New Books

Power Without Constraint: The Post 9/11 Presidency and National Security (University of Wisconsin Press 2016)

Chris Edelson (American University)

As a candidate for the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama criticized the Bush administration’s defense and assertion of unrestrained national security power. Candidate Obama criticized the unitary executive theory and inherent power while promising to restore the rule of law and limits on presidential power. However, as Chris Edelson discusses in Power Without Constraint: The Post 9/11 Presidency and National Security, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has itself often failed to recognize meaningful limits on presidential national security power.  The Obama administration has found different ways to reach essentially the same conclusion as the Bush administration in a number of specific areas. Specifically, like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has concluded that when it comes to the use of military force, targeted killing, state secrets, and surveillance, the president can act unilaterally, regardless of statutory and constitutional constraints.  Even in areas where there are differences between the results the Obama administration has reached (e.g. detention at Guantanamo, torture), there remain areas of overlap.  The Obama administration has often failed to identify plausible, meaningful limits on presidential national security power.  Although it has not embraced the unitary executive theory, the Obama administration has often reached conclusions about the scope of presidential power that are difficult to distinguish from the Bush administration.

Power Without Constraint considers what it means for a presidential administration to comply with the rule of law.  The book considers the use of presidential power before and after 9/11, with a focus on the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.  Edelson argues that, though the Bush administration’s approach to national security power more obviously breaks with the rule of law, the Obama administration’s approach often produces the same result, though through subtler methods.  In other words, the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, has failed to recognize meaningful statutory or constitutional limits on presidential power.

It is important to recognize distinctions: the Obama and Bush administration’s approaches are not identical.  For instance, the Obama administration has not claimed authority to set aside criminal law (as the Bush administration did with regard to FISA and the U.S. anti-torture law). However, by finding ways around statutory and constitutional limits in several substantive areas, President Obama missed an opportunity to make a clean break with the Bush administration’s embrace of unrestrained presidential national security power.  As a result, the combined legacy of the Bush and Obama presidencies raises crucial questions for future presidents, executive branch lawyers, members of Congress, the courts, and American citizens. Is there political will to restore a balance of powers among the branches of government and adherence to the rule of law? Or have national security concerns created a permanent shift to presidential power without constraint?

Chris Edelson, J.D.
Director, Politics, Policy and Law (PPL) Scholars Program
Assistant Professor
American University
Department of Government
School of Public Affairs
(202) 885-6218
edelson@american.edu

On Behalf of the President: Presidential Spouses and White House Communications Strategy Today (Greenwood Publishing 2016)

Lauren Wright 

The day following the 2012 Democratic National Convention, polling firms noted that Michelle Obama’s speech received over one million more online views than President Clinton’s speech, more than eight times the number of online views received by President Obama’s speech, and more views than all of the speeches made at the Republican National Convention combined. Mrs. Obama’s speech also drove unprecedented levels of social media activity, generating an average of 28,003 tweets per minute, nearly double the tweets for which Mitt Romney’s RNC acceptance speech was responsible (some 14,289 tweets per minute, according to USA Today). And no less notably, the picture of Mrs. Obama hugging her husband on the 2012 campaign trail in Iowa, wearing a quintessentially American red and white gingham sundress, was the most re-tweeted and received more likes on Facebook than any photo in history.  Michelle Obama has also been documented as the most televised American first lady, with 44 television appearances from 2008 to 2011 alone, dwarfing Laura Bush’s 12 appearances from 2001 to 2004 and Hillary Clinton’s 19 appearances from 1993 to 1996. When she appears on primetime television, networks witness hikes in their ratings, as the producers of The Biggest Loser, iCarly, Top Chef, and Parks and Recreation recently learned.

There is no doubt that presidential spouses are media superstars. What is more surprising is that their ability to attract the attention of Americans, and their propensity to actively seek that attention, surpasses that of other well-known surrogates and sometimes, presidents themselves. By promulgating stereotypes of first ladies as personal confidantes to the president and behind-the-scenes power brokers for decades, social scientists, historians, and journalists have failed to recognize one of the most important roles of presidential spouses: to enhance the president’s public image and expand public support for the administration’s policy agenda. Through dozens of interviews with former White House staff and communications strategists, in-depth analysis of almost 1,700 public speeches made by Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama, and survey experiments testing the effect of public relations strategies involving spouses on political opinion, this book illustrates, explains, and measures the impact of the expanding responsibility placed on presidential spouses in the last three administrations to communicate the president’s message.

