Professor Binstock has published more than 250 articles, book chapters, monographs, and books. Most of them deal with politics and policies affecting aging. His 25 authored and edited books include Aging Nation: The Economics and Politics of Growing Older in America; six editions of the Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences; and The Fountain of Youth: Cultural, Scientific, and Ethical Perspectives on a Biomedical Goal.  Among the honors he has received for contributions to gerontology and the well-being of older persons are the Kent Award and the Brookdale Award from the Gerontological Society of America; the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Key Award from the American Public Health Association's Gerontological Health Section; and the American Society on Aging's Hall of Fame Award.

Author of "Globalization and the Poor," Mandle is an expert in economic policy and treasurer of Democracy Matters, a national college campus-based organization focused on campaign finance reform.  Mandle argues that elections in a democracy can and should be treated as a public good, analogous to the way national security is considered.  All should pay for elections through the public sector because no set of individuals or groups should be permitted disproportionately to benefit from them.  Mandle's commitment to the issue of money in politics is evident in his regular monthly editorial, Money On My Mind, appearing on the Democracy Matters website, www.democracymatters.org. 

Quoting Richard Katula: "The essence of effective political communication is creating the appearance of authenticity and spontaneity in a situation that is entirely scripted."

"From a purely rhetorical perspective, candidates in the 2008 election will have to carefully study the first debates from Campaign 2000 and Campaign 2004.  Both tracking polls and expert analysis clearly show that nonverbal displays of petulance, annoyance, and arrogance on the part of Al Gore in 2000 and George Bush in 2004 had a dramatic effect on both elections (5-8 points in the polls)."

"President Clinton's eventual admission of his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky helped change the political landscape," Dr. Kraynak, a Republican now leaning toward supporting Mr. Romney, told Newsday for a recent article.

"There is a way that Clinton softened up public opinion in a way that makes Giuliani possible.  People are genuinely not sure if the office of the presidency is supposed to be a results-oriented job or a moral authority," Dr. Kraynak said.  "Different periods in our history, we value one more than the other." 

Though ordinarily hidden from public view, most of the legislative work of the U.S. House of Representatives takes place in its committees.  There the political battles are fought and the technical decisions made before a bill emerges for a final vote by the full House.  Most of the important issues of the day -- global warming, homeland security, energy policy, health care reform, international trade -- are complex enough that many committees are in a position to influence policy, each with its own parochial concerns.

Her responsibilities included organization and implementing Cases’ plan to host the debate and provide related programming throughout the city, from a museum exhibit to lectures, a student debate, and a watch party featuring giant screens and a band.

Leading up to the debates, national networks like MSNBC and CNN aired live and specialized programs onsite. Hosting the debate resulted in a $20 million economic impact and even more in free publicity for the school and the city of Cleveland.

Quoting Alan Schroeder: "The 2008 presidential election is shaping up to be one of the most intriguing in recent history, and the 2008 debate season will be getting underway earlier than ever.  With no incumbent in the race, and a wide and growing field of candidates, debates have the potential to be pivotal in defining the campaign season ahead."

He is editor of Ohio Politics and Southern Politics in the 1990s.  Lamis was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1997.

Carrie Keating
Professor of Psychology
Colgate University
Office: 315/228-7355
Home: 315-345-9055
E-mail: ckeating@mail.colgate.edu
Expertise: Keating focuses on the elusive quality of charisma by investigating the skills and traits associated with social dominance and leadership. She also studies facial structure and form of the presidential candidates and how we perceive such traits as trustworthiness, strength, weakness, intellectually superiority, and charisma, to name a few. Together with colleagues and student collaborators, she has discovered that humans convey dominance through facial expressions akin to those of other primates; that facial features which make people appear powerful also make them seem untrustworthy; that people who are socially powerful have unusually good acting skills; and that persuasive performances begin with kidding oneself. Her studies of dominance and deception have been featured in the print, radio, and broadcast media outlets in the U.S. and abroad, including PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers, Dateline NBC, Discovery Magazine, The McLaughlin Group, McLaughlin One-On-One, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and The Learning Channel.

