Odds shifting underfoot

Dennis Hastert represented some of the most comfortable, dyed-in-the-wool, midwestern Republicans in the world. Guess what just happened in the special election to replace him? A Democratic academic won 53-47.

Judy Feder is having another go at Frank Wolf in the same kind of district. Judy is a health policy expert and the dean of the Georgetown public policy school, and the policy academic community should get behind her again. She obviously has a much better shot this time for all the usual reasons, and also because Wolf screwed up the rail extension to Dulles.

Many readers of this blog are faculty, students or loyal alumni of MPP programs. (If yours is Georgetown, click here now and don’t bother with the rest of this post.)

Note the yummy added feature that Judy’s election will kneecap, yea, decapitate, a competitive program, hee hee.

UPDATE: A reader reports that Judy stepped down as dean this winter to focus on the campaign. So no decapitate option, just kneecapping. But even better odds that she wins.

Author: Michael O'Hare

Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O'Hare was raised in New York City and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their generosity with on-the-job social science training. He has followed the process and principles of design into "nonphysical environments" such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the "Curriculum and Case Notes" section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches regularly in the Goldman School's executive (mid-career) programs. At GSPP, O'Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school's resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb.