The Beleaguered Presidency
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| Author | : Aaron Wildavsky |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 289 |
| Release | : 2017-07-28 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1351485679 |
Since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson between 1963 and 1968, there is much reason to believe that the executive office is in trouble. For the past twenty-five years, presidents have been subject to continuing criticism, with dissatisfaction rising, approval rates falling, and demands becoming impossible to meet. Is it that Americans have become an unlucky people whose noble virtues have been undermined by the unfortunate fact that they keep nominating and electing bad presidents? Or is there a systemic reason for a beleaguered presidency in the rise of an egalitarian culture, amplified through the media which is opposed to authority? This book confronts these questions and inquires into their consequences for presidential behavior.In Wildavsky's view, the growth of political discord since the sixties-opposing views on policy matters and social issues ranged along egalitarian versus hierarchical lines-has created a demarcation between a past presidency in which national leaders had a chance to do well and present and future presidents seeking to adapt to their slim chances of leaving office with their reputations intact.Wildavsky demonstrates how various recent presidents have attempted to escape or overcome their beleaguered status by such devices as focusing on only a few issues or shedding responsibility (or blame) to other actors, or treating policy problems as if they were essentially administrative in nature. The book analyzes the wide divergence on public policy among Democratic and Republican activists and assesses the efforts of presidents from Nixon through Bush to cope, at times successfully, often not, with these divisions.The final chapters contrast the ideological presidency of Ronald Reagan with the procedural presidency of George Bush. Both are considered in the context of a governmental system that requires leadership but does not often support it. The final chapter is the first effort to make sense out of George Bush's relative lack of interest in
| Author | : Stephen Skowronek |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 288 |
| Release | : 2021-03-01 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0197543103 |
A powerful dissection of one of the fundamental problems in American governance today: the clash between presidents determined to redirect the nation through ever-tighter control of administration and an executive branch still organized to promote shared interests in steady hands, due deliberation, and expertise. President Trump pitted himself repeatedly against the institutions and personnel of the executive branch. In the process, two once-obscure concepts came center stage in an eerie faceoff. On one side was the specter of a "Deep State" conspiracyadministrators threatening to thwart the will of the people and undercut the constitutional authority of the president they elected to lead them. On the other side was a raw personalization of presidential power, one that a theory of "the unitary executive" gussied up and allowed to run roughshod over reason and the rule of law. The Deep State and the unitary executive framed every major contest of the Trump presidency. Like phantom twins, they drew each other out. These conflicts are not new. Stephen Skowronek, John A. Dearborn, and Desmond King trace the tensions between presidential power and the depth of the American state back through the decades and forward through the various settlements arrived at in previous eras. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic is about the breakdown of settlements and the abiding vulnerabilities of a Constitution that gave scant attention to administrative power. Rather than simply dump on Trump, the authors provide a richly historical perspective on the conflicts that rocked his presidency, and they explain why, if left untamed, the phantom twins will continue to pull the American government apart.
| Author | : Christopher J. Leahy |
| Publisher | : LSU Press |
| Total Pages | : 508 |
| Release | : 2020-05-06 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 080717355X |
Historians have long viewed President John Tyler as one of the nation’s least effective heads of state. In President without a Party—the first full-scale biography of Tyler in more than fifty years and the first new academic study of him in eight decades—Christopher J. Leahy explores the life of the tenth chief executive of the United States. Born in the Virginia Tidewater into an elite family sympathetic to the ideals of the American Revolution, Tyler, like his father, worked as an attorney before entering politics. Leahy uses a wealth of primary source materials to chart Tyler’s early political path, from his election to the Virginia legislature in 1811, through his stints as a congressman and senator, to his vice-presidential nomination on the Whig ticket for the campaign of 1840. When William Henry Harrison died unexpectedly a mere month after assuming the presidency, Tyler became the first vice president to become president because of the death of the incumbent. Leahy traces Tyler’s ascent to the highest office in the land and unpacks the fraught dynamics between Tyler and his fellow Whigs, who ultimately banished the beleaguered president from their ranks and stymied his election bid three years later. Leahy also examines the president’s personal life, especially his relationships with his wives and children. In the end, Leahy suggests, politics fulfilled Tyler the most, often to the detriment of his family. Such was true even after his presidency, when Virginians elected him to the Confederate Congress in 1861, and northerners and Unionists branded him a “traitor president.” The most complete accounting of Tyler’s life and career, Leahy’s biography makes an original contribution to the fields of politics, family life, and slavery in the antebellum South. Moving beyond the standard, often shortsighted studies that describe Tyler as simply a defender of the Old South’s dominant ideology of states’ rights and strict construction of the Constitution, Leahy offers a nuanced portrayal of a president who favored a middle-of-the-road, bipartisan approach to the nation’s problems. This strategy did not make Tyler popular with either the Whigs or the opposition Democrats while he was in office, or with historians and biographers ever since. Moreover, his most significant achievement as president—the annexation of Texas—exacerbated sectional tensions and put the United States on the road to civil war.
