Contemporary Presidency Research Articles

The Contemporary Presidency: Cheney, Vice Presidential Power, and the War on Terror

This essay explores the relationship between the war on terror, the rise in presidential power, and the unprecedented nature of the Dick Cheney vice presidency, which is generally recognized as America's most influential vice presidency. Whereas historically the second office often had been dismissed as too feeble, the Cheney vice presidency sometimes was attacked as too robust. Although the events of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror certainly contributed in important ways to the rise of presidential and vice presidential power during the presidency of George W. Bush, both developments were under way and would have occurred, although differently, had al-Qaeda never attacked the United States. The author attributes Cheney's influential vice presidency in large part to a confluence of factors relating to Bush and Cheney that predated 9/11. The essay suggests that these factors produced a unique vice presidency that, for most of Cheney's tenure, allowed Cheney to escape conventional sources of vice presidential accountability.

The Contemporary Presidency: The Political Utility of Empathy in Presidential Leadership

In simple and precise terms, empathy is feeling what another person feels. It is the perception of another person's emotions. A debate over the importance of empathy in political leadership has generated considerable controversy since the 2008 election. However, Barack Obama's presidency is not the first to be affected by empathy; it has played an influential role in presidential leadership throughout American history. Focusing on the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, this essay explains why empathy is a critical governing and political resource, and argues that a paucity or excess of empathy can prove a dangerous liability for presidents.

Sanctioning Foreign Policy: The Rhetorical Use of President Harry Truman

Throughout his presidency, George W. Bush actively drew connections between the war on terror and World War II and/or the Cold War (see Chernus 2006; Ivie 2005; Noon 2004; Smith 2007). At the time, Bush also drew parallels between his presidency and that of his predecessors. For example, in a speech before the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Bush made comparisons between his administration and that of Harry Truman. He stated, As we advance the cause of freedom in Iraq, our Nation can proceed with confidence that we have done this kind of work before. After World War II, President Harry Truman believed that the way to help bring peace and prosperity to Asia was to plant the seeds of freedom and democracy in Japan. Like today, there were many skeptics and pessimists who said that the Japanese were not ready for democracy. Fortunately, Harry Truman stuck to his guns. He believed, as I do, in freedom's power to transform an adversary into an ally. And because he stayed true to his convictions, today Japan is one of the world's freest and most prosperous nations, and one of America's closest allies in keeping the peace. The spread of freedom to Iraq and the Middle East requires the confidence and persistence, and it will to the (Bush 2005) Here, Bush analogized the circumstances in postwar Japan to that of Iraq in the midst of the war on terror. For President Bush, the parallels between Truman's presidency and his own were undeniable and served as tacit evidence to justify his activities in Iraq. You could read Bush's message to the nation as this: Harry Truman was right about Japan, and my ability to the United States in Iraq is the as his. Thus, my efforts will be conducted with the same confidence and persistence and will lead to the results. Certainly, President Bush's use of the past is not an isolated example. Historical events and persons are often called upon in all aspects of society to celebrate some political purpose or appropriated in some way to meet the needs of the present day. For example, in American popular culture, the 1990s saw a resurgence of World War II nostalgia. Texts such as Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's best-selling book The Greatest Generation celebrated the contributions of the World War II generation, but more importantly, they offered up a civics lesson to the American people on the virtues of sacrifice and its own exceptionalist nature (Biesecker 2002). In the realm of politics, our discourse, particularly presidential rhetoric, is rife with references to past events and the great presidents of the past, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. When presidents invoke their predecessors, they are calling upon what Philip Abbott (1990) termed the exemplar presidents. Donald Rice (1992) referred to this kind of invocation as the rhetoric of the authorizing figure. Whatever terminology is used, appropriating the memory of historical heroes for present-day purposes is a form of collective memory that performs important political and symbolic work in American politics, in particular presidential foreign policy rhetoric, and is the subject of this inquiry. Specifically, I focus on the presidential foreign policy rhetoric of three contemporary presidents--Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush--and consider how they invoked the memory of Harry Truman. I chose these three presidents because enough time had passed between their presidencies and Truman's to allow for reflection on a number of events that occurred during the Cold War, which may have influenced their foreign policy worldviews. Moreover, these three presidents are the only contemporary ones who served two full terms that were not interrupted by death (JFK) or scandal (Nixon). That is not to say that one-term presidents such as Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush did not call upon the Truman legacy. …

