Five scholars from three Duke institutes and schools predicted outcomes for the presidential election and for post-election America in a panel at the Fuqua School of Business Thursday night.
Five scholars from three Duke institutes and schools predicted outcomes for the presidential election and for post-election America in a panel at the Fuqua School of Business Thursday night. The panel covered topics ranging from clean air standards to appellate court appointments, from fear of terrorism to the integration of Europe. Although the panelists differed in focuses and conclusions, they each emphasized the importance of the 2004 contest.
The panel was divided into three topics: the environment, legal issues and national security and foreign relations. William Schlesinger, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, discussed issues such as global climate change, clean air and logging in old-growth forests. Erwin Chemerinsky, Alston & Bird Professor of Law, and Neil Siegel, assistant professor in the School of Law, discussed the legal implications of the election, focusing on potential appointments President George W. Bush and challenger Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., might make if elected. Theodore Triebel, a national security expert and visiting lecturer in public policy studies, and Jedediah Purdy, assistant professor in the School of Law, discussed foreign affairs and the role of terrorism in the election.
Schlesinger opened the discussion by emphasizing the importance of environmental policy and lamenting the apathy of the candidates and electorate to the issue.
“Both candidates have pretty well assessed the view of the average American—the environment does not win elections,” Schlesinger said. “Whoever is elected next Tuesday will have a host of environmental issues to face.... None will have an easy solution.”
Schlesinger praised Kerry’s senatorial voting record on environmental issues and called Bush “the worst president for the environment in history.” Despite this, Schlesinger said a Kerry win will not cure all ills. He said all new technologies designed to reduce automobile emissions will not be cost-effective anytime soon, and some of them may not be very effective at all.
“[Carbon dioxide] may not come out of the tailpipe of the hydrogen car,” he said. “But it certainly comes out of the smokestacks of the factory that puts the hydrogen in the car.”
Chemerinsky followed, outlining issues that might change if either candidate nominates a Supreme Court justice—a likely proposition, given the faltering health and old age of some of the Court’s senior members. Should Bush appoint a justice, Chemerinsky predicted an end to campaign reform and abortion rights, as well as other controversial legal precedents.
“First of all, affirmative action is likely to be outlawed in public and private universities,” Chemerinsky said.
Chemerinsky said Kerry-appointed justices would be more likely to extend government protection of individual civil liberties while reducing government support for faith-based institutions like parochial schools.
Chemerinsky cited a case he had argued before the Supreme Court, wherein his client, a California man, had been put in jail for 50 years for stealing $153 worth of merchandise under that state’s “Three Strikes” law. Chemerinsky lost the case 5-4, and he suggested that a court with a Kerry appointee would render a different verdict.
Siegel followed Chemerinsky and expanded on many of the themes of the preceding panelists.
“It bothers me greatly that the Supreme Court competes with the environment in terms of what Americans seem to care less about,” Siegel said.
The former clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg emphasized that a Kerry win would hasten the end of the death penalty in America and cause the Court to harshly examine the “constitutionality of state laws prohibiting gay marriage and civil unions.”
Triebel, a former captain in the U.S. Navy, discussed national security, declaring that fear of terrorism and faith in Bush will lead to his re-election.
“I sense and I feel in this country there’s fear, and regrettably those fears have been fanned by both sides,” he said. “When Americans come from Peoria, Ill., or Fuquay-Varina, N.C., to the polls, there is a feeling in their stomachs.”
Purdy closed the panel with his remarks, which dealt with the breakup of “the natural alliance of the North Atlantic” into a increasingly integrated Europe and an isolated United States. In order to explain the European desire for alliance, Purdy asked the audience to imagine the United States as 50 independent nations surrounded by Africa, the Middle East and Russia, filled with “tuberculosis, AIDS, heroin and loose nuclear weapons.”
He said the Europeans are hoping for interwoven obligations and alliances between states, while the United States hopes to be “the world’s one unchangeable power.”
“The ultimate goal is to use the aggressive application of force and economic intervention to advance the cause of a growing alliance of democratic states,” Purdy said.
He said Bush favors America as a lone power, but Kerry would be more likely to strive for the “interwoven” partnerships between the United States and Europe that characterized post-World War II foreign relations.
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