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Community Corner

What Now? A Post-Election Roundtable

In the aftermath of this year’s contentious and closely fought national elections, Arlington Community Education will host A Post-Election Roundtable with specialists in American politics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Tufts University. The program will take place at 7:30pm on Thursday, November 15, in the Arlington High School Media Center. The event is co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Arlington.


Panelists include MIT professor Andrea Campbell, whose upcoming book is How Americans Think About Taxes; Devin Caughey, who has been teaching a US National Elections class at MIT this fall; and Debbie Schildkraut, associate professor at Tufts University and author most recently ofAmericanism in the Twenty-First Century: Pubic Opinion in the Age of Immigration. The program will be moderated by David Whitford, an editor-at-large at Fortune magazine.


Panelists will examine the ways in which President Obama’s victory and the congressional and ballot initiative outcomes were both surprising and unsurprising; how voters' attitudes toward health care reform and their attributions of credit and blame for the economy– including their views on the auto and bank bailouts and the stimulus measures – affected voter choice; and, finally, whether the public is as polarized as are elected politicians, and how this reality bodes for policymaking during Obama's second term. There will be ample opportunity for questions from the audience.

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This program is the second in Arlington Community Education’s fall speaker series moderated by David Whitford and co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Arlington. The final event in the series Making Evidence Matter: The Role of Science in US Policy will take place on Thursday, November 29, at 7:30pm, and will feature Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.


Admission is $5 in advance or at the door. For more information, visit www.arlingtoncommunityed.org or call the Community Education office at 781 316-3568.

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