The Contemporary Presidency: Constitutional Reform and the Presidency: The Recent Effort to Repeal the Natural‐Born Citizen Requirement

As a result of the sudden political emergence of Arnold Schwarzenegger, high levels of immigration, and increased international adoptions, interest grew during the early twenty‐first century in repealing the Constitution's restriction on presidential eligibility to natural‐born citizens. A combination of academics, media outlets, a grassroots lobbying organization, and finally several members of Congress combined to push forward this constitutional revision to the presidency. This effort peaked along with Schwarzenegger's approval ratings in 2004 but has since lost momentum. The enormous difficulty of amending the Constitution rendered this sensible proposal an exercise largely in symbolic politics.

The Contemporary Presidency: “An Excess of Refinement”: Lame Duck Presidents in Constitutional and Historical Context

Well into President George W. Bush's second term, history appears to be repeating itself—second terms are far more problematic than first terms. Are problematic second terms inevitable, and if so are they caused by the Twenty‐second Amendment? In this article I explore the constitutional and historical dynamics of presidential term limits, focusing on the leadership and clerkship roles the president performs in the constitutional system, constrained by the dynamics of political time. The article examines the classic arguments for and against term limits, comparing Hamilton's focus on stability to Jefferson's concern for tyranny. It then surveys the scholarship on second term problems to tease out the effects of term limits from the more general problem of second terms. I conclude with an analysis of second term and term limit problems from a political time perspective, suggesting that presidents are more constrained in the pursuit of their constitutional functions by the dynamics of regime cycles than they are by term limits. It appears that term limits add little to the functions of the presidency in the constitutional order.

The Contemporary Presidency: And We Will Know Their Greatness by the Trail of Controversy: Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Their Increasingly Contested Successors

Presidential scholars argue that recent presidents are more contested than earlier presidents (Bose 2003; Lonnstrom and Kelly 2003; Murray and Blessing 1994). This is attributable to scholars' limited information--research in progress, data embargos, and classified documents--which prevents contemporary presidents' accomplishments from being revealed and settled. This position predicts that presidents since John E Kennedy are more contested than earlier presidents. By contrast, a more encompassing view on presidential contestedness identifies national historical eras in which a few presidents are considered because they contributed successfully to solve dire national problems and secured the survival of the government (Milkis and Nelson 2003). But because contemporary reconfigurations of the executive office cannot anticipate, or be fully geared toward, subsequent problems, later White House occupants become identified as sources of growing governing problems following the solution to the crisis (Skowronek 2002). This position predicts the existence of eras other than the most recent one in which scholars increasingly disagree on presidents' accomplishments. The recency hypothesis can be true without the era hypothesis being true. But if the era hypothesis is true, it can subsume the recency hypothesis. The tests outlined here use data from presidential performance studies where measures of variance still have not been properly utilized. Presidential Contestedness Ever since ratings of presidential greatness began to be calculated in 1948 with the first study by Arthur M. Schlesinger, almost without exception scholarly raters--historians, legal scholars, and political scientists--have considered George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt great presidents and James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, and, later, Richard Nixon failures. Perhaps because of the repeatedly high correlations among more than a dozen expert studies rating presidential greatness (see Simonton 2006), no study has analyzed the disagreement over, or contestedness of, presidential greatness. Contestedness emerges when scholars rate presidents and disagree on an individual president's degree of greatness or failure. The concept of presidential contestedness therefore refers to the reputational variance or disagreement that occurs when presidential scholars assess the presidents. This variance is located among the presidents, and not among the raters, and must be addressed accordingly. (1) The absence of analysis of presidential contestedness is surprising, as so much of the debate in the presidential literature revolves around the achievements and debacles, triumphs and failures of the occupants of the White House. As presidential scholars must consider a range of factors for each president, each scholar may assess some factors as more or less significant than other factors or even consider one factor to the exclusion of all others. The uneven performances of Harding, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Nixon, for example, are often addressed in the literature (e.g., Bose and Landis 2003; Greenstein 2004; Kessel 2001; Milkis and Nelson 2003; Schlesinger 1997). Whatever the choice of factors, the number of factors assessed, or the political bias of the scholars themselves, scholars are not likely to reach a complete consensus on any given president's degree of greatness or failure for two additional reasons. First, institutional factors, or ambivalence (Mansfield 1993), ensures that the president is, at the same time, both the head of state and the head of the government's executive branch. The duties of the head of state are expected to be far less partisan than the duties of the head of government. Second, the temporal factor ensures that through out his years in office, no president can be expected to perform equally well. Too many events and responses guarantee variation in accomplishments. …

