Newsweek Calls Race Even Newsweek's latest poll shows the presidential race statistically even: Kerry 47, Bush 45 in a three -way race; Kerry 49, Bush 46 in a two-way race. Four weeks ago it was Bush 52, Kerry 41.

Kerry’s perceived [debate] victory may be attributed to the fact that, by a wide margin (62 percent to 26 percent), debate watchers felt the senator came across as more confident than the president. More than half (56 percent) also see Kerry has having a better command of the facts than Bush (37 percent). As a result, the challenger’s favorability ratings (52 percent, versus 40 percent unfavorable) are better than Bush’s, who at 49 percent (and 46 percent unfavorable), has dipped below the halfway mark for the first time since July. Kerry, typically characterized as aloof and out of touch by his opponents, came across as more personally likeable than Bush (47 percent to the president’s 41 percent).

Look for Bush's campaign rhetoric to get more shrilly negative.

Why the change? Bush and his campaign had been doing battle with a strawman, a caricature of Kerry. But Thursday night, the real John Kerry showed up, and laid out clearly and crisply the mistakes and mismanagement in Bush's execution of the war on terror and in Iraq. It's a criticism Bush hasn't had to directly respond to before. It frustrated and annoyed Bush so much that he lost his way and got inanely redundant, more than once asking for a 30 second extension and and having nothing to say but the same stump speech lines he'd been uttering all night.

And of course, when he wasn't speaking, he was facially impolding.  ¶ 7:35 PM 0 comments   

  Bush Fails Global Credibility Test King George and his GOPinions, according to this report from Reuters, began assailing Kerry for using the phrase "global test" in the debate. Here's an excerpt from the Reuters' report that shows how Bush & co. plan to twist Kerry's words:

"When our country's in danger the president's job is not to take an international poll. The president's job is to defend America," Bush said on campaign stops in Mansfield and Columbus.

The Bush campaign has prepared a television advertisement to run soon that seizes on the Massachusetts senator's words in Thursday's debate that preemptive military action should be subject to a "global test."

"So we must seek permission from foreign governments before protecting America. A global test? So America will be forced to wait while threats gather?" the ad voiceover says.

Here are Kerry's words from the debate:

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. And it was always one of the things we argued about with respect to arms control.

No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

Here we have our own secretary of state who has had to apologize to the world for the presentation he made to the United Nations.

I mean, we can remember when President Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis sent his secretary of state to Paris to meet with DeGaulle. And in the middle of the discussion, to tell them about the missiles in Cuba, he said, "Here, let me show you the photos." And DeGaulle waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way? So what is at test here is the credibility of the United States of America and how we lead the world. And Iran and Iraq are now more dangerous -- Iran and North Korea are now more dangerous.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_0930.html

First, note that Kerry explicitely emphasized that we did not need anyone's permission to launch a preemptive strike. Just the opposite. It's a right the president holds and he will keep.
Kerry's argument is simple: we can't lead the war on terrorism unless we are credible.

The global test is nothing more or less than credibility. Powell went to the U.N. with evidence he's since had to retract and apologize for. Bush launched a preemptive war on bad evidence, a war that undermined America's credibility abroad. We can't lead the world if we're not credible. This does not mean asking for permission. It means simply making sure the American "people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons."

Bush failed the test on both these counts. One: He mislead the American people on the facts for the war, what the costs of war would be, and the adequacy of the plan for the war. He continues to mislead us on the conditions of that war.

Two: He declared to the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was connected to Al Qaeda. For those two primary reasons, he declared, we were going to war --not launching preemptive strikes on all those places where Rumsfeld claimed he knew WMD to be, by the way, but invading Iraq, killing or deposing Hussein and installing a democracy. The main reasons Bush gave were wrong. Bush failed the global credibility test.

And he continues to lose credibility at home both as he tries to white wash or deny bad news in Iraq, and as he tries to distort the arguments of John Kerry.

Bush may not read newspapers, but voters do. And 55 million of them saw the debate. They know what Kerry said. They know Bush is lying in his ads and stump speech. Bush, of course, doesn't know they know because he only campaigns in front of pre-screened loyalists.
  ¶ 6:11 PM 0 comments   

  Who's Having it Both Ways? Here's King George on the stump:

Bush noted that Kerry asserted that the war in Iraq is a mistake but then said that he did not believe U.S. troops in Iraq are "dying for a mistake," as the senator had said of the Vietnam War. "You can't have it both ways," Bush said. "You can't say it's a mistake and not a mistake.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1573-2004Oct1_2.html

Here's King George in the debate:

LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes. You have said there was a, quote, "miscalculation," of what the conditions would be in post-war Iraq. What was the miscalculation, and how did it happen?

