James A. Janack

The 1990s saw a veritable explosion of "outsiderism" in politics. That is, many candidates running for political office sought to portray themselves as outside the political mainstream. The most successful of these political outsiders was Jesse "The Body" Ventura in his campaign for and occupation of Minnesota's governorship. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of carnival, this essay argues that Ventura's discourse and symbolic action contained carnivalesque references and images. Such references contributed to his image as a political outsider and associated him with the carnival fool's role of protest against the prevailing political system. At the same time the essay notes the limitations and contradictions inherent in politicians' appropriation of carnival.

The Internet's capacity for interactivity has resulted in greater expectations for public political deliberation and citizen participation in the public sphere, through political campaigning and beyond. Until recently, political candidates have tempered that hope and limited the World Wide Web's potential by controlling the degree and nature of the interactive aspects of their campaign web sites. However, in the 2004 US presidential campaign, candidates surrendered some of that control by incorporating blogs (weblogs) into their web sites. Some campaign blogs allowed citizens to post comments instantaneously without any editing or interference from the campaign itself, and thus had great potential for fostering online rational-critical interaction about politically and socially significant issues, an important form of citizen participation in the public sphere. Nevertheless, through an analysis of Blog For America, the blog on Howard Dean's campaign web site, this essay argues that "bloggers" themselves created a self-disciplining system on the campaign site that maintained control over the campaign's message and muted the potential for meaningful online political deliberation and citizen participation.

This article investigates nostalgia and public memory in the 1996 Russian presidential elections. I argue that Gennadii Zyuganov and Boris Yeltsin offered condensation symbols that made either nostalgic or dystalgic appeals to the audience regarding the Soviet era in Russian history, and that the candidates discursively tried to establish the extent of Zyuganov's and communism's relevance in the future through temporal narratives. Through a combination of such appeals and narratives, the candidates offered a series of selective remembrances that suggested competing but incomplete and over-simplified characterizations of the nature of the Soviet past.