The Contemporary Presidency Executive Privilege and the U.S. Attorneys Firings

Political observers have debated whether George W. Bush's exercises of secrecy have shielded him from accountability for many of his administration's actions. In particular, the president's use of executive privilege to conceal information about the U.S. attorneys firings set off a firestorm of protest, especially among members of Congress who sought documents and testimony from White House aides. This essay describes and analyzes the president's use of executive privilege in this latest dispute between the political branches. It examines President Bush's actions in the context of his various uses of executive privilege during two terms in office. The essay assesses means by which controversies over executive privilege can be managed by the political branches without resorting to intervention by the courts.

The Evolution of the Rhetorical Presidency and Getting Past the Traditional/Modern Divide

Scholars of the presidency often begin research or examination of the institution with the “modern” presidential era that is said to begin with Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This kind of approach, as well as the “traditional/ modern” paradigm in general, is problematic because it tends to summarily dismiss a large percentage of the executive officeholders due to their seeming lack of contribution to our understanding of the contemporary presidency. Instead, when the presidents of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are closely examined alongside all of their peers, they are remarkable not for the ways in which they fail to resemble today's executive, but for the ways in which they are similar. As such, we, as scholars who are looking for the most complete examination of the presidency, its evolution, and its changes, must move past the adoption of easy handles and evaluate the entirety of presidential history to ensure each era be recognized for its important contributions to the twenty‐first century presidency.

The Contemporary Presidency Constraining Executive Power: George W. Bush and the Constitution

The modern tradition of constraining the power of political executives has deep roots in Anglo‐American governmental traditions. The Magna Carta of 1215, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the Common Law, and other documents and traditions of the British Constitution all provided precedents upon which the Framers of the U.S. Constitution drew. From the ratification of the U.S. Constitution to contemporary times, the experience and precedents of the presidency have also played an important role in laying the basis for the legitimate authority exercised by the president in the constitutional system. This article will examine several actions of President George W. Bush and argue that he has made exceptional claims to presidential authority. Four instances of President Bush's claims to presidential power will be examined: his suspension of the Geneva Conventions in 2002, his denial of the writ of habeas corpus for detainees in the war on terror, his order that the National Security Agency monitor messages to or from domestic parties in the United States without a warrant, and his use of signing statements.

The Contemporary Presidency: The Carter White House Communications Operation: Lessons for His Successors

From the perspective of thirty years later, there are three particular lessons we learn through White House communications operations in the Carter years. First, President Jimmy Carter demonstrated that, as important as it is for a chief executive to develop and maintain a relationship with the public, listening and responding to public concerns need to be part of an overall communications program designed to focus on a coordinated agenda. The chief executive needs a disciplined communications operation that focuses the attention of the public. A listening operation is important, but so too is a publicity operation that channels public attention through speeches and events designed to communicate specific messages. Second, the central elements of a press secretary's job remain today in spite of all of the subsequent changes in the publicity environment, such as the development of cable news networks and the Internet. No matter who is in office, reporters expect to receive an accurate accounting of the president's thinking and actions and to get it in a timely manner. It does not matter whether there is a twelve‐hour news cycle or a twenty‐four‐hour one, authenticity of information is crucial to a White House communications operation. Third, through the experience of the Carter administration, we learn presidents need to have communications organizations in addition to their daily press operations. Communications is a basic White House function and requires an office dedicated to responding to critics, long‐range planning, and coordination to carry it out.

The Contemporary Presidency: Who Wants Presidential Supremacy? Findings from the Institutions of American Democracy Project

The George W. Bush administration has aggressively advanced claims of presidential supremacy in American government. We use data from surveys to explore the reactions to these claims on the part of three groups of governmental elites and the general public. Responses are shaped by partisanship and ideology, which overwhelm institutional loyalties. Democrats are generally unified in opposing practices that expand presidential power beyond established political or constitutional limits. Republicans are more divided. Some entirely reject those practices. Yet about three quarters of Republicans in all samples endorse presidential supremacy, partially or fully. We consider the implications of the findings for possible longer-term outcomes with respect to these issues.