BUSH: No, what I said was that, because we achieved such a rapid victory, more of the Saddam loyalists were around. I mean, we thought we'd whip more of them going in. But because Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared. I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn't. [Answer goes on and talks about the Bush plan.]

LEHRER: Ninety seconds, Senator Kerry.

KERRY: What I think troubles a lot of people in our country is that the president has just sort of described one kind of mistake.

We see here that even when Bush acknowledges that things didn't go as he thought they would --a mistake in planning as Kerry notes in the start of his response-- he won't call that a miscalculation. But by definition when something doesn't go as you thought it would, that is in fact a miscalculation. Talk about a it-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-'is'-is moment: when things didn't go as I thought they would, that wasn't a miscalculation or mistake on my part. What then is it?

Here's another key part of the debate that gets at Bush's latest false campaign charge -- that Kerry is trying to have it both ways by saying the war's a mistake but not a mistake:

BUSH: Yes, I understand what it means to the commander in chief. And if I were to ever say, "This is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place," the troops would wonder, how can I follow this guy?

You cannot lead the war on terror if you keep changing positions on the war on terror and say things like, "Well, this is just a grand diversion." It's not a grand diversion. This is an essential that we get it right.

And so, the plan he talks about simply won't work.

LEHRER: Senator Kerry, you have 30 seconds. You have 30 seconds, right. And then the president.

KERRY: Secretary of State Colin Powell told this president the Pottery Barn rule: If you break it, you fix it.

KERRY: Now, if you break it, you made a mistake. It's the wrong thing to do. But you own it. And then you've got to fix it and do something with it.

Now that's what we have to do. There's no inconsistency. Soldiers know over there that this isn't being done right yet. I'm going to get it right for those soldiers, because it's important to Israel, it's important to America, it's important to the world, it's important to the fight on terror.

But I have a plan to do it. He doesn't.

What the exchange shows is that Kerry is making a simple, consistent, one-way argument. Here it is by the numbers:

1. Bush made a mistake by not giving diplomacy and inspections more time.
2. Bush made a mistake by not focusing more time and troops in Afghanistan and cornering Bid Laden. Today, Afghanistan is primarily controlled by war lords funded by the opium trade.
   
3. Bush made a mistake by not planning adequately for the peace and security of post-war Iraq (see his own admission of such above).
4. Bush made a mistake by not adjusting to conditions in Iraq quickly enough.
   
5. However, to paraphrase what Colin Powell has said, we broke it, we own it, we must fix it.
6. I have a plan to fix the president's mistakes and to better insure that it can be corrected so that our troops sacrifices will not be in vain.

That's Kerry's argument. It's not one of having it both ways; it's one of correcting Bush's wrong way.

But Bush lives inside his King George cocoon, and so any challenge to his world view can't be met by defending his record, but misrepresenting and attacking his challengers. You look at Bush in tapes of that debate and you get the feeling he's thinking, "Why can't I just lock him up in a tower."

Note: Debate transcripts copied and pasted from the Washington Post at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/debatereferee/debate_0930.html
  ¶ 2:06 PM 0 comments   

  King George Wilts Under Pressure E.J. Dionne, writing in today's Washington Post, nails it:

That was the other striking and disturbing aspect of the debate: Bush fares very badly when he is forcefully challenged. It makes you worry about his strength in circumstances he does not completely control. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the president has received a remarkably free ride. He rarely faces the media. He speaks only to partisan crowds; critics risk arrest if they show up. There is little evidence that Bush is challenged by his staff or his Cabinet. He is most comfortable when he sticks to talking points.

And this kind of coddling and angling for television soundbites the GOP calls leadership! Geesh! No wonder Bush's campaign centers entirely on tearing John Kerry apart.  ¶ 1:46 PM 0 comments   

  Department of No Relation This person was not a relative:

Nude Sunbather Dies in Calif. Bar Fight
4:37 PM EDT,September 29, 2004
By Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO -- A man sunbathing nude on the terrace of a bar died after getting into a fight with a patron who complained.

Jay Carbone, 52, fell and hit his head during the scuffle at the Pendulum bar in the city's Castro District, police said. He died Saturday, two days later.

