Faculty Bloggers Reflect on the 2008 Elections
Posted on November 07, 2008

Left to right: Mark Kleiman, Lynn Vavreck, Franklin D. Gilliam, and Gary Orfield. Photo by Stan Paul

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Overview
Paul Ong
Mark Sawyer

UCLA faculty bloggers from The SPRINT gathered Nov. 6 at the UCLA School of Public Affairs to discuss the recent historic U.S. election.

Since September UCLA experts, as well as two UCLA graduate students in political science, provided postings on election-related issues from healthcare and the economy to the presidential election and the candidates from both major parties.

The post-election event, “Reflections on the Presidential Election,” was moderated by Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr., Dean of the UCLA School of Public Affairs and professor of Public Policy and Political Science. The purpose was “to deconstruct what happened in this election and what it means,” said Gilliam, who also contributed blog posts to The SPRINT throughout the last months of the presidential campaign. The bloggers also discussed local and the state propositions.

“I think the Obama campaign was advantaged by the fact that they chose ‘change’ as the theme early on because real-world events changed a lot over the course of the campaign,” said panelist Tim Groeling, Professor of Communications Studies. Groeling said that issues shifted rapidly during that time, from the war in Iraq, the rise in gas prices, and back to the economy.

Adding to the discussion was Lynn Vavreck, Assistant Professor of Political Science. “I spent a lot of time thinking about this in the last week and I am prepared to say that he [Obama] is the best presidential campaigner in the last 60 years,” said Vavreck.

Rounding out the panel were: Mark Kleiman, professor of public policy; Mark Sawyer, Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics; and, Gary Orfield, Professor of Education and co-director of the Civil Rights Project UCLA.

To read more post-election opinions, information about the bloggers, as well as the blog from its beginning, please visit The Sprint blog at: http://www.newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/election-blog.aspx