The Performative Presidency: Crisis and Resurrection during the Clinton Years. By James L.Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 198 pp.

Abstract

The Performative Presidency: Crisis and Resurrection during the Clinton Years. By James L. Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 198 pp. In The Performative Presidency, Jason L. Mast discusses two presidents. The first is a likeable fellow, empathetic, inclusive, and brilliant, who seemed to spring naturally from a Horatio Alger (p. 43). The second is an antidemocratic villain, verbally evasive, sexually promiscuous, with a chronically slippery relationship to the truth. Both are named Bill Clinton. Mast's book traces the waxing and waning influence of these two interpretations of Clinton's character across his first presidential campaign and through both terms of his administration. In the process, it illuminates much about how Americans make cultural meaning out of political performances. Mast frames the story of the two Clintons with twin introductions, the first theoretical and the second historical. The historical framework is wonderfully illuminating, tracing the formation of what Mast calls conditions of (p. 18) in American political culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1990s. Defusion refers simultaneously to the dissolution of a presumed-to-be unified American public, the dissemination of the interpretive power of the presidency across diverse technologies, and the separation of the office of the president from the officeholder. Mast identifies myriad factors in the formation of these conditions, including the decreased dominance of Congress and political parties in the American political sphere of the 1890s, the expanded interpretive authority of reporters, and the rise of televised campaigning. The factors also include historically idiosyncratic events, most notably Watergate, which opened the most radical possibilities for defusion of the president's office from its occupant. The rest of the book deftly tracks key events in the making of cultural meaning around Clinton's presidency. Mast identifies the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 as the watershed moment of Clinton's first term, a moment of symbolic inversion in which the president re-fused with his sacred office (p. 134). The analysis marshals dramatic and decisive evidence for this shift in meaning, including an evaluation of two press conferences held 24 hours apart--the first before and the second after the bombing--with breathtakingly different media and public responses. Mast also skillfully illuminates the ways in which the meanings of Clinton's performances were contingent upon those of his political adversaries, most notably President George H. W. Bush, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and special prosecutor Ken Starr. In particular, the book's extended treatment of Gingrich's performances in relation to Clinton's before and during the Monica Lewinsky scandal offers the most persuasive explanation to date for why Clinton's impeachment failed to adversely affect his popularity. …