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 22nd 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, 14th
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 21st
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.
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 44th 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.
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.
