The death occurred on July 12, 1999, at a tragically young age, of Otto I.Q. Besser-Wisser, probably the most influential political thinker and analyst of our times.

He was born in 1906 on the island of Helgoland, where the bustling streets and crowded, busy marketplaces formed his early experience of life in a large and cosmopolitan urban metropolis. He was later to convert these young impressions into the central principles of physical and social distanciationalist politometrics, which have dominated Western political science ever since. In spite of its subsequent theoretical variations, refinements, and developments—in the form of neo-distanciationalism, post-distanciationalism, post-neodistanciationalism, and neo-postdistanciationalism—the essential core of Besser-Wisser's formulation is so simple, and yet so heuristically and ontologically valuable in the theoreticization of the politico-urban-time continuum, that it is puzzling that it took mankind two millennia to develop. The answer is, of course, that just as it took pure genius to uncover the principles of things such as gravity, the unconscious mind, the jet engine, and Guinness, so only someone of Besser-Wisser's uncommon genius and almost supernatural analytical perspicacity could go straight to the very heart of one of the simple yet eternal truths of the human condition.

Until I developed a new web site, I had no idea how much personal information webcasters collected on visitors. I always had assumed that surfing the Internet was an anonymous experience. The net was a benign tool that made my job easier. It brought the latest information on politics and media to my fingertips and eliminated my need to dig through dusty old newspapers.

In part, it was seeing how the web facilitated my political science work that convinced me to set up my own nonprofit site dedicated to state and national politics. If the Internet was such a positive force for public education, perhaps my site could inform people about political events, upcoming campaigns, and policy controversies.

Now that I am a certified webcaster, however, I am astonished at the level of detail available to those running Internet sites. Every time you visit a web site, your behavior is monitored. Webcasters don't know your name, but we know your Internet provider. If you log on through a school, university, business, or governmental agency, we generally can identify your institutional affiliation. In addition, we know what files you look at and how long you spend viewing each item down to the second.

This is an obvious goldmine for webcasters interested in catering to the tastes of their audience.

Data concerning the existence, size, and significance of an anti-Nazi opposition within Germany are forthcoming from two primary sources. The first source is the direct testimony of opposition leaders still surviving after the occupation; the second source consists of official German intelligence reports or interrogations of interned Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst officials. The direct testimony of opposition leaders is, of course, subject to the qualification that it is to the interest of the leader and his group to represent the activities of his movement during the war years in the best possible light. Estimates of the size and scope of activities provided by such leaders may be viewed as more or less exaggerated. However the experience of Bombing Survey Field Teams also suggests that such estimates may in some cases be low rather than high because of the extreme secrecy in which such movements were forced to operate. For example, a number of Communist leaders knew in general terms that other Communist groups and cells were operating in their area, but because of the absence of any connection they were unable to estimate the size of the group. Throughout the opposition movement it was an elementary principle of safety, confirmed by repeated experience with Gestapo terror and torture, never to know more about the personnel and activities of the movement than was absolutely essential. In evaluating the information from this source it is also necessary to keep in mind that the best informants in a great many cases had been executed in the last wave of terror. Frequently the knowledge of the survivors was fragmentary; many of those who had occupied central points in the organization had fallen.

“It is the rule of our politics that no vexed question is settled except by executive policy,” noted Henry Jones Ford (1851–1925) in his 1898 work describing the state of national politics. “Whatever may be the feeling of Congress towards the President, it cannot avoid an issue which he insists upon making,” Ford wrote as he continued with his discussion of the central role played by the president as the leader of his party (283–84). Even presidents whose congressional party members turned their backs on the leadership of their presidents were needed to provide their parties in Congress with an agenda, as was the case with Presidents John Tyler, Andrew Johnson, and Grover Cleveland. “Although repudiated by the parties which elected them, [they] furnished the issues upon which party action turned,” noted Ford (284). Even though he may have arrived at his views through shaky research means and was often inaccurate in his predictions about the direction of American politics, in the late nineteenth century Ford noted the special energy provided by the presidency to our political system. He anticipated the soonto-come activist presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898) provides a sweeping analysis of the American political system. In this short article, I will focus on Ford's understanding of the American presidency, showing how his thoughts presaged important orientations and foci of future presidential scholars and noting that, as influential as his work proved, he often got the story wrong.

The U.S. House of Representatives is in the midst of its second operational transformation in five years. Compared to the post-1994 “Gingrich-led revolution” (Drew 1996), Republican leadership strategies are considerably different in the 106th Congress under the direction of Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and his team.

This essay outlines five strategies the new House leadership team has implemented to correct past problems, shape members' behavioral norms (Weingast 1979), and manage their razor-thin majority. While it's still too early to gauge the ultimate success of these strategies, my conversations with members of the House Republican leadership, other members of Congress, House staffers, and political operatives involved with the day-to-day functioning of the U.S. House, reveal a pattern of strategic changes and accompanying modifications in member norms aimed at managing the legislative majority in the 106th Congress.

I remember an afternoon graduate seminar in 1958 at Yale when Bob Dahl asked a question: “How would we best go about ‘testing’ the insights of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America?” Two answers were offered. “Survey research can do it all,” many argued. I put my hand up and offered an alternative. We would do well to study American history, the culture of politics, and political sociology, then and now. One does not “test” Tocqueville all at once, and never fully. One continually matches his insights against what one knows and understands about our politics. Dahl accepted both answers and we then went on to other things. I recalled the question when I recently reread Ford.

Ford, along with James Bryce, was one of the first political scientists to attempt an analysis of the central dynamics of American political institutions. In The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898), he set a model followed by Arthur Bentley, Arthur Holcombe, Wilfred Binkley, Pendleton Herring, D.W. Brogan, and Clinton Rossiter, all leaders in American political science. The art was to write a perceptive book about U.S. politics that was grounded primarily in historical materials and analyzed the connections among society, politics, and government.

The study of AIDS, as a disease, a social problem, or, in my case, as a political phenomenon is necessarily difficult and invasive. Learning about AIDS requires invasion of the most private spheres of peoples' lives, involves watching people at their most vulnerable, and often requires becoming closely involved with people whose lives and circumstances are far away from the researcher's own comfort zone. As the title of this essay suggests, my research has led me to take on a variety of roles; first, in order to gather the information I sought and, later, because of the information I had gathered. Roughly speaking, these roles can be characterized with respect to the distance of the researcher from the subject matter. As a scholar, I endeavored, particularly in the early stages of my research, to hold myself apart from what I saw and to compare my findings against those of other researchers. However, as time moved on, I found myself increasingly playing two other roles, roles I have come to characterize as witness and activist. My efforts to lessen the distance between the subjects of my research and myself resulted from both practical and personal motivations. As a practical matter, like many other social scientists, I quickly discovered that I had far greater access to information—in the form of written documents, interviews, and observation opportunities—as an insider. Personally I found myself wanting to contribute what I could to help solve, or at least lessen the severity of, the problems unfolding all around me.

As I have moved closer to the subjects of my research, and to the perspectives they hold, I have been forced to confront head-on a perennial dilemma of scholars: objectivity. How does one study an issue “objectively,” particularly when the issue is fraught with controversy? Does taking a side render future observations invalid? Is there some magic line between researcher and subject that is not to be crossed? If so, where is it?

The findings presented below represent what I have discovered about interest organizing and political activism in the context of AIDS.