According to police, Carbone ordered drinks and disrobed. After about an hour, another man complained and asked Carbone to put his clothes on. Police said Carbone replied, "If you don't like it, get out."

No immediate charges were filed.

  ¶ 1:18 PM 0 comments   

  A Debate Inspite of Itself Perhaps because we're in a war that's divided the nation, not united it, perhaps because the choice between Bush and Kerry grows starker, even if some of their ideas on how to proceed in Iraq seem so similar, perhaps because the networks were not cowed by the 35 page agreement, and perhaps because both candidates viscerally distrust and dislike each other and when they're in the same place at the same time that can't be missed, perhaps for all that and more, last night's debate really felt like a debate.

It wasn't a debate in the classic sense; it was not the prime years of Firing Line with Kinsley and Buckley going toe-to-toe, but voters got a real sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both men, of their differences (in attitude and approach to goals, rather than the goals themselves) in how to proceed on the war in Iraq and the "war on terror." (I put that in quotes because it bugs me that they both keep saying war on terror: terror's a tactic, not an enemy. Who are the terrorists and why are they terrorists? Name them and their ideology please.)

Their Iraq plans boiled down to being pretty much the same: stabilize the country; get elections; train Iraqis to have their own police and army to keep the piece, and then leave a.s.a.p after that's done. They both failed to discuss what they would do in the increasingly possible (but not yet certain) event that any of those steps failed.

Their views on what strategies to take to achieve stability, elections and defense, what type of leadership it takes to get this done, and what the current state of affairs are differed radically and importantly.

To my mind, Bush has lost credibility on this issue. He can't bring himself to acknowledge that things are not getting better. He disregards the findings of his own intelligence estimates. But worse, he works hard to try to turn our attention away from those facts by insisting they aren't true or by dissing the people or sources who report them. Then he visibly resents it (see EMAIL OF THE DAY II: from Daily Dish) when he's called out on doing that.

And as this article from the Washington Post shows, Allawi "was coached and aided by the U.S. government, its allies and friends of the administration." So there is merit to Kerry's charge that Allawi's visit was as much politics as diplomacy; yet Bush accuses Kerry of denigrating an ally for making a charge that has some true. It's another example of Bush ignoring the facts and hiding the truth.

It's just too hard to trust Bush's judgment when he won't simply level with the American people. To put it more bluntly: he doesn't trust us; why should we trust him.

Kerry, for all his positions that get qualified and nuanced to the nth degree, came across as concise and direct this time. His goal in Iraq, at this point, is no different than Bush's. The difference is that Kerry will try more vigorously to get help from allies who aren't currently involved, and Bush will stay the current course (whatever that is; tactically they seem to be making it up as they go along, and they're going along one or two steps behind events, not in front of them).

After the speech, news pundits returned to a theme Bush tried to drive home (with middling success in my view because he often stumbled or looked lost uttering it): how are you going to get allies to help when you keep calling the war a mistake and distraction? Kerry never addressed that charge directly, asserting instead, as I recall (I'm not checking the transcript, which is intentional. I want to record what I came away with here.) only that he could and would sit down with our allies. He should have said that they aren't going to see the war as a mistake and distraction because Kerry said it was, they see it as that now because of how Bush proceeded in rushing to war and not managing it well. Only once did Kerry mention in passing a possible reason why they might help even if though they view the war as a mistake and distraction: that they have a stake in the outcome because for Arab countries Iraq is their neighbor and for European countries and Russia, Iraq is at their doorstep. But he didn't sketch that out or use it to blunt the question Bush asked more than once.

Still, even though he didn't make a case that convinced pundits that he could get allied help where Bush couldn't, I think it's important that Kerry will go back to that table while Bush won't. I also think Kerry made clear the distinction between working more vigorously with the world and taking orders from the world or seeking their approval. Bush tried to make it sound like anything less than doing what Bush is doing is compromising. It's not. It's so clear that it's not that when Bush talks that way I can't trust him or his judgment.

So the pundits may be right and the plan may not work, but that doesn't mean trying to get those countries to the table is not a legitimate strategy, a significantly important strategy. It's clear we're stretched too thin in Iraq and underprepared. It may in fact be possible to persuade other nations to do more. If not in terms of troops, then debt relief, training, construction (simply opening up contracts to others besides Halliburton will help on that score), and other kinds of aid to Iraq.

