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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/31659/full/31659/nelson-polsby-larger-than-life-wit-and-political-expert-dies-at-72/ <br /><br /> <b>Nelson Polsby, larger-than-life wit and political expert, dies at 72</b> <br /> Friday, February 16, 2007 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>Wherever Nelson Polsby was, that’s where you wanted to be. <br /><br /> Whenever professor Sheldon Rosenblatt wanted to visit his old pal, he’d walk through one of the three doors leading to Polsby’s U.C. Berkeley office and invariably find the rotund professor lying on a ragtag couch with his shoes on the floor and equally ragtag slippers on his feet, speaking on the phone with former students now in the State Department or working in Congress, while current students and faculty whirled around him in political discussions. <br /><br /> “Nelson had a genius for friendship,” recalled Rosenblatt of his friend, who died suddenly of a heart attack on Tuesday, Feb. 6. Polsby was 72. <br /><br /> “He was brilliantly witty and everyone will tell you that. He made circles move. When he was in a gathering, he made it hop and jump. He loved to make communities work and create environments in which ideas could be exchanged.” <br /><br /> Polsby, a vocal Zionist, was a member of Berkeley’s Netivot Shalom and co-founder of El Cerrito’s Tehiyah Day School, where his son was one of the first attendees. As the head of U.C. Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies from 1988 to 1999, he often brought Israeli scholars to campus, and lectured in the Jewish state himself. <br /><br /> He was born to a Connecticut Jewish farm family in 1934 and was one of the very few Jews in his prep school. He was offered scholarships to Harvard and Yale, but instead attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore so he could audit sessions of the U.S. Senate. <br /><br /> Polsby, who joined U.C. Berkeley’s political science faculty in 1967, was one of the nation’s most respected scholars on the presidency, Congress and the interrelation of the two. He received virtually every honor a political scientist can get, and his textbook on presidental elections, written with Cal colleague Aaron Wildavsky, is in its 11th edition and is read in college poli sci courses from sea to shining sea.<br /><br /> His understanding of Congress was not gleaned from books but from decades of sticking his nose over lawmakers’ shoulders and seeing how things really get done. <br /><br /> “He would go to Congress and walk around behind the congressmen and see what they did. Who talks to whom? Who were the constituents who counted? Mostly, how does one congressman influence another to do something?” said longtime friend and colleague professor Eugene Smolensky, the former dean of U.C. Berkeley’s school of public policy. <br /><br /> “He would say it was like counting chips in a bar. I buy you drinks, you buy me drinks. He knew what the chips were and who was spending them on whom.” <br /><br /> Polsby generously provided time and assistance to his colleagues and students during the day, but by night he was an insomniac who wrote prodigiously. His insomnia was sparked when he noticed his colleagues’ lights blazing in the wee hours of the morning. <br /><br /> Polsby’s wit was legendary among his colleagues, and he was in top form at a 2003 Berkeley panel regarding George W. Bush — of whom Polsby was a fierce critic — and the Iraq war. <br /><br /> Launching a double-barb against both the president and U.C. Berkeley’s rival school, he quipped, “Undoubtedly Condi Rice’s capacity to explain things simply [to Bush] is the pure product of her having taught at Stanford all these years.”<br /><br /> He also predicted that the only way for Bush to win the 2004 election was for Karl Rove to “keep Bush wrapped in the flag — pinned with a diaper pin.” <br /><br /> Nelson Polsby is survived by his wife, Linda, of Berkeley and three children: Lisa Susan Polsby of Naperville, Ill., Emily A. Polsby of Berkeley, and Daniel R. Polsby of Mountain View; his mother, Edythe Woolf Polsby Salzberger of Washington, D.C., his brothers, Daniel D. Polsby of Fairfax, Va., and Allen I. Polsby of Bethesda, Md.; and two grandchildren.</p> <p> </p>

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