Program Highlight | Winter 2007-2008
The Billion Dollar Campaign: The 2008 Presidential Election
Exploring the changing nature of campaigning
DATE: Tuesday, February 26
TIME: 4:30pm
LOCATION: Lindsay Rogers Room, Room 707, International Affairs Building
Thomas Edsall
Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism, Columbia University
Former Washington Post reporter
Todd Gitlin
Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University
Jefrey Pollock
President, Global Strategy Group, LLC
Robert Shapiro
Professor, Political Science
Director, Public Opinion Project, ISERP
President, New York Chapter American Association for Public Opinion Research (NYAAPOR)
Speaker Bios
Thomas Edsall
Thomas Edsall is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism. He joined Columbia faculty after a twenty-five year career at The Washington Post. During that time, he covered all aspects of national politics, including presidential elections, the House and Senate, lobbying, tax policy, demographic trends, social welfare, the politics of race and ethnicity, organized labor, among other topics. He is now the political editor of The Huffington Post, and a correspondent for The New Republic and The National Journal. He has reported for The Baltimore Sun, The Providence Journal, and contributes TV and radio commentary for CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, PBS, FOX, and NPR. In 2006, he served for a month as a guest columnist for The New York Times.
Edsall is the author of four books: Building Red America (2006); Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (2005); Power and Money: Writing About Politics (1988); and The New Politics of Inequality (1984). He has written extensively for magazines, with articles appearing in American Prospect, The Atlantic, Civilization, Dissent, Harper's, The Nation, The National Journal, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Washington Monthly. Awards include the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association, the Bill Pryor Award and the Front Page Award of the Newspaper Guild, a yearlong fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and five Media Fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Chain Reaction was a Notable Books in the New York Times Book Review and a Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Non-Fiction. Edsall received a B.A. from Boston University.
Todd Gitlin
Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University, is the author of twelve books, including, most recently, The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; other titles include The Intellectuals and the Flag; Letters to a Young Activist; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives; The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, and The Whole World Is Watching.
He holds degrees from Harvard University (mathematics), the University of Michigan (political science), and the University of California, Berkeley (sociology). He was the third president of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1963-64, and coordinator of the SDS Peace Research and Education Project in 1964-65, during which time he helped organize the first national demonstration against the Vietnam War. He blogs at TPMcafe and writes for many periodicals.
Jefrey Pollock
Jefrey Pollock is President of the Global Strategy Group, a political consulting and market research firm, and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy and Administration at SIPA, where he teaches a class on campaign management. His political clients former presidential candidate and former senator John Edwards (D, NC), West Virginia governor Joe Manchin, New York State attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer, the United States Senate Democratic Policy Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, members of Congress, such as Carolyn McCarthy (D, NY), Loretta and Linda Sanchez (D, CA), Steve Israel (D, NY), Charles Rangel (D, NY), Bob Filner (D, CA), Tim Bishop (D, NY), and Henry Cuellar (D, TX), as well as Illinois State Comptroller Dan Hynes, Delaware lieutenant governor John Carney, and Pennsylvania state auditor general Jack Wagner. His not-for-profit clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 1199/SEIU, NCTA and YMCA of the USA; he also works with many corporate clients, such as Goldman Sachs and Anthem/WellPoint.
Jefrey has conducted focus groups with voters for ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos and election town-hall meetings for ABC News. He also often appears as a political commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and the FOX News Channel. He has been quoted extensively on survey research in The New York Times, the New Yorker, Time, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today, the Washington Post, New York magazine, and the Washington Times.
Jefrey was part of the research and strategy team for former President of the Dominican Republic Leonel Fernandez and worked for former Governor Pedro Rossello of Puerto Rico. In addition, he has provided research services for campaigns in international locations such as Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Kazakhstan.
Robert Shapiro
Robert Y. Shapiro is Director of the Public Opinion Project at ISERP, Professor of Political Science at Columbia, and President of the New York Chapter American Association for Public Opinion Research (NYAAPOR). He specializes in American politics with research and teaching interests in public opinion, policymaking, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods. He has taught at Columbia since 1982 after receiving his degree and serving as a study director at the National Opinion Research Center (University of Chicago). Professor Shapiro has published numerous articles in major academic journals, and is co-author of The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (with Benjamin I. Page, University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness (with Lawrence R. Jacobs, University of Chicago Press, 2000). He serves on the editorial boards of Political Science Quarterly, Presidential Studies Quarterly and Public Opinion Quarterly (editor of the "Poll Trends") and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. His current research is examining American national policymaking, political leadership and opinion from 1960 to the present.