Above the Fray? The Use of Party System References in Presidential Rhetoric

Examining communication items from four presidents, we find that presidents link themselves to the party system rhetorically. Employment of party references is tested against recurrent features of the office and shifts in the political environment, including presidential approval, partisan independence, presidential successes and defeats in Congress, and the presence of divided government. Presidents strategically employ party system references with regard to audience and calendar. We find greater support for the rhetorical president as politician rather than as statesman above the fray, and we consider our findings in relation to the concept of political time. These findings suggest rethinking accounts of the contemporary presidency that presume that presidents determinedly place themselves “above politics” and “beyond party” when crafting their communications imagery.

Center stage: media and the performance of American politics

Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Prologue: News, Politics, and the Public Interest on September 10, 2001 Chapter 3 1 Frames of Reference in the Era of Casual Spectatorship Chapter 4 2 Forces Shaping the News Business Chapter 5 3 Discovery and Discourse in the New Media Chapter 6 4 The Staging of the Contemporary Presidency Chapter 7 5 Congress and the Courtroom Chapter 8 6 Nationalism, Foreign News, and War Reporting Chapter 9 7 Art, Entertainment, and Politics

The Contemporary Presidency: The Greats and the Great Debate: President William J. Clinton's Use of Presidential Exemplars

This article examines President William J. Clinton's use of presidential exemplars from 1991 to 2001. While many observers have called attention to the fact that Clinton made efforts to connect his presidency to Democratic “greats” Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt, his rhetoric reveals a more complex pattern of identification and use of his predecessors. Not only did he reference Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—Republican “greats”—as often as Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt, but he appears to have used them to talk across party lines and move his fellow partisans to the center. This rhetorical pattern became more prominent after the 1994 midterm election, when the Republicans won majority control of Congress. Hence, this article asserts that Clinton used his predecessors to help him carry out his political agenda and his constitutional duties. Further, he learned from his predecessors about how they had used ideological and partisan constructs during their administrations, and this led to his reconsidering the “great debate” between Jefferson and Hamilton. This research concludes that President William J. Clinton left a Hamiltonian—not Jeffersonian—legacy for the Democratic party.

Changing their minds? George W. Bush and the limits of presidential persuasion

Leading the public is at the core of the modern presidency. Even as they try to govern, presidents are involved in a permanent campaign. Both politics and policy revolve around presidents' attempts to garner public support for themselves and their policies. At the base of this core strategy for governing is the premise that through the permanent campaign the White House can successfully persuade or even mobilise the public. Yet one of the crowning ironies of the contemporary presidency is that at the same time that presidents increasingly attempt to govern by campaigning, public support for presidential policies is elusive. This paper explores George W. Bush's success in moving the public by, first, examining his success in obtaining support for himself through his nationally televised addresses. It then investigates several key issue areas in the Bush presidency to discover whether public opinion moved in the president's direction. The study finds that the public has been largely unresponsive to the White House and concludes by questioning the faith that many have in the broad premise of the potential of presidential leadership of the public. It is appropriate to rethink the theory of governing based on the principle of presidential success in exploiting the bully pulpit to achieve changes in public policy. Presidents not only fail to create new political capital by going public, but their efforts at persuading the public may also decrease their chances of success in bringing about changes in public policy.

THE RHETORICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE PRESIDENCIES

ABSTRACT The modern presidency emerged not from an effort to escape constitutional propriety, as Tulis argues, but, rather, to emancipate presidents from the localized political parties of the nineteenth century, which had come to be viewed as sites of provincial and corrupt forms of popular rule. As the troubled tenure of George W. Bush suggests, contemporary presidents are torn between the public expectation that they stand apart from party politics and act as the chief executive of the administrative state; and their role as party leaders, which links them to political allies in Congress and loyalists in the electorate. In its contribution to the development of a “new” national programmatic party system, the Bush administration reveals the potential for a novel, disturbing meld of party and administration, in which presidents seek to exploit the powers of the modern executive office for partisan gain.

Navigating a Turbulent Ocean: Indonesia’s Worldview and Foreign Policy

This article explores the definition, origins, and meaning of Indonesia’s worldview for contemporary international relations. It finds that Indonesian perceptions of the country’s world role and the realities of its capacities are in tension. Apparent sharp breaks in foreign policy from one regime to the next mask underlying continuities in the country’s view of the world and Indonesia’s place in it. By virtue of its size, location, history, principled behavior, and rich culture, Indonesia is entitled to a leadership role in the region and the world. For Soekamo, the father of the nation, this was political-revolutionary. For Soeharto, this was economic. For contemporary presidents, the inspiration to leadership still exists, even if the capacity to lead is not always present.