I also thought it important that Kerry at least mentioned the need to reach to Muslim nations and to find ways support them in an effort to tamp down the rise of Jihadist Muslims. It's a crucial --ultimately the crucial-- front of this war. It's the roots of Jihadism that must be pulled and you can't do that by force alone, especially force as Bush misapplies it and mismanages it. I wish Kerry had said more about this.

Of the two, I think John Kerry brings the right temperament to the table. Bush's inability to get beyond circular reasoning, his clinging to repetition of the same phrases "hard work," "can't waver," indicate to me that he isn't ready to think beyond where he's thought. He can't admit mistakes or grow in outlook.

But even more than that, I'm put off by Bush's insistence again and again that any questioning of him and this war disqualifies you to be president. Who does he think he is? King George? This theme of daring to question has been constant in this administration, from Fleisher after 9/11 warning that people should watch what they say, to Ashcroft likening to questioning him and his office to supporting terrorists, to Cheney and Bush in the past weeks calling any questioning of the war an affront to our troops and standing in the world and aid to terrorists because it sends "mixed messages."

What an insulting and despairing line of attack to take in a democracy! It's that kind of imperiousness that most makes me distrust Bush and his ability to lead us effectively. And all of this is ranting is summed up better over at Slate by William Saletan, so I'll quote him here to close:

But the greater shame belongs to the candidate who launched this war, refuses to admit his errors, and now holds the moral pride of his countrymen hostage, blackmailing them into shunning the truth. Tonight he scoffed, "If I were to ever say, 'This is the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place,' the troops would wonder, 'How can I follow this guy?' "

Exactly, Mr. President. If you were ever to give them the correct assessment, they would ask the correct question.
http://slate.com/id/2107517/

  ¶ 9:11 AM 0 comments   

  Bill O'Reilly's Factoring I don't watch a lot of Fox News, but I check in every once in a while to see what the GOP talking points and memes are. When I do watch, I admit to enjoying sometimes (and sometimes not), The O'Reilly Factor, which seems like a parody of itself to me because O'Reilly's schtick is obvious and over-the-top and because he wears his insecurities on his sleeve.

Anyway, so I'm watching, and heard on 9/16/04, Bill say the following:

As far as Dan Rather (search) is concerned, 38 percent say he is biased in favor of John Kerry. And 38 percent say he's fair and balanced.

Even the ultra liberal editorial page of The Los Angeles Times says this. "CBS News was had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion."

But as usual, The Times blames it all on those dreaded conservatives. "As CBS floundered, conservatives cited this episode as an egregious case of liberal media bias."

Well, come on, L.A. Times. It isn't only conservatives who are concerned about the validity of the story. It should be every clear thinking American. CBS News is a powerful voice in America and millions rely on it for their information. Any kind of mistake regarding the president of the United States must be fully explained.

Sure, some conservatives are hammering Mr. Rather, but the story is much bigger than ideological passion. The national press must be held accountable for its reportage. We have a responsibility to see that everything is above board and transparent. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,132602,00.html Note: the Fox site has this dated 9/17, but it's an error on their part; they have two of O'Reilly's Talking Points Memos dated for 9/17).

Now here's an excerpt from the L.A. Times editorial O'Reilly was referring to:

As The Times reported, conservative bloggers detected glaring inconsistencies, such as a Microsoft Word type style. The alleged memos from Killian also contain stylistic problems, such as the fact that Killian signs his rank not in accordance with National Guard procedure.

In addition, Killian's signature on a memo dated May 4, 1972, is different from one on file in the
Pentagon. The part of a memo supposedly written by Killian that refers to pressure from an earlier Bush commander to help out the young fighter pilot is highly dubious. The 1973 memo is dated almost a year and a half after the commander had resigned from active duty.

As CBS floundered, conservatives cited this episode as an egregious case of liberal media bias, while some liberals indulged in the comforting notion that Karl Rove, who is responsible for everything bad that happens everywhere, must be behind the documents.

Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country.

It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School in Massachusetts.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-cbs15sep15,1,7747016.story

The L.A. Times wasn't "blaming" conservatives for anything. It was blaming CBS for the shoddy journalism it practiced. The editorial merely pointed out that:

• conservative bloggers were the first to question the documents and
• that some conservatives did see the Killian documents fiasco as a case of liberal media bias while at the same time some liberals thought it was Karl Rove who set it up.