This book primarily tests the assertions that first, the White House harnesses the first lady’s popularity strategically in order to garner public support for the president and his policy agenda, and second, that these appeals have a positive effect on individual evaluations of the president and certain administration-sponsored policies. A secondary set of experimental results that predict how the spouses of leading candidates for president in 2016 affect the public image of those candidates is also discussed in the epilogue chapter. As several elite interview participants appropriately conjectured, Bill Clinton may very well be able to do for Hillary Clinton’s public image what first ladies have done for decades: reveal the human face of the candidate through charming anecdotes and personal information, and engage the press in an informal and familiar manner.

Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (Cambridge University Press 2015)

Michael Albertus, University of Chicago

When and why do countries implement land reform programs? When is land reform redistributive, and what political purposes does it serve? And what place, if any, does land reform have in today's world?

A longstanding literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent work holds that redistribution should be both higher and more targeted at the poor under democracy. Yet comprehensive historical data to test this claim has been lacking.

This book shows that land redistribution – the most consequential form of social and economic redistribution in the developing world – occurs more often under dictatorship than democracy. It develops a theory of land reform that takes into account the key actors that influence land reform outcomes: political elites, landed elites, and the rural poor. Land redistribution occurs when two conditions are met: 1) a split between landed and political elites that gives political elites a coalitional incentive to redistribute; and 2) low institutional constraints, which would otherwise obstruct reform. Popular rural pressure can ratchet up the scope of land redistribution, but only when the political conditions are ripe for redistribution in the first place. The less redistributive types of land reform – land negotiation and land colonization – operate under logics distinct from land redistribution.

To test the theory, the book develops a typology of land reform policies and then presents detailed original data on these policies for all of Latin America from 1930-2008. Extensive statistical analyses of land reform during this period strongly support the theoretical argument. Two in-depth sub-national analyses of land reform in Peru and Venezuela also support the theory. These findings call for rethinking much of the common wisdom about redistribution and regimes.

The scope of the argument is not limited to Latin America. Using new data on major and minor episodes of land redistribution across the world from 1900-2010, the book shows that the broader patterns of redistribution trace those found in Latin America. Case studies of key countries such as Egypt, Hungary, Taiwan, and Zimbabwe support this finding.

The conclusion discusses how and why these findings challenge much of the received wisdom about the rural sector, discusses the normative implications of the main findings, and then suggests a set of solutions for addressing lingering rural poverty, landlessness, and unrest in the contemporary world.

Tea Party Divided: The Hidden Diversity of a Maturing Movement (Praeger 2015)

Heath Brown, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. 

Unlike previous books on the Tea Party, this work looks at the second phase of party growth to show that what was once considered a monolithic movement is truly a collection of different opinions.

Since the Tea Party exploded onto the American political scene, it has matured and changed, but the differences that now exist within the movement are largely unacknowledged. A more nuanced understanding is called for to understand the role played by the movement in recent and future presidential elections. Previous treatises have sought explanations for the rise of the movement and focused primarily on its early days. This book, in contrast, focuses on understanding the diversity within the party, challenging the notion that the Tea Party is a homogeneous political movement defined solely by its ultra-conservatism, regionalism, and rigid political orthodoxy. 

To accurately depict the Tea Party as it exists today, the book explores how the party evolved from its first phase to its second, examining important distinctions in terms of who has joined and who has served in Congress and other offices. Differences in Tea Party organizations around the country are examined and their funding sources considered. One set of Tea Party groups formed as highly decentralized organizations pursuing outsider strategies, such as protesting, in cities and counties across the country. Another set, exemplified by Tea Party Express, were much more centralized, Washington-based, and pursued insider strategies involving traditional campaign politics and lobbying. It is within this party of the Tea Party movement that incredibly large, and often non-transparent, sums of money have played a major role. As the movement moves from its first phase (2009-2010) to its second phase (2010-2014), the local organizing fades in importance, while the more centralized/insider approach takes on greater prominence, especially in the post-Citizen United Supreme Court ruling political environment. The book also explores the political positions taken by Tea Party members, looking at the voting records of party legislators to see if they've adhered to stated movement objectives. Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, the author speculates on what this all means and suggests possible futures for the diverse Tea Party strands, including the viability of several Tea Party-backed candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination as well as the rising role money plays in presidential politics. Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, in particular, reflect two strains of the Tea Party, the former a social conservative and the later a libertarian. The Tea Party backed both candidates when they first ran for election to the Senate, but each has struggled to maintain that support as they pursue the White House. 

