• the controversial 2000 Presidential race
• campaign finance reform
• landmark Supreme Court decisions like 1954's Brown v. Board of Education, which ended racial segregation in the public schools
• Third Party candidates
• balancing the budget and reducing the national debt
• lobbying for interests as disparate as the Sierra Club or a corporate giant
• running for president of the fifth-grade class
• managing the campaign of a candidate for U.S. Congress or state legislature

PUBLIC POLICY is...

• is striving to reduce the effects of global warming
• attempting to improve the accessibility and delivery of health care
• working to obtain a quality education for all children
• wrestling with the given of crime in a free society
• struggling with the issues of Medicare and Social Security to ensure their fiscal integrity for generations to come
• trying to extend the opportunity for a better life to every citizen
• Creating, evaluating, and implementing programs in civil rights, criminal justice, national defense, health and welfare, education, taxation, budgeting and spending, and environmental protection
• working in state legislatures and in Congress to balance individual rights with the collective good of the nation

  PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION is...

• administering the vast system of bureaucracies that conducts the business of governments, small and large, from the State Department to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife
• managing the municipal government of a small city like Norman
• Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York guiding his city through the challenging days after 9/11
• improving the relationship between management and labor
• working to understand how to improve communication, hiring practices, and workplace inequities in the modern public organization
• the devolution of budget allocation and decisions from the federal government to the states

COMPARATIVE POLITICS is...

• the mutated communism of China, with its superimposed free enterprise system
• the decaying regime of Cuba's Castro, an anachronism in a postmodern world swept away by the "Third Wave" of democracy
• Great Britain's constitutional monarchy and how it struggles for justification
• the implosion of Russia
• the dilemma of Mexico City as it tries to cope with devasting population and pollution problems
• a Middle East increasingly defined by radicalism
• the changing European landscape in the wake of the "Union" and the "Euro"

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS is...

• the Iraq War, now viewed by most as a tragic foreign policy mistake
• the global threat of terrorist attacks
• NAFTA and the dilemma of Mexican immigration
• the centuries' old conflicts in the Middle East
• the United Nations grappling with refugee problems more desperate than any since WWII
• Sub-Saharan Africa, unraveling in civil war from Congo to the genocide in Darfur
• the United States as the world's only superpower

POLITICAL THEORY is...

• the skeleton on which to hang the skin and bones of the discipline
• to delineate the ideal "republic" from the seminal thinkers of classical Greece
• to extrapolate from Machiavelli's prince the "realpolitik" of today
• to see in Rousseau's "noble savage" every conquered native population to meet the onslaught of "progress"
• to go to the source of American political vision, through the ideas of Jefferson and his compatriots