 as the best source of information on the local politics of each state and congressional district. I take particular pleasure in singing Jacobson's praises. To my mind, he is V. O. Key's successor as the clearest thinking student of American politics of his generation. As with Key, not only do I learn a lot by reading anything Jacobson writes, but I also derive an aesthetic pleasure from seeing how elegantly he marshals data to answer important questions.

As usual, Alex reads the piece as soon as I send it in and, gratifyingly, he likes it. He singles out the ending for special praise. Reading Jacobson and the Almanac won't tell us in advance what's going to happen on Election Day, I wrote, but it will “help make our ignorance more intelligent.”

July 30

All Things Considered, National Public Radio's late-afternoon news program, airs a long story on Tennessee Democratic senatorial candidate Harold Ford, including two sound bites from me. Taken together, they amount to about 10 seconds excerpted from a 90-minute interview that I did with host Debbie Elliott when she was in Memphis this past Monday.

Deciding which media interview requests to grant is a problem many political scientists face because interviews are so time consuming. My decision rule is to say yes only if it's with a publication or program that will reach either a) a substantial number of Rhodes alumni, parents, and prospective students (so, for example: Washington, D.C. media, yes; Washington state media, no) or b) some of my family, friends, and close colleagues. All Things Considered scores high on both counts.

July 31–August 2

Taylor, Emily, and Jonathan present their papers on the Clinton presidency to the other student and faculty fellows of the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies. Apart from their facility with PowerPoint (some of which seems like magic to me), what is most impressive about their presentations is how poised and professional they are. Each has done serious research on an important aspect of the Clinton presidency by intelligently weaving primary source material from the presidential papers with interviews and a wide range of secondary sources. Both their presentations and their papers constitute living testimony to the quality of research that undergraduates can do with sufficient time, resources, and, I like to think, faculty mentoring. (You can find their papers at www.rhodes.edu/RegionalStudies/index.cfm.)

August 3

Today is Election Day, so I'll be putting in some extra time at WMC-TV. In Tennessee, for reasons unknown to me (some expert!), the first Thursday of August in even-numbered years is when we hold the general election for county offices and the primary election for state and federal offices. The national focus today is on who the Republicans will nominate to run against Harold Ford for the open U.S. Senate seat. Locally, people are even more interested in who will be the next sheriff, county clerk, and juvenile court judge.

As recently as a few years ago, local television stations would offer live and continuous coverage on Election Night. Tonight they air their regular prime time programs, almost all of them summer reruns. People who want to follow the returns can either wait until the 10:00 news or tune in to The Office or So YouThink You Can Dance and read the “crawl”—that is, the streaming numbers at the bottom of the screen—to find out who will govern them for the next several years. I'll be live on several news programs today, Friday, and Saturday, but it won't be nearly as exciting as five-hour election broadcasts used to be.

August 4

Fred Woodward of the University Press of Kansas puts me on hold while he connects with the third party to our monthly conference call, historian and former Middlebury College President John McCardell. John, whom I knew while we were in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, is my co-editor for Kansas Press's new American Presidential Elections book series. My aspiration for the series when I pitched the idea to Fred three years ago was to commission books by distinguished scholars that would vividly describe and analyze important presidential elections while using them as windows into their time. In late 2005, Claremont political scientist Andrew Busch published the first book in the series, Reagan's Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right. Most of the other authors are historians whom John has been especially helpful in recruiting. Among those working away on their books (and the election years they are covering) are James Roger Sharp (1800), Joel Silbey (1848), Michael Holt (1848), Lewis Gould (1912), and Donald Ritchie (1932).

Fred, John, and I comprise a remarkably congenial group, with similar standards of excellence. Today's agenda, however, centers on a book prospectus about which we've already laid down differing positions in email messages. The outcome of our discussion, I expect, will be a reforging of the ties that bind us and a stern but encouraging set of instructions to the author about what needs to be done to bring the prospectus up to the level of the others in the series.

[Post mortem: Our discussion goes exactly as I had hoped.]

August 15

Tomorrow the new semester kicks off, at least the faculty meeting-student orientation-registration phase of it. This will be my 26th fall semester in the classroom. It never gets old. Every year I feel the same sense of excitement, anticipation, and eagerness to meet a new crop of students. Summer has its charms, and this summer has been especially satisfying and (dreary word) productive—so much so that I took last week off to read, relax, and, yes, do a little “field research” at the blackjack tables in Tunica, Mississippi. But fall and spring are what keep me going.