| Author | : Bob Woodward |
| Publisher | : Simon and Schuster |
| Total Pages | : 1068 |
| Release | : 2012-12-11 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1471104729 |
Twenty-five years after Richard Nixon's resignation, investigative journalist Bob Woodward examines the legacy of Watergate. Based on hundreds of interviews - both on and off the record - and three years of research of government archives, Woodward's latest book explains in detail how the premier scandal of US history has indelibly altered the shape of American politics and culture - and has limited the power to act of the presidency itself. Bob Woodward's mix of historical perspective and journalistic sleuthing provides a unique perspective on the repercussions of Watergate and proves that it was far more than a passing, embarrassing crisis in American politics: it heralded the beginning of a new period of troubled presidencies. From Ford through to Clinton, presidents have battled public scepticism, a challenging Congress, adversarial press and even special prosecutors in their term in office. Now, a quarter of a century after the scandal emerged, the man who helped expose Watergate shows us the stunning impact of its heritage.
| Author | : Edward L. Widmer |
| Publisher | : Macmillan |
| Total Pages | : 208 |
| Release | : 2005-01-05 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 0805069224 |
The first president born after America's independence ushers in a new era of no-holds-barred democracy The first "professional politician" to become president, the slick and dandyish Martin Van Buren was to all appearances the opposite of his predecessor, the rugged general and Democratic champion Andrew Jackson. Van Buren, a native Dutch speaker, was America's first ethnic president as well as the first New Yorker to hold the office, at a time when Manhattan was bursting with new arrivals. A sharp and adroit political operator, he established himself as a powerhouse in New York, becoming a U.S. senator, secretary of state, and vice president under Jackson, whose election he managed. His ascendancy to the Oval Office was virtually a foregone conclusion. Once he had the reins of power, however, Van Buren found the road quite a bit rougher. His attempts to find a middle ground on the most pressing issues of his day-such as the growing regional conflict over slavery-eroded his effectiveness. But it was his inability to prevent the great banking panic of 1837, and the ensuing depression, that all but ensured his fall from grace and made him the third president to be denied a second term. His many years of outfoxing his opponents finally caught up with him. Ted Widmer, a veteran of the Clinton White House, vividly brings to life the chaos and contention that plagued Van Buren's presidency-and ultimately offered an early lesson in the power of democracy.
| Author | : Stephen Skowronek |
| Publisher | : University Press of Kansas |
| Total Pages | : 272 |
| Release | : 2020-01-30 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 0700629432 |
In this expanded third edition, renowned scholar Stephen Skowronek, addresses Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Skowronek’s insights have fundamentally altered our understanding of the American presidency. His “political time” thesis has been particularly influential, revealing how presidents reckon with the work of their predecessors, situate their power within recent political events, and assert their authority in the service of change. A classic widely used in courses on the presidency, Skowronek’s book has greatly expanded our understanding of and debates over the politics of leadership. It clarifies the typical political problems that presidents confront in political time, as well as the likely effects of their working through them, and considers contemporary innovations in our political system that bear on the leadership patterns from the more distant past. Drawing out parallels in the politics of leadership between Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt and between James Polk and John Kennedy, it develops a new and revealing perspective on the presidential leadership of Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump. In this third edition Skowronek carefully examines the impact of recent developments in government and politics on traditional leadership postures and their enactment, given the current divided state of the American polity, the impact of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, of a more disciplined and homogeneous Republican party, of conservative advocacy of the “unitary theory” of the executive, and of progressive disillusionment with the presidency as an institution. A provocative review of presidential history, Skowronek’s book brims with fresh insights and opens a window on the institution of the executive office and the workings of the American political system as a whole. Intellectually satisfying for scholars, it also provides an accessible volume for students and general readers interested in the American presidency.
