I want to thank Tim Levine for posting his commentary on the “lameness” of NCA journals. I thank him not because I agree with his conclusions, but because his posting offered a very teachable moment for one of my classes.

I teach the Communication Department’s Introduction to Graduate Studies course at the University of Maryland, a course that is both about socialization to the university/department and to the discipline as well as an introductory discussion of research methods. The distribution of Tim’s posting in class generated considerable discussion, particularly about how research claims/arguments are made and the evidence or data used to support those arguments. Two lessons emerged from this discussion.

One lesson that the students quickly identified was the importance of care and precision in moving from data to the larger claims or arguments that are advanced in research. This, of course, relates to the second main lesson here—it is essential to understand how data/evidence are collected and used when making evaluative/normative claims about some empirical phenomenon.

Tim relies primarily on ISI’s Journal Citation Reports impact factor for his argument that NCA journals are “lame.” (Tim also employs Google Scholar—though my own experience with tracing citations through this source is that it is still quite new and unreliable, missing some obvious citations and including others that are unusual and rare.)

Interestingly, the year-by-year impact factors that ISI calculates are “the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year.” So, ISI will average the number of times articles published in QJS in 2006 and 2007 are cited in other ISI journals in 2008 for QJS’s 2008 impact factor.

The result, of course, is that there are wide shifts in impact ranking over the 11 years of ISI reports. Just last year, for example, Communication Monographs had the highest impact factor ranking of any NCA or ICA journal (and Communication Research)—it was #4 in 2007 with an impact factor of 1.512. The next closest journal was Communication Research at #5 (1.481). The Journal of Communication was #15 in 2007 with an impact factor of 1.156. Similar year-to-year shifts in overall impact factor rankings among Communication journals happen for virtually all of the journals Tim mentions. I’ve posted two graphs that display these shifts here: ISI Journal Graphs.

While it is true that ICA journals and CR are generally ranked higher in impact factor among Communication journals than are NCA journals, my students were quick to note, given the manner of data calculation by ISI and the significant shifts in this data, that these rankings may be explained by factors other than simply journal quality—they may involve citation and publication practices, editorial shifts and changes in journal focus, the differences in research and citation expectations in the humanities as opposed to the social sciences, etc. The students did conclude, though, that there is little here to justify the argumentative/normative conclusions that NCA journals are “lame,” a “home for irrelevant scholarship,” or a “poor choice for publication outlet.”

Tim asks in his post if he is “just missing something and reading the data wrong?” As we concluded in my course, that may be the case. It may also be the case that while the data on citation impact and patterns reveal much, they may not justify Tim’s rather sweeping indictment of NCA’s publications.

Maureen Dowd speculates on a conversation between George W. Bush (43) and Bill Clinton (42) upon hearing that 44 has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even amidst the humor of the piece, Dowd manages to highlight the possible alternatives that might have been more plausible as recipients of the Nobel than Obama.

And the front page of the Washington Post today has a story about the coarsening of public discourse and political rhetoric as related to viral videos and technological change. Refreshingly, the story has a historical sensibility that recognizes the limits of presentism and recites some interesting negative moments from the past–Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and the like. Perhaps this sensibility comes because the story consulted and cited Tom Benson from Penn State.

Now, the White House announces that the president wants to address a joint session of Congress next week on health care. One of my graduate students wonders if that’s a “risky” move. It seems to me that this is a correct judgment–Obama is taking a big risk. I’m wondering about how these moves work historically.

Such speeches seem to be a creature of the rhetorical presidency, but in a rather unusual way. Books of presidential message and speeches from the eighteenth century contain numerous statements to Congress, but they weren’t delivered oratorically. Even State of the Union messages were delivered in writing until Woodrow Wilson actually went to Capitol Hill to deliver his report. Of course, Wilson is often identified as among the first of the truly rhetorical presidents.

There aren’t a lot of joint session speeches that come to mind. Big crises (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) give rise to such speeches, but I’m not sure that there’s many on particular public policy questions. Garth Pauley notes in his Voices of Democracy analysis of LBJ’s speech on civil rights legislation before a joint session that “Presidents rarely deliver special messages to Congress  in person to advocate for a specific bill, especially on domestic policy; Harry Truman had been the last president to do so. Such speeches are risky, as they put the president’s crediblity on the line and chance making members of Congress resentful, feeling they are being coerced into action and having their law-making duties usurped.” (Garth Pauley, “Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’ (15 March 1965),” Voices of Democracy 3 (2008): 24).

This is the challenge facing Obama, and it’s unlike the other rhetorical challenges he’s faced. Perhaps the hardest part for Obama will be finding the balance between general principles and delineations of the problems with the current health care system and specific policy proposals. And this is the problem he’s faced all along–the initial decision to not spell out a specific proposal but to leave that task to Congress.

In his fervent quest not to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton health care plan, Obama created a rhetorical vacuum that filled all too quickly by speculations about “death panels” and pulling the plug on grandma to Canada-style federal takeovers of health care. Sibelius and Gibbs give away the farm on the public option, then the administration backtracks. Now no one’s happy–not the left who are worried about being sold out by their knight in shining armor nor the right who were suspicious of Obama all along.

Will one big time speech do the trick? Probably not.

When asked about what Kennedy taught Kerry upon the junior senator’s arrival in Washington, Kerry said: “David, when I first got involved in politics, I thought that politics was just about the issues.  You know, you believe this, you believe that, you fight for this, you fight for that.  What Teddy showed me is that politics–and this is slightly contrary to what Tip O’Neill said when he said all politics is local–all politics is personal.  And that’s really what Teddy taught a lot of us, I think.”