When Government Helped: Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Sheila D. Collins and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, editors

The Great Depression and Great Recession are frequently compared, and so are the responses of the New Deal and the Obama administration to these economic crises. None of the comparisons, however, systematically examines what the successes and failures of the New Deal can teach us about solutions to the Great Recession and its aftermath. This book fills that gap by evaluating New Deal approaches to relief, recovery and reform along a wide range of policy issues, including a response to environmental degradation that is of particular contemporary relevance. The book offers new perspectives on the Great Depression and the choices taken by New Dealers on issues similar to those that confront contemporary publics. Through doing so, it demonstrates some possible ways out of our malaise—policies and programs that began modestly but were expanded, that were initiated but never fulfilled in the 1930s, that were raised as possibilities by popular movements but not allowed onto the political agenda, that were enacted but either discontinued or diminished, or that were simply unforeseen in an earlier era. Thus, the book presents a set of guideposts—some beneficial, some cautionary--for the future. Throughout the book point by point comparisons are made between the FDR and Obama administrations responses to economic crisis in chapters that cover topics such as the relative role of government vs the private sector, banking and finance reform, presidential responses to social movements and labor, employment and welfare state policy, environmental policy and the arts.

Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency (Palgrave Macmillan 2015)
Meredith Conroy, California State University at San Bernardino

In American politics the meaning of femininity is largely synonymous with weakness, and antithetical to leadership. Typically, masculine traits are preferred in public officials, as is expertise on more masculine issues, such as national security; especially in the context of the White House, feminine traits and feminine issues are largely deemed less relevant. Yet feminine characteristics are not replete of leadership potential. Empathy, deliberation, and cooperation are characteristics that are valuable leadership traits. Yet, due to our cultural expectations of leadership as masculine, to express feminine traits is to be a weak leader. To the extent that media play a role in maintenance of this gender hierarchy, where masculinity is the norm—and preference—in American politics is the focus of Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency.

Using a content analysis of print news for the 2000 through the 2012 presidential elections, Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency explores the extent to which the media play a role in perpetuating a political environment where masculinity is preferred. To capture whether this is the tendency, Conroy recorded the characteristics and traits used to describe the presidential nominees, noting whether the traits were masculine, feminine, or neutral, as well as the tone of the traits (positive, negative or neutral). Her analysis of the candidates’ media coverage finds that journalists often uses gender conflict framing to create narratives in which a more masculine candidate is in conflict with a more feminine candidate, regardless of the candidate’s sex. Furthermore, she finds this discourse maintains a preference for traits associated with masculinity in US politics; masculine traits were more often praiseworthy, and feminine traits were more often invoked as a means of debasing or criticizing the candidates.

Unfortunately, the affect of the media’s use of gendered language in presidential elections extends beyond the candidate whose image is feminized. This sort of discourse in media surrounding presidential elections, even where only men are running, influence the public’s general perceptions of women, their capacities for leadership, and their representation in our government. As long as media, and thereby the public, praise more masculine characteristics and styles, female candidates will be at a disadvantages, and notions of representation will remain unnecessarily narrow.

The VP Advantage: How Running Mates Influence Home State Voting in Presidential Elections (Manchester University Press 2016)

Christopher J. Devine and Kyle C. Kopko

           A widespread perception exists among political commentators, campaign operatives, and presidential candidates that vice presidential running mates can “deliver” their home state’s electoral votes in a presidential election.  In recent elections, presidential campaigns have even changed their strategy in response to the perceived “vice presidential home state advantage.”  For example, in 2012, both the Obama and Romney campaigns devoted a disproportionate amount of advertising dollars and campaign visits to Wisconsin, as compared with other battleground states, following Paul Ryan’s selection as Republican vice presidential nominee.  In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign largely withdrew from Alaska upon Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate.  And in 2004, both the Bush and Kerry campaigns began to contest North Carolina after Kerry’s selection of John Edwards as the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