Now O'Reilly might have challenged the L.A. Times for tacitly dismissing the bias argument by linking it with Rove conspiracy theory, but he didn't do that. He claimed the L.A. Times was blaming conservatives for CBS troubles. That's clearly not the case.

I don't know whether O'Reilly is deliberately dishonest or blinded by his own schtick, but the fact is that he uttered out of context a single sentence from of the L.A. Times editorial, and then spun it to fit one of his favorite memes: the liberal elite media is out to get President Bush.

Well, duh! Of course liberally led editorial pages generally run arguments critical of Bush, just as conservatively led pages run arguments critical of Kerry. The point is, that here, the L.A. Times was agreeing with the general assessment that CBS News blew it, was crediting --not blaming-- conservative bloggers for questioning the documents authenticity, and pointed out that now both sides have their consparicy theories about why and how the documents were used by CBS.

But that's not how things play out in the no spin zone, where sometimes O'Reilly spins so you so fast and often you get whiplash.

  ¶ 4:48 PM 0 comments   

  Internet Use Up; Television Use Down The University of Southern California Annenberg School's Center for the Digital Future released their fourth annual report on the Internet and its impact.

Among the findings from Year Four of the Digital Future Project:

• Internet access has risen to its highest level ever. About three-quarters of Americans now go online.
• The number of hours spent online continues to increase, rising to an average of 12.5 hours per week – the highest level in the study thus far.
• Although the Internet has become the most important source of current information for users, the initially high level of credibility of information on the Internet began to drop in the third year of the study, and declined even further in Year Four.
• The number of users who believe that only about half of the information on the Internet is accurate and reliable is growing and has now passed 40 percent of users for the first time.
• The study showed that most users trust information on the websites they visit regularly, and on pages created by established media and the government.
• Information pages posted by individuals have the lowest credibility: only 9.5 percent of users say information on those sites is reliable and accurate.
• Television viewing continues to decline among Internet users, raising the question: “What will happen as a nation that once spent an extremely large portion of time in a passive activity (watching television) transfers increasingly large portions of that time to an interactive activity (the Internet)?”

The Digital Future Project compares findings from all four years of the study, looking at five major areas: who is online and who is not, media use and trust, consumer behavior, communication patterns, and social and psychological effects. (Quoted from Press Release Summary/Report on Ten Trends)

The CDF also identified ten trends they see emerging from this and their prior reports, many of which, in the summary linked to above, offer elaborations on the list above from the 4th year study by drawing on prior studies as well. I'm interested in three items from the list above and the list of ten.

1. More people are going online and spending more time online, especially as they increasingly move from dial up to broadband. As people move online and become Internet regulars, the Internet becomes a more important source of information, often the primary source.
   
2. People are properly more skeptical of the information they find online as they spend more time online. That is, they become more savvy. However, once they come to trust a source or site, they return to it, whether a government source, an established news source, a particular blog, community, and so on.
   
3. As people spend more time online, they spend less time watching television, including television news.
   

I think this election cycle is a benchmark moment in these trends. We're seeing quite clearly the confluence of these trends, both its benefits and risks. For a recent example of course, look no further than bloggers who assailed the authenticity of the Killian memos used in the 60 Minutes report. The Dean campaign's, and currently Kerry and Bush campaigns', use of blogs as fundraising tools has proven pivotal.

Or more impressively to me, and not campaign related, are the bicyclists who started posting streaming video demos of how they could pick their bike's U-shaped Kryptonite locks. It caused a consumer backlash and pr fiasco that forced the company to offer a redesigned locked to its customers (though that may have come too late). But the lock owners, using cyclist message boards and WWW sites, drove this story before any consumer reporter managed to do a report on the local, let alone national, news.

But back to the bloggers. Bloggers, mostly, in this case, conservative bloggers skeptical of the so-called "elite media," drove the Killian memo story, with assist from conservative traditional media such as Fox News and The National Review Online. Even so, it was an impressive event that forced traditional media to look more quickly into the documents authenticity than they may otherwise have. It helped set the news coverage agenda. (Note: This kind of thing cuts both ways, politically/culturally: a while back mostly liberal bloggers called out Trent Lott's remarks on Strom Thurmond, and got that into mainstream press.)

The bic-lock story is even more impressive because it wasn't so much second hand press criticism, but actual reporting and demonstrating key information factually.

Both stories benefited from broadband --the streaming video and graphics images showing the picked lock; the swapping of PDF's of the Killian documents and word files mimicing the fonts in those documents via blogs in the Killian story.

