I’m about to embark on teaching a pair of papers on the Presidential Election in my freshman writing class. My students, most of whom are eighteen or nineteen and, thus, are first-time voters. My goal for them to be able to explain why they’re supporting their candidate based on an issue that matters to them.
They are to write an op-ed arguing passionately for their candidate as stronger on their chosen issue. Then, they are to also write a more nuanced essay on the issue itself, a longer piece that goes into the complexities of their issue, the things that may make the issue hard to solve, that make it interesting, compelling, important.
They will be checking in on WNYC’s 30 issues in 30 days series from time to time and using those conversations as a resource but, as they’ll be doing some research (and, as they’re freshmen), I want to provide them with a little research guide.
Here’s what I have so far and that’s where I’m hoping for your help in finding more.
I am especially hoping to find good resources for solid, nonpartisan policy analysis of health care, education, free speech, and the war/foreign policy:
As you'll see in what I've collected here, I'm not proselytizing: my action in this case is really about working to create informed citizens. I'm on the record all over the place as a strong Obama supporter, but recruiting for Obama is not my pedagogy. Instead, I'm trying to get my students to really understand why they're voting for their candidate and, in so doing, to become engaged voters, committed to and excited about the process.
Information on the issues:
WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show is covering 30 issues in 30 days. These hour-long conversations feature experts from the right and the left in dialogue with each other and with callers. As a supplement to these discussions, the show is putting together wikis and listeners can post their comments on the show comment page. The show itself is available as a podcast, too.
Check Point: A collection of New York Times articles, blog posts and other resources examining the policies and statements of the presidential candidates
Urban Institute: Founded in 1968 by President Lyndon Johnson to provide policy makers with nonpartisan research on social issues affecting cities.
Their broad issues include:
• crime/justice
• economy/taxes
• education
• health/healthcare
• housing
• welfare
• work/income
Tax Policy Center: The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center aims to provide independent analyses of current and longer-term tax issues and to communicate its analyses to the public and to policymakers in a timely and accessible manner. The Center combines top national experts in tax, expenditure, budget policy, and microsimulation modeling to concentrate on four overarching areas of tax policy that are critical to future debate.
Investigative journalism:
The following magazines publish weekly or monthly and have good investigative articles on the candidates and the issues. The Atlantic (center-left), The New Yorker (center-left), The National Review (right), The New Republic (center-left), The Weekly Standard (right), and The Nation (left). There are other political magazines, on the left and the right, but these are good starting points.
Editorials:
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal publish some of the most influential editorials nationally every day. You should glance these over for editorials on your issue, but don’t neglect other papers, especially your hometown paper.
Real Clear Politics: Not so much a blog or a newspaper as an aggregator of political news and opinion. This is a good stop for the day’s most influential op-eds and investigative journalism nationwide, links to other websites, and polling data.
Fact-checking:
Factcheck.org: We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.
PolitFact: Truth-o-meter: from Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersburg Times: a collection of short fact-checking articles on the candidates. Lots of fun graphics but not a lot of detailed articles at this site.
A cautionary tale:
I think of the tax policy center (listed above) as a good & reliable site, but in trying to find their URL, I found a link to this blog post from “Truthbusters.org” which looks like a nonpartisan site, but has as its tag-line “Welcome to NewsBusters, a project of the Media Research Center (MRC), the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.” The article there criticizes ABC for calling the Tax Policy Center nonpartisan, arguing that their assessment of Obama’s tax policy “runs counter to the more conservative American Enterprise Institute which found Obama "would raise marginal tax rates for many middle-income tax payers." But the link takes you not to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, but to an article in The American, a conservative magazine. This link-switching shows that newsbusters is less interested in exposing misstatements than in fighting a perceived left-wing bias and drawing readers to a right-wing site.
Rejected site:
On the issues2000.org: This link was a featured one at Michael Dobbs’ Washington Post page (a link that I found through the New York Times but one that only intermittently works for me). It looks primitive but promising at first glance. However, it is both outdated (still with a 2000 url, lots of information about 2006), and uninformative, offering no way to learn about the page’s authorship or funding. Plus, if you click on an issue, it links you to the campaign website (I can get there by myself, thanks) and Wikipedia (!). Finally, the page is full of random ads and filled my downloads folder with all kinds of random spam.