But is the perception of a vice presidential home state advantage real?  And could it decide a presidential election?  The VP Advantage is the most comprehensive analysis to date, and the first book-length manuscript, to analyze whether and under what circumstances vice presidential candidates influence vote choice and other key aspects of political behavior among home state voters in presidential elections.  Utilizing a multi-method approach, Devine and Kopko find that the vice presidential home state advantage is limited to candidates who come from relatively less-populous home states and have extensive political experience within that state.   Moreover, this advantage – when it occurs – is extremely unlikely to prove decisive in the Electoral College.   Indeed, Devine and Kopko present evidence to challenge the most prominent example of a purportedly decisive home state advantage in recent history – John Kennedy’s selection of Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson in 1960.  Using American National Election Studies data and internal polling from the Kennedy-Johnson campaign, Devine and Kopko find no evidence to support the hypothesis that Johnson provided an electoral advantage for the Democratic ticket in Texas or the South in 1960.  However, this is not to say that vice presidential candidates are irrelevant in presidential elections.  There is evidence that a vice presidential candidate could, under narrow but plausible circumstances, deliver a decisive home state advantage for his or her ticket.  Specifically, Devine and Kopko’s empirical analysis suggests that Al Gore could have secured a majority of Electoral College votes if he had selected vice presidential finalist Jeanne Shaheen, of New Hampshire, as his running mate in 2000.  Finally, the authors examine the influence of presidential versus vice presidential feeling thermometer ratings to gauge the relative importance of running mates in presidential elections, finding that they influence presidential voting but much less so than their partners at the top of the ticket.

Written in an accessible manner that is appropriate for graduate and undergraduate students alike, The VP Advantage reminds readers of the gap that sometimes exists between conventional wisdom and empirical reality, and the importance of subjecting conventional wisdom to scientific analysis.  Rich in historical as well as contemporary insight, The VP Advantage is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how running mates influence presidential elections.

Pitiful Giants: Presidents in Their Final Term (Palgrave Macmillan 2014)
Daniel P. Franklin, Georgia State University

Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, in this book I have examined presidential transitions from the perspective of the leaving administration. If there is one characteristic shared by lame duck presidents it is that, freed from the demands of running for office, lame duck presidents become the persons they are. If they are worried about money, they look for work. If they are in poor health, they scale back their activities. If they are embarrassed by the performance of their Administrations they seek redemption. And if they fear the policies of the party opposite, they try in every way they can to lock in policies they have already set in place.

Fortunately for us most leaving presidents are as public spirited in the end as they are in the beginning. But if there is one thing common in that regard, presidents on their way out of office tend to have a sense of history. And because under the current constitutional scheme they cannot serve again as president, for the rest of their lives, there is more of an incentive than ever to swing for the fences. Eisenhower tried for a comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; Johnson, peace in Vietnam; Reagan, nuclear disarmament and Clinton, peace in the Middle East. But that is not the only change that results from the current constitutional arrangement. It is likely that the 22^nd Amendment, to limit the number of presidential terms, will have the perverse effect of increasing the length and frequency of lame duck presidencies.

In the end nothing can be done to take the human component out of the presidential transition. Each transition is different and, as noted in the book, the freedom from ever having to face the voters again allows leaving presidents to become the persons they are at that stage in their lives. Thus, lame duck presidencies are very individualistic. While no institutionalized process is a guarantee of success, at the very minimum the transition process should be aimed at the best possible result. Thus, we still need to rely on the good will and intelligence of our elected officials and so far, in the main, we’ve done pretty well.

Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (W.W. Norton 2016)

David Greenberg, Rutgers University

Republic of Spin recounts the rise, from the Progressive Era until today, of the White House spin machine—the vast apparatus of tools and techniques that presidents use to shape their images, their messages, and public opinion. In the nineteenth century, presidents did relatively little to mobilize the public behind their agendas. But modern presidents, notably Theodore Roosevelt, turned the executive into an activist office, using such new methods as speaking tours, publicity stunts, press conferences, and the hiring of dedicated press aides. Roosevelt—and Woodrow Wilson after him—established practices and institutions for influencing public opinion that no subsequent president could safely ignore.