The Contemporary Presidency: “Going Local” to Reform Social Security

Presidents have turned increasingly to local media to build support for their policy initiatives, as evidenced by President George W. Bush's recent and unprecedented efforts to reform Social Security. In this article, we examine local newspaper coverage of the president's reform tour and the success he had “going local.” We find that local newspapers tended to be positive, but mostly descriptive, in their coverage of the president's reform tour. Local news stories not only differ from national coverage but also from each other: a newspaper's size and location affect the content of local news coverage of the presidency. We conclude with an assessment of the usefulness of a “going local” governing strategy in light of these findings.

The Contemporary Presidency: The Decline and Resurgence and Decline (and Resurgence?) of Congress: Charting a New Imperial Presidency

Much Power Should They Have? demanded cover of Newsweek as 2006 began, as President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney glared out from underneath headline. question was prompted by a flurry of holiday season revelations centered on aggressive claims to, and use of, unilateral presidential powers. These ranged from detention and treatment of imprisoned terror suspects around world to phone taps placed on Americans without a court warrant. We've been able to restore legitimate authority of presidency, vice president insisted; others worried that Constitution's checks were being unbalanced and that imperial presidency of Vietnam/Watergate era had risen from grave (Cheney 2005; Rudalevige 2005; Schlesinger 1973). Framing Questions However timely, Newsweek's query was of course hardly new. Indeed, little at Constitutional Convention of 1787 provoked more debate than shape and scope of executive branch. Delegates had to determine how president would be selected, how long should serve, whether should be able to run for office more than once, how much power should have--even whether president would be a he or a they. (1) Some of Framers were unconvinced of need for an executive branch in first place. Others thought that executive power must be strictly divided, to impede future tyranny: for them, in Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph's phrase, a single executive was the foetus of monarchy (Rakove 1996, 257). And monarchy, of course, was what Framers wanted to avoid. In end, framework of presidential power was left largely in outline form, to be worked out in practice. Consider very first sentence of Article II: The executive power shall be vested in a President of United States of America. What is the executive power? What might it allow president to do? Here document is silent. In other places president was given a limited array of specified powers, many of them further truncated by a sort of congressional asterisk--the president can finalize treaties, or appointments, only with Senate approval; execution of law assumes its legislative passage; no money can be spent that is not first appropriated by Congress. How these shared powers might work was itself not clarified; expectation was, in Madison's famous phrase from Federalist, that interbranch interaction would allow institutional ambition ... to counteract ambition. conflict that implied began immediately, when Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and Congressman James Madison argued over scope of President Washington's unilateral authority. Reduced to its essence, dispute was--and is--relatively straightforward: is a president limited to specific powers affirmatively listed in Constitution or granted in statute, or can take whatever actions deems in public so long as those actions are not actually prohibited by Constitution? Theodore Roosevelt's iteration of Hamilton's position put it clearly: My belief was that it was not only [the president's] right but his duty to do anything that needs of Nation required unless such action was forbidden by Constitution or by laws. Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, clarified opposing view. The President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power or justly implied within such express grant as proper and necessary to its exercise, Taft wrote. There is no undefined residuum of power which can exercise because it seems to him to be in public interest (Pyle and Pious 1984, 70-71; Roosevelt 1985 [1913], 372). Whatever Framers' true intent, Hamiltonian position won out over time. growth in size and scope of government during and after Great Depression, and national security apparatus built during World War II and Cold War, effectively settled argument. …

The Contemporary Presidency: The “Flying White House”: A Travel Establishment within the Presidential Branch

A conglomeration of civilian, military, and security offices works in concert to support presidential travel. Although domestic and international excursions are critical to a chief executive’s efforts to “go public,” scholars have yet to investigate the bureaucratic structure that makes travel possible. This article traces the growth and formalization of a presidential “travel establishment,” from Washington’s day to the present. In so doing, it challenges legalistic definitions of the “presidential branch” which focus on the Executive Office of the President (EOP), recommending instead a functional definition that would embrace a wider range of presidential personnel. The article further suggests that scholars regard the travel establishment as a partner to the EOP—the two operations maintaining institutional separation even as they coordinate parallel missions.