What I find most interesting about this lesson is Kerry’s utter inability to bring the lesson about personal politics to life in his ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign. I don’t believe this is the only reason Kerry lost, but I think there’s plenty of evidence that he was simply unable to make a connection, to move people or persuade people that he was the person to lead, the leader to be president, the president to change the country. Unlike Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kerry didn’t ever manage the complicated political task of convincing a broader public of his capacity to be president in opposition to an incumbent.

Kerry’s words echo McGee’s admonition in 1978: “Human beings make up a government, not measures or issues.”

I was particularly struck, this morning, listening to C-SPAN radio and the highly polarized reactions to Kennedy’s passing–from the deeply moved citizens who valued Kennedy’s persistence on their behalf in the areas of civil rights, education, the elderly, the disabled, and on and on, to the equally moved citizens lamenting Kennedy’s betrayal of his faith because of his support of abortion rights or angry because Kennedy so embodied liberal causes and progressive politics.

Missing somewhat from the memory coverage is a full appreciation of Kennedy’s rhetorical acumen and his rhetorical failures. Quoted ad nauseum are Kennedy’s powerful words in his 1980 convention speech: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” I would like to see a bit more coverage of Kennedy’s other rhetorical masterpieces–his powerful speech on the Senate floor that set the entire tenor of the effort to defeat Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, his fantastic speech at the 1988 Democratic convention (”Where was George?”), his journey into the lion’s den at Falwell’s Liberty University to discuss “Truth and Toleration in America.”

And the failures–especially the Roger Mudd interview. Some cable news folks are discussing these rhetorical moments, but the mainstream coverage seems stuck in 1980 and then its retread in 2008.

Of course, this raises the rather interesting question about how oratory and rhetoric figure in the collective memorializing of public figures, particularly political ones. Admittedly, I’m an NBC viewer, so my sense of how Kennedy’s oratory is used in the memorializing coverage is limited by the choices NBC has made. On NPR, Nina Totenberg featured considerable coverage of Kennedy’s Bork speech, so the source may seriously affect the choices made. But more than anything, it’s intriguing to study how the first drafts of memory in the wake of such a public death as Ted Kennedy’s employ oratory and public rhetorical performances.

Having survived the health care debates of the early nineties, I find the return of Harry & Louise perhaps the most interesting aspect of the current health care advertising battles. It’s an intriguing advertising approach, relying on political memory for success. I’m not convinced that most people, most voters remember Harry & Louise, or their position vis-a-vis the Clinton health care reform proposal. For those who lack the memory, don’t these new Harry & Louise ads seem odd–a couple of middle-aged folks randomly sitting around talking about health care?

I’m wondering if they might have wanted to draft a different ad–sort of a visually compelling “that was then, this is now” sort of ad that would do more to remind people of the 1993-1994 ads and how the situation has changed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwfpSEaneY

It will be interesting to see, as the NJ and VA races heat up in the fall, whether there will be anything new or interesting in terms of ads. Certainly the primary ads in VA were fairly conventional.

As I’ve noted, I participated in a two-day workshop on integrating sustainability in the college/university curriculum–The Chesapeake Project. It was a great workshop, sponsored by the Office of Sustainability at UM and organized very successfully by Mark Stewart from that office. My proposal was to redo the curriculum of my political advertising class to focus on how the 2009 campaign for governor in Virginia and the 2010 campaigns in Maryland discuss the environment and sustainability, with a specific focus on how the candidates deal with Chesapeake Bay preservation/restoration issues.

During the workshop, I came across a fascinating document from SustainCommWorld that traced the carbon footprint of the political ads in 2008. It’s pretty dramatic. You can read it here: 2008 Political Ads Carbon Footprint.

Both Herb and I concluded that consistency in political leadership is not all it’s cracked up to be, and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have a president who changes his (or her) mind and who adapts to changing conditions. I was particularly amused by a caller who complained that Obama was not pursuing a single-payer health care system. This caller had worked on the campaign, going door to door for Obama, and yet couldn’t understand why the president, now, was abandoning single-payer. Of course, Obama NEVER supported a single-payer system, except for that one clip that emerged from some forum during that campaign that showed a young Obama saying that such a system would be good in an ideal world.

I thought this particular caller was a fascinating example of the disappointments of some on the left who projected onto Obama (with no small amount of encouragement from the candidate and his campaign) all their hopes and dreams for a new great society, only to have their hopes dashed when they realize that he’s not all he’s cracked up to be in terms of lefty policies. At the same time, they should also realize that he never was all that lefty during the campaign, magnificently carving out a moderate range of policy positions even against a profoundly liberal, if somewhat limited by time, voting record in the Senate.

The same day at the WYPR interview, I was also quoted in a Matt Kelley story in USA Today about Jeff Sessions, the new ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who was rejected for a federal judgeship by that same committee a few decades ago. The story discusses Sessions’ role in the Sotomayor confirmation. You can read it here.

Not a lot of advertising in the DC area in this election. McAuliffe was up with some fairly standard ads about his plans for the Commonwealth, but they were largely unremarkable. Deeds went up with ads touting his coveted Washington Post endorsement–they were neat ads, but said little besides the fact that he was endorsed.

Of particular disappointment was each candidate’s unwillingness to speak seriously about the Chesapeake Bay and environmental issues. I’ve scoured their ads and Web sites in preparation for a class on sustainability and political campaigns in the ‘09 Virginia and ‘10 Maryland elections (as part of the Chesapeake Project), and there are only occasional mentions of green jobs and the need for more technology to preserve the environment. The only candidate to seriously address the need to restore the Bay was Brian Moran, and he came in third, well behind Deeds.