contact program. Malchow had some credibility in Gore’s world, thanks to his successful management of the Tennesseean’s first race for Senate fifteen years earlier. Back then, Gore didn’t flinch at Malchow’s proposal to invest in three computer terminals for the Nashville headquarters and hire a computer programmer to develop software to manage the candidate’s schedule and track donations. From that experience, Malchow considered Gore one of the smartest people he hadever met, if ultimately less suited to politics than other intellectual pursuits. (“In some senses, I think he ended up in the place where he was least talented,” Malchow says. “His confidence in his political judgment was never as high as his confidence in a wide range of other interests. This is why he was often overly cautious in his campaign strategies.”)
The two had had little interaction in the intervening years, but Malchow’s impressions of his old boss were confirmed as soon as Gore arrived for the presentation. Gore announced that he had just come from a meeting in his West Wing office with physicist Stephen Hawking,with whom the vice president enjoyed discussing such arcana as how cosmology supercomputers could measure previously imperceptible antigravitational forces.
Manna from heaven
, Malchow thought. “That’s great,” he told Gore. “Because I am here to talk about putting some science into this campaign.”
Malchow described his CHAID technique, and he thought he saw Gore react approvingly. But when Malchow tried to follow up afterward with the campaign manager, Craig Smith, he never heard back. A simultaneous effort to convince the DNC to impose experimental controls on its mail program—what had become a quadrennial quest for Malchow—came up empty, too. Malchow became convinced that the political profession could never muster the skepticism to examine its own practices. The revolution would have to find its momentum elsewhere.
THE NEW HAVEN EXPERIMENTS
D on Green was still new to the Yale political science department when he began to suspect that his chosen discipline was intellectually bankrupt. In the 1950s, political scientists had started talking like economists, describing politicians and citizens as rational beings who acted to maximize their self-interest. Voters were believed to peruse a ballot the same way they examined a store shelf, calculating the benefits each product had presented and checking the box next to the one offering the best value. “Voters and consumers are essentially the same people,” the economist Gordon Tullock wrote in his 1976 book
The Vote Motive
. “Mr. Smith buys and votes; he is the same man in the supermarket and in the voting booth.” By the time Green began teaching in 1989, such thinking was pervasive among his peers. They saw politics as a marketplace where people and institutions compete for scarce power and resources with the clear, consistent judgment of accountants.
This detached view of human behavior was particularly galling toGreen, who was trained as a political theorist but found his greatest joy amid sophisticated board games. Growing up in Southern California, Green had played Civil War and World War II games with his brothers, a diversion he partly credits for his later interest in politics and history. When he first arrived at Yale, Green bonded with students and colleagues through games, which filled the interstices between classes and office hours, with a single competitive session often stretched over weeks. In the late 1990s, Green was playing at his colonial home in New Haven with his seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, using the plastic construction toy K’nex to build a lattice-like structure. The kids imagined spiderlike monsters moving from one square to the next. Green started to visualize from this a new board game, in which Erector-set-like limbs could be grafted onto basic checkers-style coins and every piece would become dynamic.
The two had had little interaction in the intervening years, but Malchow’s impressions of his old boss were confirmed as soon as Gore arrived for the presentation. Gore announced that he had just come from a meeting in his West Wing office with physicist Stephen Hawking,with whom the vice president enjoyed discussing such arcana as how cosmology supercomputers could measure previously imperceptible antigravitational forces.
Manna from heaven
, Malchow thought. “That’s great,” he told Gore. “Because I am here to talk about putting some science into this campaign.”
Malchow described his CHAID technique, and he thought he saw Gore react approvingly. But when Malchow tried to follow up afterward with the campaign manager, Craig Smith, he never heard back. A simultaneous effort to convince the DNC to impose experimental controls on its mail program—what had become a quadrennial quest for Malchow—came up empty, too. Malchow became convinced that the political profession could never muster the skepticism to examine its own practices. The revolution would have to find its momentum elsewhere.
THE NEW HAVEN EXPERIMENTS
D on Green was still new to the Yale political science department when he began to suspect that his chosen discipline was intellectually bankrupt. In the 1950s, political scientists had started talking like economists, describing politicians and citizens as rational beings who acted to maximize their self-interest. Voters were believed to peruse a ballot the same way they examined a store shelf, calculating the benefits each product had presented and checking the box next to the one offering the best value. “Voters and consumers are essentially the same people,” the economist Gordon Tullock wrote in his 1976 book
The Vote Motive
. “Mr. Smith buys and votes; he is the same man in the supermarket and in the voting booth.” By the time Green began teaching in 1989, such thinking was pervasive among his peers. They saw politics as a marketplace where people and institutions compete for scarce power and resources with the clear, consistent judgment of accountants.
This detached view of human behavior was particularly galling toGreen, who was trained as a political theorist but found his greatest joy amid sophisticated board games. Growing up in Southern California, Green had played Civil War and World War II games with his brothers, a diversion he partly credits for his later interest in politics and history. When he first arrived at Yale, Green bonded with students and colleagues through games, which filled the interstices between classes and office hours, with a single competitive session often stretched over weeks. In the late 1990s, Green was playing at his colonial home in New Haven with his seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter, using the plastic construction toy K’nex to build a lattice-like structure. The kids imagined spiderlike monsters moving from one square to the next. Green started to visualize from this a new board game, in which Erector-set-like limbs could be grafted onto basic checkers-style coins and every piece would become dynamic.
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