Presidential Nominations and Regional Primaries: An Analysis of Proposals for Reform

The 2007‐2008 presidential nominations season will go down in the record books as the longest, the most expensive, the most frontloaded, the most debated, the most unpredictable and the most contentious presidential nominations contest in American history. Part of the reason for the scope and depth of the highly public conflict was the fact that this was the first time since 1952 when a sitting president or vice president was not a serious contender for the nomination of one of the two major parties. Thus, it is an open seat contest for both major parties, and both parties have attracted from eight to ten potential early contenders for the nomination. After several trial balloons and early drop‐ outs by officially announced candidates, the fall of 2007 pre‐primary season produced eight officially announced candidates for both parties. A lot of contenders meant a lot of traffic, and lot of coming and going into the early primary and caucus states, like Iowa and New Hampshire, and crowded stages when both parties held their seemingly innumerable pre‐nomination presidential debates in the 2007 warm up season. It also meant that the mass media were very active, especially early in trying to handicap the frontrunners and dark‐horses, and in trying to keep up with all the press releases and political machinations from all the candidates and their camps. It also meant that the paid media, especially television, came up in the early contest states much more extensively and earlier than it had in the past. The campaign was on in full force in the early months of 2007 and as that year wore on the intensity of the media’s coverage of campaign 2008 increased with each month. By the end of 2007 it seemed like the race for 2008 had already been underway for a very long time. Many observers were saying that the campaign season was just too long, a complaint which had been heard in previous races, but perhaps never heard quite this early

The Anatomy of President Barack Obama\u27s General Election Victory in Illinois

On November 4, 2008 the junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, was elected the 44th President of the United States. Obama was the first president to be elected from Illinois since the Civil War era. Of course, Abraham Lincoln was the first and the most famous, and the 16th president was also the first Republican ever to be elected president since the party was only born in 1854. Given Lincoln’s stature and reputation as one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest president in American history, it is not surprising that Obama took every opportunity available during his campaign to link himself with Lincoln. This linkage even continued after the election when in preparation for his inauguration in January of 2009 the president‐elect announced that he would use the same Bible for the swearing in ceremony that Lincoln used in 1861, an act which was laden with much symbolism. Ulysses S. Grant was considered to be elected from a political base in Illinois where he had lived for part of his adult life although like all professional military men he had moved around a lot. Ronald Reagan was from Dixon and spent his early years in Illinois; however, he moved to Iowa as soon as he graduated from college, and he won his fame as a movie actor in Hollywood and then as Governor of California. So, while Obama, like Lincoln, was born and raised in another state, his political base and adult life were formed and tempered in the crucible of Illinois politics. Clearly Chicago is Obama’s political home, and Springfield is where Obama, like Lincoln before him, learned to ply the legislative craft. So, it was not inappropriate at all for Senator Obama to announce the kick off of his presidential run on a frigid day in February of 2007 by invoking Lincoln and while standing on the steps of the Old State Capitol building in downtown Springfield

The 2014 Illinois Governor Race: Quinn vs Rauner

The 2014 Governor’s race in Illinois featured two candidates who are the epitome of campaigns for high office in America today. In addition, the race also illustrated the major trends, driven by big money and big media, which are shaping our politics in the 21st century. This paper examines and analyzes the governor’s race in order to learn what it teaches us about politics in Illinois, and in the United States midway through the second decade of this century

The 2008 Presidential Nominations Process, a Marathon and a Sprint: An Analysis of What Happened and Why

The 2008 nominations process will certainly go down in history as one of the longest, most contentious, and most expensive in the nation’s history. It was also one of the most interesting and exciting ever. The race had more officially declared candidates, had more money spent on it, and for the Democrats was more closely contested than any race in recent history. It was one for the record books in many respects. For the Democrats it unexpectedly became a marathon which extended from January of 2007 through early June of 2008, almost eighteen months of intense combat. The slug fest between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama for a while seemed endless, and it appeared that neither candidate could score a definitive victory. Each state contest was important. The rules of the game were also important and set the calendar and the parameters for the allocation of delegates in such a fashion that both became bones of great contention within the party as both major candidates fought every step for every minute advantage. Indeed, the rules which typically should have been settled long before the contest began became a fulcrum for the contest between Clinton and Obama, and some of the most crucial decisions were not made until the meeting of the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Committee met in Washington, D. C. on May 31st to settle on what to do about the disastrously unsettled Michigan and Florida primaries rules. That decision was a signal that Obama would probably prevail and was the beginning of the last stage for the Clinton campaign. It ultimately came down to the last set of contests on June 3rd before the Obama campaign could point to an insurmountable lead in the delegate count and thus claim victory. The Democratic race truly turned into a marathon (Whitcover, 1977). It very nearly exhausted both candidates, and threatened to exhaust the patience of the American public. Because the Democratic nomination was so divisive and so hard fought, this paper will devote more attention to an analysis of it, and to the rules which govern the Democratic contest; however, the nominations season is but a prologue to the main event which is the general election which will end on November 4, 2008

Phenomenology from a U(1) gauged hidden sector

We consider the phenomenological consequences of a hidden Higgs sector extending the Standard Model (SM), in which the matter content are uncharged under the SM gauge groups. We consider a simple case where the hidden sector is gauged under a U(1) with one Higgs singlet. The only couplings between SM and the hidden sector are through mixings between the neutral gauge bosons of the two respective sectors, and between the Higgs bosons. We find signals testable at the LHC that can reveal the existence and shed light on the nature of such a hidden sector.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Talk given at the Lake Louise Winter Institute 2007, Feb. 19-24, Alberta, Canad

Testing Realistic Quark Mass Matrices in the Custodial Randall-Sundrum Model with Flavor Changing Top Decays

We study quark mass matrices in the Randall-Sundrum (RS) model with bulk symmetry $SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R \times U(1)_{B-L}$. The Yukawa couplings are assumed to be within an order of magnitude of each other, and perturbative. We find that quark mass matrices of the symmetrical form proposed by Koide \textit{et. al.} [Y. Koide, H. Nishiura, K. Matsuda, T. Kikuchi and T. Fukuyama, Phys. Rev. D {\bf 66}, 093006 (2002)] can be accommodated in the RS framework with the assumption of hierarchyless Yukawa couplings, but not the hermitian Fritzsch-type mass matrices. General asymmetrical mass matrices are also found which fit well simultaneously with the quark masses and the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix. Both left-handed (LH) and right-handed (RH) quark rotation matrices are obtained that allow analysis of flavour changing decay of both LH and RH top quarks. At a warped down scale of 1.65 TeV, the total branching ratio of t \ra Z + jets can be as high as $\sim 5 \times 10^{-6}$ for symmetrical mass matrices and $\sim 2 \times 10^{-5}$ for asymmetrical ones. This level of signal is within reach of the LHC.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures. Reference added, typos corrected, discussions in Sec. IV B expanded. Version conforms to the published versio