Colby Magazine - Fall00: In the Loop Outside the Beltway feature

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"One of the things that doesn't work in American politics right now is that people are bored to death, and one of the reasons is that it just comes at them too much, too often. I remember as a kid, even as a college student, that the conventions were just the peak of excitement because you hadn't heard much about the elections before that. And the vice presidential nominees were always selected late at night at the conventions and you'd see Mike Wallace. He's down on the floor with Dan Rather and they're saying, 'I've got a story over here in Pennsylvania.' You sat there and it was really fun. Now, it's beaten to death before it's actually news."

–G. Calvin Mackenzie

It was the opening night of the Democratic Convention and Anthony Corrado, headphones in place, was seated in a soundproof cubbyhole on the fourth floor of the Eustis Building at Colby awaiting a call from National Public Radio's Scott Simon. The NPR host was at the convention in Los Angeles. The interview was to be broadcast live. Corrado had been told he would be discussing President Clinton's fund-raising legacy. When Simon came on the line, his first question was whether the entertainment industry is more likely to give to the Democratic Party than to Republicans. "They certainly are," Corrado said, without missing a beat. "In fact, one of the groups that the Clinton administration has brought into the Democratic fund raising over the past eight years is the so-called Hollywood money. He had roots there with the Thomasons back in his first bid in 1992 . . . "


Tony Corrado at the microphone in the radio studio in Eustis, where he does live commentary with the national press.

Corrado's face was turned to a bank of dials, his words beamed from the dimly lit room to listeners across the country. "With experience, one gets used to the surreal character of live broadcasts," he said later.

And like fellow Colby political scientists G. Calvin Mackenzie and L. Sandy Maisel, Corrado has had plenty of experience.

In recent weeks Corrado, associate professor of government, one of the country's most respected experts on campaign finance, has logged 25 calls a week from reporters, a relative lull before the pre-election press crush that sees the number double. Mackenzie, Colby's Distinguished Presidential Professor of American Government, was in Washington assisting with a multi-million dollar bipartisan study of the presidential appointment process–and girding for his media turn after the November election. "And then that goes on for about a year," Mackenzie said. "That's one of the cycles of my life."

Maisel, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, recently weathered two press flurries, one on the pick of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, as a vice presidential candidate, and another on third parties. In the two days after the Lieberman pick, Maisel did interviews with the Dallas Morning News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Detroit Free Press, The Christian Science Monitor and The Wall Street Journal. "And then two days later, because of this book I've done on third parties, it started all over again," Maisel said. "This guy from the Dallas paper, he called me back and he said, 'I'm not calling you about [the Lieberman] story. I'm doing another story. Put on your third parties hat.'"

Maisel and his Colby colleagues take their roles as political pundits in stride, but the fact is that these three members of the Government Department wear their commentator hats exceptionally well.

All three are affiliated with prestigious Washington think tanks. All three are authors whose works are prerequisite to understanding the American political system. All three are equally at home in the classroom, in front of a microphone or mulling politics with the press. "I think it's wholly unusual," Corrado said. . . . "I don't think there's another government department at a four-year institution that matches us in terms of the amount of research work that's done here, the depth and quality of the faculty and in terms of the public profile."

"The primary barrier to campaign finance reform is that the public hasn't shown a willingness to broadly vote on this issue. Every opinion poll you read says that 90 percent of the public thinks the current system doesn't work. The problem is that there are very few examples of members of Congress or the Senate who are defeated because they're against campaign finance reforms. It's a mantra on Capitol Hill that nobody ever lost a race because of their stance on campaign finance reform."

–Tony Corrado

One of the leading congressional scholars, one of the leading campaign finance scholars and one of the leading scholars of the presidency can be found not at a major research institution but at one small college 600 miles outside the Beltway. In fact, they can be found in the same corridor in Miller Library, which Maisel points out when he gets a press query better suited to one of his colleagues. "I say, 'Look. You've got one of the country's leading experts on my campus two doors away from me. Why are you talking to me?"

For the nation's political writers, Corrado, Mackenzie and Maisel are go-to guys on Rolodexes that hold names and numbers of literally thousands of sources. Some sources are political staffers or consultants. Others are academics, used to add perspective and weight to news stories. "When you're covering the White House or politics, you skip from issue to issue, whether it be tobacco legislation or defense policy or education and health care," said Warren P. Strobel, former White House correspondent for The Washington Times, who now covers national security issues for U.S. News & World Report. "You don't have the chance, oftentimes, to be very deep. It's really good to have somebody who you can go to very quickly who can help explain things."

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