Try to find a mentor. It is often very hard for an assistant professor to get tenure unless there is at least one senior member of the faculty who cares about the junior faculty member as a human being, and who will provide honest advice and go to bat for him at tenure time. If at first you don't succeed, be willing to try again. A number of distinguished faculty in political science didn't get tenure at their first institution. The assistant professor's lot is not an easy one, but it still has more job security and more freedom than all but a handful of jobs.
Tenure is worth struggling for.
A Wuffle is Assistant to Professor, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. He is currently at work on a series of essays on empirically insightful tautologies. Moreover, even in the unlikely event that change for the better occurs, its likely pace is so glacial that unless assistant professors have tenure they won't be around long enough to benefit from the change. Get a MacIntosh. Even a moron can learn to do word-processing on a Mac.