After recounting the Progressive Era origins of spin in its formative “Age of Publicity,” Republic of Spin then traces the development of a series of media management methods. It explores the contributions of both key politicians and their aides—some famous, some obscure—who made the traffic in words, images, and symbols a central part of modern politics: George Creel and Bruce Barton, Charles Michelson and Robert Montgomery, Roger Ailes and James Carville, and dozens more. According to the book’s chronology, the initial “Age of Publicity” was followed by an “Age of Ballyhoo” during the 1920s, when the ethos of flashy advertising and public relations permeated politics; an “Age of Communication,” in the 1930s and 1940s, when radio and public opinion polling allowed leaders such as Franklin Roosevelt engage with a democratic public; an “Age of News Management,” when Cold War security imperatives led presidents to finely calibrate the release of information; an “Age of Image Making,” when television and its production values dominated White House communication; and, finally, our current “Age of Spin,” in which politicians and media figures of all stripes competed relentlessly to win the ceaseless imaging and messaging wars.

Thus one narrative strand tells the history of the tools and techniques of spin—the development of the White House press office and its speechwriting office, of presidential polling and interagency publicity working groups, of radio and TV and the internet. Simultaneously, though, Republic of Spin also recounts how writers, intellectuals, and journalists analyzed these innovations and assessed their implications for democracy in a mass society. At each stage, debates raged: Some observers descried a boon for popular government, holding that leaders could now understand and satisfy public opinion with new precision. Others foresaw the corruption of democracy, suggesting that politicians would use these methods to deceive the public. Still others were realists, acknowledging the perils of spin yet insisting that information and education could maintain a public capable of carrying out the tasks of self-government. From Edward Ross to Walter Lippmann, Lindsay Rogers to Vance Packard, Hannah Arendt to Stephen Colbert, the book considers how these and other incisive thinkers made sense of the ever-broadening world of political spin.

In offering this historical narrative, Republic of Spin also makes an argument about spin’s efficacy, suggesting that the public is not as susceptible to manipulation as is commonly supposed. At its core, spin is the means by which leaders make their case in a democratic republic. Audiences, moreover, are resistant to uncongenial information and wise to manipulation; they can see through spin—or challenge it, or applaud it, as the case demands. Spin works best, the book suggests, not when it tries to persuade people of things they don’t believe but when it highlights things they already believe. Good spin resonates and engages the public. Its history since the days of TR shows it to be a force not just for misleading but also for leading. 

Michael L. Mezey, DePaul University

Presidentialism: Power in Comparative Perspective. (Lynn Rienner, 2013)  

Presidentialism is a phenomenon characterized by a broadly shared public perception that places a nation’s president at the center of its politics and views him (or her), no matter what constraints the president may face, as the person primarily responsible for dealing with the challenges before the country. In addition, presidentialism is characterized by the efforts that presidents and others make to increase the power and authority of the presidency so that the occupants of the office will have the capacity to meet the expectations that the public holds for them, or simply because it is in the nature of presidents to seek to aggrandize their power. Finally, presidentialism refers to the actual movement of power and authority in the direction of the president, either through usurpation by the executive, or abdication and delegation by other branches of government.

Presidentialism has been driven by three forces: the expanding role of government in the lives of its citizens which has led to an increase in the size and prominence of the executive branch of government; the globalization of public policy issues to the point where there are fewer purely domestic issues and more policy issues that are international in nature and therefore more likely to be dominated by the executive branch; and democratization and modern electronic media which have combined to create an increasingly intimate bond between presidents and their people.

Presidentialism looks at the way these forces have affected the American presidency as well as presidencies around the world. The book also includes an intellectual history of executive power, a discussion of the invention of the office in the United States and its adoption and modification in other countries, and a balanced discussion of both the perils as well as the promise of presidentialism.

The book’s comparative perspective on the presidency is a departure from both the country studies that have been typical of the field and the focus on individual presidencies that has characterized much of the literature on the American presidency.

Andrew J. Polsky (ed.) The Eisenhower Presidency: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books 2015)

The chapters in this volume, by leading Eisenhower scholars from history and political science, address the lessons we might draw from the Eisenhower experience for presidential leadership today. By design, the authors use history in a self-consciously “presentist” approach. The topics covered included Eisenhower’s innovations in organizing the presidency, his enduring influence on the Republican Party, his creative use of appointment powers to shape the relative power of economic interests, his record on civil rights, his direction of science policy, strategic planning in foreign policy since Eisenhower, his Middle East policies and their consequences, his contentious relations with the U.S. military leadership, and his determined efforts to curb defense spending despite the persistent tensions of the Cold War. The chapters draw heavily on archival research by the authors, as well as on published materials. 