| Author | : Michael Beschloss |
| Publisher | : Crown |
| Total Pages | : 754 |
| Release | : 2019-10-22 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0307409619 |
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From a preeminent presidential historian comes a “superb and important” (The New York Times Book Review) saga of America’s wartime chief executives “Fascinating and heartbreaking . . . timely . . . Beschloss’s broad scope lets you draw important crosscutting lessons about presidential leadership.”—Bill Gates Widely acclaimed and ten years in the making, Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War is an intimate and irresistibly readable chronicle of the Chief Executives who took the United States into conflict and mobilized it for victory. From the War of 1812 to Vietnam, we see these leaders considering the difficult decision to send hundreds of thousands of Americans to their deaths; struggling with Congress, the courts, the press, and antiwar protesters; seeking comfort from their spouses and friends; and dropping to their knees in prayer. Through Beschloss’s interviews with surviving participants and findings in original letters and once-classified national security documents, we come to understand how these Presidents were able to withstand the pressures of war—or were broken by them. Presidents of War combines this sense of immediacy with the overarching context of two centuries of American history, traveling from the time of our Founders, who tried to constrain presidential power, to our modern day, when a single leader has the potential to launch nuclear weapons that can destroy much of the human race. Praise for Presidents of War "A marvelous narrative. . . . As Beschloss explains, the greatest wartime presidents successfully leaven military action with moral concerns. . . . Beschloss’s writing is clean and concise, and he admirably draws upon new documents. Some of the more titillating tidbits in the book are in the footnotes. . . . There are fascinating nuggets on virtually every page of Presidents of War. It is a superb and important book, superbly rendered.”—Jay Winik, The New York Times Book Review "Sparkle and bite. . . . Valuable and engrossing study of how our chief executives have discharged the most significant of all their duties. . . . Excellent. . . . A fluent narrative that covers two centuries of national conflict.” —Richard Snow, The Wall Street Journal
| Author | : Jeffrey K. Tulis |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 264 |
| Release | : 2017-11-07 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1400888360 |
Modern presidents regularly appeal over the heads of Congress to the people at large to generate support for public policies. The Rhetorical Presidency makes the case that this development, born at the outset of the twentieth century, is the product of conscious political choices that fundamentally transformed the presidency and the meaning of American governance. Now with a new foreword by Russell Muirhead and a new afterword by the author, this landmark work probes political pathologies and analyzes the dilemmas of presidential statecraft. Extending a tradition of American political writing that begins with The Federalist and continues with Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government, The Rhetorical Presidency remains a pivotal work in its field.
| Author | : Steven Rosefielde |
| Publisher | : World Scientific |
| Total Pages | : 417 |
| Release | : 2021-07-29 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 9811236208 |
As a new president takes over in Washington, three intertwined threats imperil the world. One is internal. The others are external. The internal threat is a potent and increasingly anti-patriotic, anti-competitive, anti-meritocratic, and sky-is-the-limit federal deficit spending political current that is simultaneously diminishing and destabilizing American and global economic vitality. The two major external threats are the rising military power of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran and a global economic malaise sowing the seeds of discontent. America's role in containing the spread of new wave authoritarianism, and fostering competitiveness and global prosperity is critical, but domestic politics is preventing the Biden administration from adequately responding to these challenges. Biden's America is adrift.America is key to the survival of the free world. America is currently a beleaguered superpower. This book is possibly the first to address the politics shaping the likely course of America's new president in world affairs. It is politics, not idealist and realist abstractions, which determine international security. The world is concerned about what course Biden will take and the likely consequences. It will be the most carefully researched of such books.The book deals explicitly and extensively with issues such as spreading authoritarianism, the emerging new Cold War, global growth retardation, civic discord, economic sanctions, arms control, soft power and the deteriorating correlation of forces. The China weapons section of the book draws from the latest assessment made by the American Department of Defense. The book also includes a section on China's new technology generating innovation model and a chapter on Covid-19.
| Author | : Aaron B. Wildavsky |
| Publisher | : |
| Total Pages | : |
| Release | : 1991 |
| Genre | : POLITICAL SCIENCE |
| ISBN | : 9781315131078 |
"Since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson between 1963 and 1968, there is much reason to believe that the executive office is in trouble. For the past twenty-five years, presidents have been subject to continuing criticism, with dissatisfaction rising, approval rates falling, and demands becoming impossible to meet. Is it that Americans have become an unlucky people whose noble virtues have been undermined by the unfortunate fact that they keep nominating and electing bad presidents? Or is there a systemic reason for a beleaguered presidency in the rise of an egalitarian culture, amplified through the media which is opposed to authority? This book confronts these questions and inquires into their consequences for presidential behavior.In Wildavsky's view, the growth of political discord since the sixties-opposing views on policy matters and social issues ranged along egalitarian versus hierarchical lines-has created a demarcation between a past presidency in which national leaders had a chance to do well and present and future presidents seeking to adapt to their slim chances of leaving office with their reputations intact.Wildavsky demonstrates how various recent presidents have attempted to escape or overcome their beleaguered status by such devices as focusing on only a few issues or shedding responsibility (or blame) to other actors, or treating policy problems as if they were essentially administrative in nature. The book analyzes the wide divergence on public policy among Democratic and Republican activists and assesses the efforts of presidents from Nixon through Bush to cope, at times successfully, often not, with these divisions.The final chapters contrast the ideological presidency of Ronald Reagan with the procedural presidency of George Bush. Both are considered in the context of a governmental system that requires leadership but does not often support it. The final chapter is the first effort to make sense out of George Bush's relative lack of interest in"--Provided by publisher.
