Political Scientist

Pendleton Herring, 100, a political scientist, writer and foundation executive who did pioneering work in the study of American politics, died Tuesday of pneumonia at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was born in Baltimore and received a bachelor's degree in English and a doctorate in political science from the Johns Hopkins University. As a scholar, he worked to understand the basic mechanics of government and to apply rigor to the emerging study of political science. Group Representation before Congress (Johns Hopkins, 1929)

This time of the year, there is a seamless flow on television as Sunday morning turns to afternoon, from the political talk shows to the NFL pre-game programs. Both feature pontificating pundits chosen as much for their personalities as their insight. Style is at least as important as substance. Most significantly, both are spectator sports. Professional football was designed as that. American politics was not. Even on the verge of an election that has energized the electorate more than most mid-term votes, it still seems that the citizens are on the sidelines of a game that was once famously said to be "of the people, by the people and for the people."

Gerald A. Heeger is the new president of the University of Maryland University College, the state's continuing education institution that enrolls more than 35,000 students worldwide.Heeger, 56, was introduced to the school's staff at its College Park headquarters yesterday by University System of Maryland Chancellor Donald N. Langenberg. He was named to the post by the system's board of regents, replacing T. Benjamin Massey, who was president from 1978 until his retirement last year. Robert E. Meyers has been interim president.

Before Tuesday's election, political scientist Larry J. Sabato had just one question for readers of his "Crystal Ball" online newsletter. "When has an incumbent ever won when he is tied with his challenger on election eve?" wrote Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. "The answer is never. ... So George W. Bush needs to beat history, and the polls, to win the election." Yesterday, the day after Bush did just that to win a second term, Sabato acknowledged that this campaign has undermined some of the tenets that have governed modern political thinking -- and suggested some new ones.

THE COLD WAR had just ended and scholars in the American academy who spent their adult lives studying the minutiae of war machines like MIGs and MIRVs were growing antsy. Everything on which they had built their careers was seemingly crumbling just like the Berlin Wall: The Soviet Union had collapsed. NATO, bereft of an enemy, was adrift and searching for a mission. And after so many years girding for World War III, the United States began mulling peace dividends. That's when a leading security studies specialist cracked.

According to conventional wisdom, China is marching down a road that will eventually lead to democracy. The first steps are the economic ones that China is taking, opening up a centralized economy to market forces, letting free enterprise reign. Economic growth is expected to lead to popular pressure to change a totalitarian regime into a democratic one, complete with respect for human rights. "The idea is that as per capita GDP increases, that will basically bring about all types of structural changes - increasing education, urbanization, industrialization - which will create structural conditions more favorable to a transition to democracy," she says.

Labor Day, which will be upon us in a week - is traditionally considered the beginning of the presidential election campaign. But in a very real sense, Labor Day is the end of the true campaign. By true campaign I mean the period in which the actions, speeches, personalities and curriculum vitae of the presidential nominees, and the presumably related social and economic state of the union, convince the overwhelming majority of voters whom to vote for. That period begins on the previous Inauguration Day, or even on the previous Election Night.

Arsenals of Folly The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race By Richard Rhodes Alfred A. Knopf / 400 pages / $28.95 In the mid-1950s, Winston Churchill advised Americans that if they continued the nuclear arms race "all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce." With 1,756 nuclear weapons in its stockpile, the United States had the capacity to detonate 192,000 Hiroshimas. Assuming a "greater-than-expected threat" from the Soviet Union, the Pentagon increased its arsenal to 18,638 bombs and warheads (1.4 million Hiroshimas)

Political scientist Andrew Hacker's best seller, "Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal," will be the subject of the fall semester's final "Books Sandwiched In" session at noon Thursday at Western Maryland College in Westminster.Dr. Charles E. Neal, associate professor of political science at WMC, will discuss the work during the lunchtime review in McDaniel Lounge. The discussion is free and open to the public."Two Nations," published this year, asserts that the racial attitudes of white Americans are responsible for the "disconsolate" state of black life in the United States.

Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South By Thomas F. Schaller Instead of "futile pandering to the nation's most conservative voters" in the South, Democrats should build a non-Southern majority to regain dominance, argues Schaller, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County political scientist, in this focused, tactical account. The Republicans' Southern monopoly may have helped them achieve national majorities in the past, but it has never constituted a majority alone, Schaller explains.