4 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, February 7, 2006 OPINION abe Sibigan7&3tilg DoNN M. FRESARD Editor in Chief EMILY BEAM CHRISTOPHER ZBROZEK Editorial Page Editors ASHLEY DINGES Managing Editor EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com NOTABLE QUOTABLE This week is a week we can tell our children and grandchildren about." -Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick in a press conference yesterday, thanking the city of Detroit for its cooperation over Superbowl weekend, as reported yesterday by the Detroit Free Press. COLIN DALY THE M ICHSIG AN 11ALY *F*1*WisT TEC.hpAE' oxr OF sri Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their author. Why Hillary can't win SAM SINGER SAM'S CLUB For proof that you can be regis- tered to vote and still born yesterday, ask a Hillary Clinton enthusiast his take on the senator's recent jog toward the center. If he's as practiced as the fans I've encountered, he'll tell you that she's always been a moderate, that she has histori- cally identified with conservatives on national security and with centrists on abortion, that her 2006 Senate campaign - now being billed as a dress rehearsal for a widely anticipated 2008 presidential bid - is little more than a display of her true colors, a coming of age for Clinton, who the enthusiast will claim has always been aligned with mainstream political culture. If that doesn't grab you, he'll make a point to discuss her formative years, a story with all the humble elements of the customary blue-collar narrative: a religious middle-class home, a father in textiles, a homemaker for a mother. Then he'll suggest her book, "Liv- ing History," a Bible for the politically gull- ible, in which Clinton supposedly reconciles her liberal public image with her personal, more traditional meditations as a life-long Methodist. Clinton, he'll argue, is a victim of typecasting, a middle-of-the-road politician slandered by her opponents and misread by the media. Of course, if it's the nonfiction version you want, ask the same question of political operative-turned-pundit Dick Morris, a long- time advisor to the family and an understood authority in Washington on anything and everything Clinton. While I can't speak for him directly, I would be surprised if Morris, as sharp and cynical as he is, couldn't see right through the Senator's recent maneuvers; she is, after all, reading from his playbook. Morris calls the approach "triangulation," an aerial navigation technique he turned into political lingo while operating former Presi- dent Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. The objective is to raise your candidate above partisan divisions, to distance him from party lines and rigid platforms, from Democrats and Republicans alike. If contrived properly, the candidate can at once broaden his base of popular support and remain accessible enough to lawmakers for a prominent policy agenda. Examples of Hillary's efforts abound: The senator is as unrepentant a war proponent as Democrats come these days, never bending on her decision to support the use of force and consistently speaking out against the merits of immediate withdrawal. And having posi- tioned herself to the right of President Bush on Iran, Clinton gets free headlines each time she laces into the White House for being too tame with the uranium thirsty state. Off the foreign-policy tack, Clinton has recently tweaked her position on abortion, now iden- tifying as a pro-choice "anti-abortionist," a position as politically meaningless at it is ethically courageous. Exactly who advised Clinton to abandon rank and file is unclear, though I can say with confidence that it wasn't Morris. In fact, Mor- ris has gone on the record with the opposite advice, warning that by moving toward the center too early, Clinton risks alienating base voters. He may be onto something. Clinton's new posture reflects rock-hard confidence in her outlook for the primary election. Pre- liminary polls show her trouncing the field. But at this early stage, when the candidate list is light and tentative, opinion polls can't be relied on to measure anything more than name recognition. Bill Clinton had room to maneuver with Democrats in 1996 because as incumbent, he was also the presumptive nominee. Add another household name to the 2008 roster - Al Gore, John Edwards, you name it - and Hillary's critical mass begins to shrink. But say, for the sake of argument, that Clin- ton really is a primary shoo-in. There's still no reason to believe that the next year and a half of image-polishing would do much to make her marketable to the rest of the coun- try. Of all the false pretenses this campaign is built on, the most damaging remains Clinton's inability to recognize that far from any moral philosophy or policy position, her "electabil- ity" problem is one of sincerity. Clinton's stint as a born-again centrist, what Los Angeles Times columnist Jonah Goldberg called her "latest reinvention," is widely recognized as a political stunt - and rightfully so. From her late 1960s romance with the Black Panther Party to her short- lived fight for socialized healthcare, Clinton has spent the better part of her adult life in costume, playing the female protagonist for whichever role has the largest audience, never actually finding herself along the way. Clin- ton's is the story of a politician teeter-totter- ing her way through a career, too terrified of her self-image to let it develop. Dick Morris may have coined the term, but Hillary Clin- ton has been triangulating her entire life. Singer can be reached at singers@umich.edu VIEWPOINT New Progressive Party wants changes in MSA BY RACHEL FELDMAN AND WALTER NowiNSKI Have you ever regretted taking a course that did not live up to your expectations? If you knew that students in previous semesters found the professor boring, the workload excessive and the subject matter dull, would you have taken a different course instead? Currently, a lack of information about potential courses leaves many students in the same position; and as the Daily pointed out in