But broadband's not a key just because it allows for richer and more interactive content. It's also a key because it lets you always be on the Internet if you want to be, without tying up a phone line. Those of us who work this way know the benefits: turn on the computer and you're on the Internet. You can check your email on a whim. Browse your favorite WWW sites between phone calls or meetings. Read an article online, hear a news report on the radio or see it on television, and blog a response while you're reading, listening, or watching. Read other bloggers, and respond to them. Or respond in email lists or discussion boards and other community spaces. People are making their own protest posters and campaign art. They're making their own Internet based position ads, satires, and commentary in Flash and other digital video formats.

The technologies of big media sit increasingly on everyone's desktops (yes, there's still a digital divide, but it's closing, if slowly). What's also important is that the skepticism people learn to bring to Internet sources begins to bleed and to applied to more traditional sources, including of course newspapers, magazines, and television news and infotainment. So the authority of all sources is being questioned.

The risk is that the skepticism and questioning becomes kneejerk and based on dogma (see Wayne Booth's Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent for what that entails), where you distrust a source not for what they say, but for who or what entitity is saying it and fail to move beyond that distrust to give the source a fair hearing. This leads to paranoia.

What's needed is a healthy skepticism, one that allows, at least, for the possibility that sources you don't agree with and don't fully trust at face value might none-the-less have good points to make, good and accurate stories to tell from time to time.

As a teacher, I wonder often how best to bring students to healthy skeptics and not just paranoid skeptics.
  ¶ 9:43 AM 0 comments   

  Research and Order in WPA Land I'm reading Jeff Rice's "Yellow Dog" blog entries WPA II and WPA. Just a few thoughts in response, in no particular order.

By way of summary: WPA stands for Writing Program Administrator, and in the first post, Works Progress Administration. In WPA, Rice describes how he links these meanings using Greg Ulmer's idea of "puncept" to question composition studies "dependence on "order" as a governing principle of methodology and pedagogy." In WPA II, he elaborates, in response to the comments others made on the WPA post.

In WPA II, he writes:

I'm reading Nancy Sommers' article in the latest CCC, "The Novice as Expert," and here we find a nice example of the WPA instituting order. Like Andrea Lunsford's St. Martin's Handbook, Sommers justifies her work and research as WPA at Harvard with student comments collected in an evaluation process. All of the comments are supportive and enthusiastic.

I don't have the Sommers' essay at hand, but I am familiar with Andrea Lunsford's St. Martin's Handbook. I currently work for Bedford/St. Martin's, the company which publishes the book, and I worked on The St. Martin's Handbook even before coming to work full-time for Bedford/St. Martin's.

No where does Andrea Lunsford justify the research that went into the St. Martin's Handbook "with student comments collected in an evaluation process." Lunsford and Bob Connors, when they began their work for the St. Martin's Handbook, did research on the frequency of formal error in student writing, drawing a large and extensive national sample of 30,000 student essays. (That research was published in their Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research essay). In subsequent editions of the book, they returned to those essays and asked different questions. They also surveyed instructors and students prior to the 4th edition, asking about how the Internet, computers, and other digital technologies were shaping how students write. That was a national survey of 2,500 students and 53 teachers. The current (5th) edition of the book was informed, in part, by Lunsford's interviews with first year student writers at Stanford University, where Lunsford teaches.

But those were formal research interviews, not course evaluations.

That said, it seems to me that there are two key issues raised by Rice.

1. What is the role of order and why does a Writing Program Adminstrator seek it?
2. Can applied 'puncepting' (if that's the way to phrase it) be a form of invention?

One of the main connections between the two questions --order and invention-- is found for Rice in textbooks:

The usefulness of these kinds of writings, I believe, is the exploration of digital invention (not codification of..) whose focus does not mirror the ways invention is typically taught in a composition textbook or classroom. (WPA)

Or to put it even more explicitely, in a comment on this post, Rice writes:

"Where do you find the common expressions valuing order in writing programs?"

Textbooks, textbooks, textbooks. (WPA, see comments)

I think this is a fair conclusion. Textbooks do provide some order and structure to a composition course, and when adopted program wide with a common syllabus, to a program. But what I've learned from working at a textbook publisher for the past four plus years is that order found in textbooks emerges from the field, from what and where people are teaching and from how instructors see the role and purpose of the writing they teach.

