With the current attention on the role of super-delegates in the selection of a Democratic candidate for president, we asked Elaine Kamarck, Kennedy School lecturer in public policy, if we might reprint a portion of her doctoral dissertation on the history of super-delegates. Her dissertation, "Structure as Strategy: Presidential Nominating Politics Since Reform,” was submitted to the political science department of the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. The following is extracted from the original. Kamarck will serve as a super-delegate at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Half of all living Americans today were born after McCain's A4E Skyhawk was shot down in an attempted bombing run on the Yen Phu power plant....his "rescuers" stripped him and beat him before handing him over to the military, which put him in Hoa Lo and then moved him around to several other prisons, where he continued to be repeatedly tortured....The Democrats can't compete with John McCain's past. But given the emergence of the millennial generation and its contributions so far to the Democratic comeback, they should be more than able to compete with John McCain for the future.

Elaine Kamarck, lecturer of Public Policy at the Kennedy School, gives a detailed history of how today's "super delegates" came into being.

"In any other business model, growing to meet this demand would be easy. Rapid growth usually provides more money for investment. But the Internet business got started as a flat-fee business — we all pay one monthly fee regardless of how much bandwidth we use."

In November 2002, Congress passed legislation creating the first new Cabinet department in more than a decade — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Now in its fourth year, the department is plagued with problems and chronic mismanagement. If DHS is to fulfill its mission, the next president will have to take a hard look at the agency and make some major structural changes....This paper proposes a redirection and redefinition of DHS, with an aim toward helping it more effectively pursue its core mission: protecting the American people.

"...[H]e began to modernize the British Labor Party. His first big move as party leader was to repudiate the infamous Clause 4 of the Labor Party platform, a section calling for national control of industries. In doing so, Blair signaled to his party and his country that the links between them and their socialist past were history.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, many political leaders declared that government was, in the words of Ronald Reagan, "the problem, not the solution." But on closer inspection, argues Elaine Kamarck, the revolt against government was and is a revolt against bureaucracy—a revolt that has taken place in first world, developing, and avowedly communist countries alike.

To some, this looks like the end of government. Kamarck, however, counters that what we are seeing is the replacement of the traditional bureaucratic approach with new models more in keeping with the information age economy.

"Americans gave George W. Bush six years in which to match his actions to his words. He didn't. They won't be so patient next time around."

One year after Katrina, what if it’s not just once in a lifetime? Making sense of our disaster-prone future.

"In the 1988 presidential election, Michael Dukakis was pilloried — rightly — for running a soulless campaign whose message consisted of the phrase, “It’s not about ideology, it’s about competence.” But times change. That was before the Federal Government’s response to Hurricane Katrina so overwhelmed us with its incompetence that America was humiliated before the world. The response to Katrina, however, was only the most dramatic in a long series of government failures, from the planning of the war in Iraq, to the failure of the occupation, to the design of the Medicare prescription drug policy...."