Although most of the authors find much to admire in the Eisenhower record, they express varying opinions on how applicable his approach would be for our own time. On one side, they appreciate his limited faith in the power of his words to move public opinion, his avoidance of pointless partisan confrontation, his commitment to strategic leadership, and his reluctance to turn to the use of force to solve international problems. On the other side, the authors conclude that Ike’s exercise of “hidden-hand” leadership (in Fred Greenstein’s evocative term) would not be possible in the modern media environment that makes Washington a giant fishbowl and that other conditions would make it impossible to emulate key aspects of his presidency.

The Institutional Effects of Executive Scandals (Cambridge University Press 2015)

Brandon Rottinghaus, University of Houston

Watergate, Iran-Contra, Lewinsky, Enron, Bridgegate: according to the popular media, executive scandals are ubiquitous. Although individual scandals persist in the public memory and as the subject of academic study, how do we understand the impacts of executive indiscretion or malfeasance as a whole? What effect, if any, do scandals have on political polarization, governance, and most importantly democratic accountability? Recognizing the important and enduring role of scandals in American government, this book proposes a common intellectual framework for understanding their nature and political effects.

Given the continual presence of political scandals and the toll that such events have on cooperation, political bargaining and the arc of political careers, this book takes a systematic look the dynamics of what shapes the duration of a scandal, the way scandals affect presidents and governors’ capacity to govern and the strategic choices executives make in confronting scandal at both the state and national levels.  This book specifically explores the frequency of scandals at the state and national levels affecting both governors and presidents from 1972 to 2012, how these scandals cause executives to react to allegations, conditions under which executives and related officials “survive” scandals, the effect of scandals on policy and political actions, the effect of scandal on executive-legislative relations and the reaction of the legal system to scandals. 

In the aftermath of scandal, political actors demonstrate a robust institutional resiliency, and although political accountability is often compromised, the political system responds with additional scrutiny.  Indeed, chief executives are generally more likely to adapt than retrench.  Executives react expectedly to scandals, dictated by their central position in the political system.  Both presidents and governors respond aggressively to revelations of scandal, large and small, by adapting their behavior and using the powers of their office to demonstrate political fortitude.  Although the institutions of government survive these crises, democratic accountability, the lifeblood of the public political system, is often limited by scandal.  Scandals involving presidents or governors are more likely to be met with obfuscation rather than truth telling (especially if the scandal is serious), nominees involved in scandal are permanently thwarted and more legislative allies and political stonewalling leads to greater political survival.  The system, though, bends but doesn’t break in the aftermath of these crises; the system maintains good health and is responsive in predictable ways.  The system reacts to investigate and admonish further wrong doing in the aftermath of scandals:  more legislative hearings are held to probe wrongdoing and more investigations by internal and external agencies are conducted.  Ultimately, the institutional ramifications for executive scandals demonstrate impressive adaptability by the actors involved and the system at large.

Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post 9/11 Presidency (Little Brown and Company, 2015)

Charlie Savage, New York Times

Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of change from George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” and he gathered around himself an elite group of liberal-minded national-security attorneys who were determined to restore what they saw as the rule of law. Yet this former constitutional scholar ended up entrenching drone strikes, a sprawling surveillance state, military trials for terrorism suspects, and – despite his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay wartime prison – the continued indefinite imprisonment of the detainees there whom he inherited. While the new commander-in-chief repudiated torture, Obama went further than Bush in other ways, including overseeing an unprecedented crackdown on leaks and ordering an American citizen killed without trial.

What happened?

In this riveting, meticulously detailed account, Charlie Savage takes readers behind the scenes of a momentous post-9/11 presidency. Bursting with exclusive information based on his interviews with more than 150 current and former officials, Savage lays bare the deliberations of Obama’s national security legal policy team as it wrestled with a seemingly ceaseless series of crises and high-stakes dilemmas. Savage brings readers through emotional debates over the fates of detainees held because torture-tainted evidence suggested that they were dangerous, and over acts of war in Libya and Syria that had no authorization from Congress. He uncovers extensive new details about planning for the Osama Bin Laden raid. He comprehensively explores the Obama-era leak crackdown, and scrutinizes the embrace of secrecy by an administration that once boasted of being the most transparent in history. He reconstructs the fateful meeting where a newly inaugurated Obama learned that he had inherited a National Security Agency program that was collecting every Americans’ phone records – and decided to keep it.