And I think this is the heart of Rice's critique: the role is traditional, or what Rice, in his examination of Sommers' essay, calls cliche'. First year college writing programs and courses and curriculum are gateway --not gatekeeping-- entities. Yes, if students don't do well in a FYC, that might contribute to them quitting college, or in some cases, if they don't repeat the course to reach a certain grade, being forced to leave college. But the fact is, most WPA's and most writing instructors see themselves as there to help students succeed in college. And yes, that success often means, supporting either the given order and idealized form of order as enlightened participation in civil discourse.

This emphasis is expressed in many forms -- course descriptions premised on "college writing," or assignments that emphasize "research skills," "critical thinking," "analyses," and "academic conventions." The arugment is that through these skills, students will learn to question authority, to critique order, to seek alternatives, to invent new ideas and persuade others of their values in a civil and orderly way. Textbooks are in fact part of this system, and do express the values and views of a discipline.

Textbooks come from ideas about teaching, and those come from one of two places generally: An instructor who has a teaching idea that he or she thinks would work in a book, an idea, usually that other books do not address at all nor in quite the right way. This idea is presented to a publisher for consideration. The other way a book gets done is when an editor hears an idea or approach or issue arise in the field that they think a textbok could help address.

And editors are avid followers, indeed members of, the field they edit and develop books in: they read journals; attend sessions at conferences; talk to professors about teaching and other professional issues when they travel to campus; participate in discipline email lists and blogs; and when they can, talk to students. So when an editor has an idea, they'll sometimes get in touch with those instructors and scholars whose work they've come to know and they'll invite them to work on a book of some kind.

I wouldn't be surprised if someday an editor doesn't ask Rice about using puncepts in a writing book, or else seeing that idea picked up and put into a first year composition textbook. It's a good idea; it would be fun to do and fun to teach.

Which brings me back to puncepts and order. If puncepts are an example of a good way to create new topoitic paths of invention, and if those paths somehow disrupt the current order, that's only going to be temporary. Once an idea begins to circulate, whether through a textbook, or lore, or professional workshops, blogs, conferences, email lists, or other means, it becomes absorbed, and goes from revolutionary to merely evolutionary before settling down into routine. In other words, it becomes codified.

What gets lost in the transition from new to codified is the excitement of something being risky, rare, and well, a bit disorderly because it's an experiment. What is also often lost are the intellectual excitements that made an idea new. We see it in terms that were once liberating to the field, and needed to used with some explanation of what they meant, like "writing process," and that are now taken for granted and attached to the original insights and research that lead to the term by a kind of collective shorthand. Jenny Edbauer, I think, is getting at this process of loss, as order inevitably finds a way to codify (and commodify) what was once unodered. Her post to WPA-L on rhetorical analysis essays turning up in paper mills is a good example.

What's useful too, in this context, are two things. Ideas like those Rice pursues which attempt to bring something new to the mix, in this case, puncept as a way of invention, and work like Edbauer's, where if I'm reading right, she's trying to, in her dissertation, make the familiar, rhetorical analysis, strange again by rediscovering and recalling forth the circumstances that made the approach exciting and unpaper millable. In her case the move to do this is to bring back the complexity at the root of such assignments and to remind instructors that the complexity is required. These teaching things --by which I mean not just rhetorical analysis assignments or a given invention strategy-- to work well, can't be rote or routine. They need to be invented anew each time.

The question I always wonder about is can you make and sustain huge changes, upset a given order, in an institutional context without going about it very deliberatively and patiently and politically astutely. In other words, in an orderly fashion. When departments undergo radical revisions in direction without building consensus and support, they're often disbanded, abandoned, or the WPA is replaced and reputiated. Those failures are often about a failed revolutionary approach, a failed cult of personality at the top (Not always of course; we've seen great programs gutted for no logical reason, which leads to the cause in the final clause.) , or the perception from higher powers that be than the WPA that what the program is doing isn't worth pursuing. And what happens when programs implode, or get taken over? What happens to those people, those faculty and students? Where do they go and what do they become?

So I don't see how a WPA can proceed without some order. Or how a textbook can be orderless, even if it were purely hypertextual in every sense of that word. But it should be possible to create a model where there was room for recreation and reinvention.

I doubt, though, that within an institution as conservative in purpose and goals as a college, you're going to have any truely revolutionarily unordered approaches. Even a Montesorri college, where there such a thing, would not be unordered. If only because there's a theory to give it shape and order.

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