Darrell West, the well-known Brown professor, thinks Barack Obama will be the next president. He says Hillary Clinton’s bid is virtually over and John McCain is popular personally but too tied to the Bush administration.

The Providence Journal / Connie Grosch

You may have read that Darrell West, the Brown University political scientist I call Professor Sound Bite, is leaving town and heading for Washington.

But don’t despair. The place he’s going, the Brookings Institution, has its own TV studio. All the easier for stations and networks to drop by the Massachusetts Avenue think tank and do interviews. In fact, it’s also available for satellite interviews.

So West, who joins Brookings as vice president and director of governance studies on July 1, will be more visible than ever.

Professor Sound Bite goes national? “I hope so,” he says with a chuckle.

West, 53, was a Brookings research fellow years ago.

He has been at Brown since 1982-’83, when one of the students in his Campaigns and Elections course was David Cicilline, a senior who knew how to impress people.

“He used to distribute zeppole pastries to the political science faculty, so we all loved him,” West reports.

Today, of course, Cicilline is the Providence mayor and a top Democratic prospect for governor two years from now.

West says, “He was a very smart student. He knew how to argue. He clearly was a very impressive individual.”

Cicilline and another Democrat, General Treasurer Frank Caprio, each has a 2010 campaign chest of more than $500,000. I’m hesitant to believe both actually will run for governor, and you notice that they prefer to dance around the issue rather than to say flatly that they are running. But West says, “You shouldn’t watch what they say. You should watch what they do. They’re both raising a lot of money.”

West has become a familiar presence on Rhode Island television and is quoted in newspapers around the country because journalists are always looking for smooth-talking authorities — unidentified with a particular candidate — who know their fields. West has the added credential of being a pollster.

“When you see a poll from Darrell West, you know it’s a legitimate poll and it was done on the up and up,” says Joe Fleming, a political consultant and long-time pollster for Channel 12.

Face it, professors and political operatives may be used to toiling in the background, but they also get a kick out of exposure to the limelight.

The University of Vermont’s Garrison Nelson says political scientists love to see their names in the newspaper. “It’s a lot easier to give an interview than it is to write an article,” he says.

As for which quotes get used, Nelson asserts that reporters select them based on whether they agree with them or as a way to get something in the piece that they may not feel free to say themselves.

I might have been guilty of this myself when I was a day-to-day news reporter; I can’t remember that far back! As a columnist, I feel free to say whatever I want — in this case, that it has always been a pleasure to shoot the breeze with West, even if we don’t always agree.

It’s been said that Rhode Island is a theme park for journalists. West says it is for political scientists as well. “Absolutely! I mean, Rhode Island is filled with colorful personalities and there’s always something of interest to analyze here.”

He says Rhode Island politics are distinctive mainly for corruption. Well, sure, the state has had its share of crooks. West says it’s more than that: Rhode Island can contend with such notorious hotbeds of corruption as Louisiana and New Jersey.

“It’s just been a persistent problem in the state, and we actually have pretty tough ethics laws courtesy of some of the reforms that were enacted in the 1990s. But you can’t stop human greed, and people keep doing their things. ... There’s a culture of corruption here in which even when we elect reformers people want special deals, that they expect to get jobs for their friends, or a government contract.”

On the bright side, West says Rhode Island has also made major progress. The Wall Street Journal touched off a furor here in 1983 with a story saying that, to many New Englanders, Rhode Island was “little more than a smudge beside the fast lane to Cape Cod.”

Now, West says, “We’ve become a major destination. People should feel proud of that.”

A registered Democrat who says he splits his tickets, West bemoans the fact that Democrats so heavily dominate politics here. More competition would mean more accountability, he says.

If a young person came to him and sought counsel on whether to seize a chance to run for an office as a Republican, West says his reply would be: Do it. In the tiny GOP, “opportunities for upward mobility are very high,” he says. West adds, “Local Republicans are going to have to insulate themselves from the national party, but we’ve had a number of people who’ve done that very successfully.”

Indeed, many did, but I wonder how likely it is to be able to pull it off now.

I asked West the other day to tell me who will be elected governor in 2010, when Republican Don Carcieri will be term-limited out, but he said he doesn’t know.

It is widely assumed that the GOP nominee will be former Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey, who lost a close, nasty 2006 Senate primary to incumbent Linc Chafee. Chafee lost the general election and has left the party.