Power Wars also provides lucid explanations of complex national-security legal problems in a way that non-lawyers can understand. It pieces together the first coherent, publicly available history of how American surveillance secretly developed over the past 35 years. It reveals crucial new information for understanding the politically charged aftermath to the failed Christmas underwear bombing that nearly ruined Obama’s presidency. It includes Savage’s own eyewitness reporting at Guantanamo, detailed accounts of closed-door meetings at the highest levels of power and unreported secret memos, and vivid portraits of powerful officials whose names rarely appear in the press but who exercised extraordinary influence over the nation – and the world.

Power Wars equips readers to answer a fundamental question of the post-9/11 era: “Did Obama become Bush?” 

Presidential Elections: Strategies and Structures of American Politics, 14^th ed. (Rowman and Littlefield 2015).

NELSON W. POLSBY, AARON WILDAVSKY, STEVEN E. SCHIER, AND DAVID A. HOPKINS

Our fourteenth edition of this classic text offers a complete overview of the presidential election process from the earliest straw polls and fundraisers to final voter turnout and exit interviews. The comprehensive coverage includes campaign strategy, the sequence of electoral events, and the issues, all from the perspective of the various actors in the election process: voters, interest groups, political parties, the media, and the candidates themselves.

This new edition incorporates major revisions that explore the new world of 21^st century presidential elections.  The theme of partisan polarization receives through coverage throughout the book.  We provide complete coverage of the 2012 election and presidential selection process changes for 2016 and explain the new 2016 campaign finance rules and their implications.  The book analyzes the increasing demographic diversity of the presidential electorate and its possible 2016 impacts and includes insights on the evolution and impact of new "microtargeting" campaign technology.  Our analysis of possible reforms of the presidential election process is revised and updated.  We also include a list of most and least effective general election TV ads by Obama and Romney and excerpts from the major party platforms.

Exam copies available here -- https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442253650/Presidential-Elections-Strategies-and-Structures-of-American-Politics-Fourteenth-Edition

American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford University Press 2014)

Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, both University of Miami

Americans have been conspiracy theorists since the beginning of America, but what do we really know about American conspiracy theories? Why do some burn brightly and endure while others flicker and fade? Why does the overall popularity of conspiracy theorizing change over time? How do conspiracy theorists compare to other citizens? How do new technologies impact conspiracy talk? Are we in danger from conspiracy fueled violence? Using a unique trove of data, American Conspiracy Theories is the first work to combine over a century of U.S. conspiracy theories with contemporary national surveys. It finds that many of the received wisdoms are not supported by the evidence, but that power is at the root of perceptions. Domestic political power, the presidency in particular, appears to drive the direction and content of most American conspiracy theorizing. While survey results suggest everyone is susceptible to conspiracy theories, some people are particularly prone – these people tend to be poorer financially and less educated. They are also less likely to vote, donate money, and invest in the market; but they are more likely to support the use of violence for political ends. Despite their alluring luster, it is difficult to know the truth behind conspiracy theories. Was President Obama born in Kenya? Did President Bush destroy the Twin Towers to precipitate a war in the Middle East? For many, these are contestable questions about political truth rather than verifiable facts. If a secret group is intent on hiding truth and throwing out red herrings, why should expect to find confirming evidence of the plot? Or, be surprised when disconfirming evidence is presented by authoritative sources? American Conspiracy Theories argues that conspiracy theories and theorists are not as crazy as they have been portrayed, and perhaps, there is a democratic value to conspiracy theorizing. Beneath the Byzantine surface of successful conspiracy theories lurks a strategic logic. Shifts in power and influence have predictable effects on American conspiracy theorizing, suggesting, despite its bad name, that the pastime is quite rational and perhaps even necessary. 

Czars in the White House: The Rise of Policy Czars as Presidential Management Tools (University of Michigan Press, 2015)

Justin S. Vaughn and José D. Villalobos

One of the earliest and most jarring hurdles that Barack Obama’s transition effort faced in late 2008 and throughout 2009 was the unanticipated yet voracious debate over the 44^th president’s allegedly excessive reliance on policy czars.  Czars, an evocative term for an ambiguous administrative concept, suddenly went from being a frequently overused and abused journalistic shortcut to a potential threat to the constitutional order.  The Obama Administration subsequently found itself embroiled in a controversy about staffing decisions that critics from the right and left challenged as excessive, illegal, and potentially symptomatic of a hidden governing agenda.  Left unsaid—or at least said at a decibel level significantly lower than the charges being tossed about by participants in the political debate—was the fact that no clear consensus exists about what precisely constitutes a czar, much less the threat they pose to key American governing principles such as checks and balances and separation of powers.