Spencer Kelly
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Colgate University
Office: 315/228-7350 
Home: 315/824-8206
E-mail: skelly@mail.colgate.edu
Expertise:  Kelly applies his research -- on the role of hand gestures in producing language-- to politicians and public figures from around the world.  From President Bush’s palm movements to Saddam Hussein’s pointing, Kelly can analyze the possible meanings and functions of the hand gestures we repeatedly see in the media. “Gesture, and other forms of visual communication, are tightly integrated with our understanding of language,” he said.  “Gesture may represent one of the earliest forms of communication in the evolution of language.”  Kelly has been quoted by numerous media outlets worldwide, including Danish public television, Radio 3 in Hong Kong, the Orlando Sentinel, the New York Times, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“The 2006 [congressional] elections will tell us who is angrier: Democrats at Republicans, Democrats at Democrats, or Republicans at Republicans. Whoever wins this contest for most indignant voter--that will have serious consequences for both parties’ short-term tactics and presidential contenders’ long-term strategies.”

Dumm has explored the relationship of punishment to the origins of American democracy, different aspects of contemporary American political culture, and poststructuralist political theory in four books, including A Politics of the Ordinary (1999).  He was founding editor of Theory&Event, an internationally juried journal of contemporary political theory. 

Loevy (rhymes with "navy") worked on Capitol Hill in the 1960s. He has participated as a campaign consultant or campaign manager in a number of political campaigns in Colorado. He regularly teaches courses in American Government, State and Local Politics, and the Civil Rights Movement. He has been quoted in the New York Times, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, and other major newspapers, as well as by many television and radio stations.

Loevy is the author of The Flawed Path to the Presidency 1992: Unfairness and Inequality in the Presidential Selection Process (State University of New York Press, 1995); The Flawed Path to the Governorship 1994: The Nationalization of a Colorado Statewide Election Campaign (University Press of America, 1996), Colorado Politics and Government: Governing the Centennial State (with Thomas E. Cronin) (University of Nebraska Press, 1993); To End all Segregation: The Politics of the Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (University Press of America, 1990), American Government: We Are One (with John Whitman et al.) (Coronado, 1987), and he is the editor and major contributor to The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Passage of the Law that Ended Racial Segregation (State University of New York Press, 1997).   He has also self-published his book, Small States First, Large States Last: Reforming the Presidential Election Process 2000, which can be read at http://faculty1.coloradocollege.edu/~bloevy/bookweb/index.html

But, Schaller explains, the changing demographics of the Midwest and Southwest offer a combination of issues important to the middle class - including jobs, immigration and the environment - that give the Democrats their best shot to regain the White House.  The GOP can't win without the South, Schaller says, but they also can't win with the South alone.

Schaller is a columnist for the Baltimore Sun and has appeared in various regional and national media including The Nation, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Slate, and the American Prospect, C-SPAN and NPR.

Quoting Schaller: "The dramatic economic, social and political changes of the past half century can be neither rewound nor ignored. The old "three-party" model of regional American partisanship -- with northern and southern Democrats outvoting western Republicans -- is now defunct, replaced by a new three-party model that pairs southern and western Republicans against urban-based Democrats of the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Coast states. Simply put, the South is no longer the "swing" region in American politics: It has swung to the Republicans."

Expertise:  Teaching primarily in the areas of political parties, political movements, and women, gender, and politics, Professor Beckwith has special interests in the United States and West Europe, particularly Britain and Italy. Author of numerous scholarly articles, she is the co-editor of Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State and author of American Women and Political Participation.

Beckwith is the founding editor of Politics & Gender, the journal of the Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA).

She has also been co-editor of the "Gender and Politics" series of the Oxford University Press, and served as president of the American Political Science Association's Women and Politics Research Section. She has recently been appointed to incoming APSA President Robert Axelrod’s Task Force on Inter-Disciplinarity. She has also been appointed as chair of the Sophonsiba Breckinridge Prize of the Midwest Political Science Association (2007). She is co-organizer of the recent conference seminar on Political Women and American Democracy.

McNulty notes that the formula to reliably convert enthusiasm among younger people into votes has not yet been found.  They don't turn out at high rates, nor do they vote as reliably Democratic as they're assumed to, although they do lean slightly more Democratic than the general populace.  "Mostly, they vote like their parents...but less often," said McNulty.  McNulty points out that although Barack Obama seems to be the 'campus' candidate in this cycle, he does not appear to be counting on it.  "To indulge in pure speculation, perhaps since Obama is from a generation too young to have been immersed in the cauldron of Vietnam and Watergate, he sees the youth vote with clearer eyes," said McNulty.

He is co-author of Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Students Political Engagement, and author of Television Consumption and Civic Engagement Among 15- to 25-Year-Olds. Both studies were released by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement where he served as an intern. The reports are available for download at www.civicyouth.org.

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