Mr. President: How and Why Founders Created a Chief Executive. By Ray Raphael. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. 324 pp. In Mr. President, a traditional and engaging political history, Ray Raphael seeks to answer How and Why Founders Created a Chief Executive by using as an analytical tool. Raphael focuses squarely on single issue of presidency, carving debate and parliamentarianism chronologically at Philadelphia, to excise the day-by-day and even minute-by-minute dynamics of dialogue (p. 281). This technique is not new, historians have often culled single issues from debates for narrative and analysis, but Raphael is first to do so for presidency. Raphael's how and why are not limited to convention, as he divides his investigation into three parts: Precedents, Conjuring Office, and Field Tests. Throughout, Raphael stresses unlikelihood of a powerful American executive and reveals that political maneuvering by key players led to its creation. Further, Raphael argues that while most founders wished presidency to be a unifying factor in American politics both inside and out, office and its first three inhabitants deepened and hardened existing divides into entrenched partisanship and political warfare. In Precedents, Raphael travels familiar road from American monarchism at 1750, through its opposition to programs by Parliament and placemen, to rejection of king in Declaration of Independence, followed by creation of strong state governments with varying forms of executives, bound together loosely by a weak confederation with no executive (and no governing power, for that matter). He is at his best in Conjuring Office, where his use of narrative as an analytical tool reveals central role of Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris at Constitutional Convention. In debate, Morris's advocacy for a single, powerful executive and for method of selection evolved over summer, and he used committee structure of convention to his advantage when he perceived vulnerability for his plans in general session. Raphael's focus on Morris explains in stunning clarity sensibility of a system that most today deem arcane and undemocratic: Electoral College. As presidency emerged and grew in power, mode of selection became more contentious, pitting many interests against one another: state governments versus national, large states versus small, democratic selection versus elite control. Unfortunately, Raphael abandons his use of narrative as an analytical tool in Field Tests, as he turns to telling narrative stories in a topical, case study manner that ignores chronological day-to-day approach that worked so well in his coverage of Convention. …