its editorial (Dreading a W,' 01/24/2006), the early drop/add deadline means students often find themselves stuck in bad courses for the entire semester. Being forced to endure a dull course for an entire semester is a waste of both time and money. And while changing the drop/add deadline would be a good way to help students escape the most tiresome courses, students will still find adding courses after the first couple of meetings difficult. Thus, the best way to help students avoid poor classes and enroll in the best ones is to provide them with proper information about potential courses before they register. The Michigan Progressive Party has a plan to do just that. The Michigan Student Assembly has the poten- tial to give students substantially more informa- tion about courses and professors before they register. Currently, MSA operates a rarely used website called Advice Online. This site reports data from the evaluation sheets that students fill out at the end of each semester. These forms evaluate each course and instructor. The site is a good first step toward providing students with more information, but unfortunately it falls short on several fronts. Aside from being poorly pub- licized, MSA's Advice Online also contains too little data - only the past few semesters - and, most importantly, the data that are posted lack context. Who knows what a score of 3.2 out of 5 as the average response to "Overall this was an excellent course" really means? Because the data have not been analyzed, no one really knows if a class with a rating of 3.2 overall is average or decidedly below average. The MPP believes that Advice Online has tre- mendous potential, and we have a detailed plan to overhaul the website in order to realize that poten- tial. The MPP's plan has three main components. The first is to publish all of the available data online and include students' comments. There is no reason that students should be arbitrarily limited to data from only the past few semesters, and there is no reason that students should not be able to read the written comments about courses. Comments will help students better understand the strengths and weaknesses of a course before enrolling in it. The second step is to provide a comprehensive statistical analysis of the Advice Online data. The goal of this analysis is to give the individual course ratings (such as a 3.2) context, by allow- ing students to compare the rating of a particular course or professor with the average rating for all courses or professors. These averages could be compared to both department averages and an average for the University as a whole. Finally, the MPP proposes a publicity cam- paign to promote the "New Advice Online!" The first step towards this is to register a real ".com" domain name for the site, rather than burying it within the MSA website. Other publicity will include taking out advertisements in campus publications a few days before registration begins each term. These ads will list the 50 most popular courses at the University alongside the course's rating. Additionally, the ads may list the top and bottom 10 courses offered, as rated by the students. Publicity will also extend to incoming freshmen, because they are the group that has the least information about the quality of courses. Of course, all ads would direct students to the web- site where they could find full information on all courses they are interested in taking. The Michigan Progressive Party believes that one of the best ways to improve the expe- rience of everyone at the University is to pro- vide them with the information they need to avoid bad courses and take the best ones. If you are interested in this, you can find the entire proposal and others at our website: www.MichiganProgressiveParty.com. Feldman is an RC junior. Nowinski is an LSA senior. The authors are writing on behalf of the Michigan Progressive Party. a LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Send all letters to the editor to tothedaily@ mich igandaily. corn. Committee misunderstands college campus civil rights To THE DAILY: The Student Relations Advisory Committee's letter (An open letter to the Daily, 02/03/2006), charged that two cartoons the Daily published may have created a "hostile learning environ- ment" in violation of federal civil rights laws because some members of the University com- munity found them to be "offensive." This is a patently false and dangerous assertion that college administrators have long been using Some colleges and universities have inter- preted OCR's prohibition of "harassment" as encompassing all offensive speech regarding sex, disability, race or other classifications. For harassment, however, to be prohibited by the stat- utes within OCR's jurisdiction, it must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive. SRAC's members are either igno- rant of the role of the First Amendment and fed- eral civil rights legislation on college campuses, or they are intentionally trying to scare members of this community with false information. Either way, students and editors should not have to fear The commission has recently begun a series of hearings to investigate the racially targeted voter fraud committed by the anti-affirmative action Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Preliminary investigation by BAMN in the Ann Arbor area has already turned up a number of pro-affirmative action community members, including two University professors, who were misled into signing the petition. Further investi- gation will certainly turn up many more people affiliated with the University who were deceived into signing MCRI's petitions. A Civil Rights Commission hearing in Ann Arbor will allow University students, faculty and Editorial Board Members: Amy Anspach, Andrew Bielak, Reggie Brown, Kevin Bunkley, Gabrielle D'Angelo, John Davis, Whitney Dibo, Milly Dick, Sara Eber, Jesse Forester, Mara Gay, Jared Goldberg, Ashwin Jagannathan, Mark Kuehn, Will Kerridge, Frank Manley, Kirsty McNamara, Rajiv Prabhakar, Eric Karna, Katherine Seid, Brian Slade, Ben Taylor, Jessica Teng. I