Laffey strikes me as excessively polarizing. But West seems to rate his prospects more highly. West calls Laffey “smart, opinionated, abrasive,” and declares, “A lot of people underestimate him. Whenever I talk with people, they always say, ‘Well, he can never win.’ But he actually has the perfect public opinion climate right now, because so few people in Rhode Island think the state is headed in the right direction; we’re facing a major budget crisis. That’s a perfect recipe for an opinionated outsider to ride in on a white horse and say, ‘I’m the guy who can straighten this mess out.’ ”

Chafee may run for governor as an independent — the former Warwick mayor also raises the idea of running for Providence mayor — and West says, “He’d be a strong candidate for whatever office he sought, because people like him and they respect him.” And, yes, they feel bad they were obliged to boot him out in 2006 because, in their zeal to set back President Bush, they were intent on electing a Democratic Senate.

As for the contest for the Democratic nod for governor, West credits Cicilline for thinking a lot about public policy issues. “I mean, he has real debates with his staff about what needs to be done, and he’s been very honest and has retained a lot of popularity, not just in Providence but statewide.”

Yet there is also a flip side to being mayor: “People in the rest of the state tend to view Providence as Sodom and Gomorrah, because you have crime, you have terrible schools, you have high taxes.”

As for Caprio, West takes him very seriously. “He is well funded. He’s a thoughtful individual. He has the advantage of being in an office that generally doesn’t generate a lot of problems. It’s not like a mayor where, if schools are terrible, people blame you for that. … As long as the [state] portfolio performs reasonably well, there aren’t a lot of negatives there.”

Also eying the Democratic nod for governor is Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts. West says, “She has great upside potential. She’s very smart, very knowledgeable about health-care issues. She’s starting to raise money. If it’s a crowded field, I think that would help her, especially if Caprio and Cicilline go nuclear against one another.”

West says Attorney General Patrick Lynch also could be a strong contender in a large field, but he’s less sanguine about two other possible candidates, former Lt. Gov. Charlie Fogarty and former Congressman Bob Weygand. Fogarty has been real low profile since losing to Carcieri in 2006. Weygand has been out of office for eight years; “It’s hard to come back after that,” says West.

Interestingly, Cicilline is hardly the only politician on the scene who went to Brown. So did Chafee, Roberts, Lynch — and Carcieri.

Whatever happened to Carcieri, the business executive/reformer who was such a breath of fresh air, a natural political talent, when he burst into politics in 2002, and now is mired in one controversy after another?

“I don’t know. I think he’s lost his political footing,” says West. “I think people liked him because he came across as their grandfather. He was folksy. He related very well to ordinary people. He was a very strong communicator. Now he seems to be pursuing a very conservative agenda and he seems more like a Republican than your grandfather.”

A Newt Gingrich Republican, West says.

Carcieri hardly has succeeded in transforming the landscape. Still, this doesn’t mean government operates exactly as it always has. West says the governor has had an impact in changing the conversation: “We now are having public sector employees have to contribute much more to their health-care costs and their retirement benefits.”

On the other hand, “He’s scapegoating illegal immigrants. … For the last six months he’s attacked welfare mothers for having too many children. He’s gone after non-English speakers who need translation. … I just think he’s opening too many fronts.”

In West’s office there are photos showing the professor with Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during visits to Brown.

He says Obama will be the next president of the United States.

“She’s not going to be the Democratic nominee,” West says. “She seems to be the only one who doesn’t recognize that fact.”

He also says Clinton has too much baggage for Obama to offer her the vice presidency.

Obama spoke at Brown in October 2006. “He gave one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard,” West recalls. “Very smart. Very charismatic. People love him. I think he needs to fine tune his message. Primary after primary, he’s lost the blue-collar vote to Hillary Clinton, and I think he really needs to focus more on economics and focus on working people and what he would do for them. I think they’re a little suspicious of all the lofty rhetoric that he uses. They want to know what he’s going to do about bread and butter issues.”

In John McCain, West says, Republicans are putting up their strongest candidate, but it’s not enough.

“McCain does well among independents, and that’s going to be a plus. People like him personally. They think he’s honest and ethical. But I think the big albatross around his neck is George Bush.”

With the unpopularity of the war, with worry over the economy, and with people’s “hate” of the incumbent, West says the Democrats’ chant that McCain is running for Bush’s third term will be lethal.

In calling Bush the worst president he has ever seen, West asserts, “He doesn’t learn from past failures.”

Most politicians make adjustments, West says, noting, for example, that Ronald Reagan was rocked by the Iran-Contra scandal but made personnel and policy changes. “By the time he left office, he had regained a fair amount of his popularity. Bush is going down with the ship. He refuses to admit any mistakes, hasn’t made any significant policy changes, hasn’t really made major changes in personnel. He’s not a real politician in the good sense of the word.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.