In this book, we investigate the rise of policy czars as an increasingly important managerial tool in the modern presidency.  In doing so, we examine the historical dynamics that have given rise to this staffing phenomenon and put forward a theoretical argument that the employment of policy czars, like other recent controversial developments such as executive agreements and signing statements, is largely a function of the growing gap between what is expected of presidential leadership and what is possible given the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and the increasingly polarized political environment that presidents must operate within.  We go on to analyze several key cases of presidential usage of policy czars, from the era of the energy czars in the 1970s to expansive coverage of the rise of the drug czar throughout the Twentieth Century.  We also examine the establishment and subsequent performance of the AIDS czar, the role played by George W. Bush’s trio of national security czars after 9/11, and the more contemporary political debate over czars that began in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency.

 

Laying aside inflammatory political rhetoric, we offer a sober, empirical analysis of what precisely constitutes a czar, why Obama and his predecessors used czars, and what role they have played in the modern presidency.  We explain not only why presidents have increasingly employed czars over the past four decades, but to also determine why czars have gone from a largely embraced administrative strategy—one exercised by presidents to symbolically as well as substantively tackle salient policy problems—to a controversial phenomenon that left the current administration eschewing the very word ‘czar’ amid opponents attempting to paint dozens of influential presidential advisors with the characterization while drawing attention to autocratic dimensions of the word’s meaning and authoritative dimensions of the personnel practice.  By engaging this subject from a dual perspective—one that links rhetorical dynamics with administrative dimensions of presidential policy leadership—we are able to better understand the roots and consequences of this presidential personnel phenomenon and predict the future of czars in the White House.

See more at: https://www.press.umich.edu/7774485/czars_in_the_white_houseWHAT HAPPENED 

TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY? AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS (Routledge 2016).

 JOHN KENNETH WHITE, Catholic University of America 

What Happened to the Republican Party? is a question that is foremost in the minds of political commentators. For months, the Republican presidential contest has been dominated by two outsiders who have never before sought political office: Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Each appeals to the dissatisfaction rollicking the GOP base and their fears about the future direction of the country. Republicans dread a third straight presidential defeat because it would mean that the party’s tentative control of the Supreme Court would be lost; Obamacare would become a permanent feature of the social safety net; the cultural changes symbolized by the legalization of gay marriage would proceed at breakneck speed; the rise of minority groups would accelerate thanks to an immigration policy that encourages migrants to come to the U.S.; and the executive orders signed by Obama would remain in force (and would even be enhanced) in a new Democratic administration.

Democrats, too, fear a presidential loss because it would signify a rollback of many (if not all) of Barack Obama’s achievements–something that would be highly likely since a GOP White House win would indicate that Republicans would be in charge of both houses of Congress. The Democratic base is also severely weakened at the state and local levels thanks to landslide losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections, reducing their talent base for higher offices such as the presidency.

But while Democrats have their own unique set of difficulties, it is the Republicans who have the bigger task. Today’s Republican Party is divided between an insurgent Tea Party wing and a conservative, but pragmatic, establishment that sees the party’s reasons to exist very differently. Tea Party Republicans emphasize the party’s long-standing commitment to less government and reducing taxes; they also believe that the Constitution has been flaunted by President Obama and want his unconstitutional actions rolled back; and they are frightened by a new racial demography that will make the U.S. a majority-minority nation by mid-century. What Happened to the Republican Party? describes the many challenges facing today’s GOP–including the drawing of new demographic maps; the need for Republicans to dispatch Ronald Reagan into the history books and find a new leader; and the need to rethink conservatism for a new century–something that is largely lacking in the conservative think tanks that once hummed with new ideas. The book argues that the Republican Party remains a political necessity, as it has become the home for Thomas Jefferson’s skepticism of a powerful federal government and his belief that most of the country’s problems should be solved outside of Washington, D.C. But the party’s future is endangered by a base that gives its leaders no latitude and is uninterested in governing. 2016 is likely to be an inflection point, as the future direction of the Republican Party is at stake. What path Republicans choose is likely to determine our country’s political future.