The American public hungers for a heroic leader. From John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, every American president has left office either under a cloud or as a failed leader. Michael A. Genovese argues that presidents are set up for failure; it is not specific presidents but the presidency itself that is the problem. The presidency was designed to prevent tyranny through a system of separation of powers that inhibits presidents from exercising sufficient power to meet the demands and expectations that developed over time. Each new president dreams of success, only to be crushed by the paralytic weight of vetoes and roadblocks. As they fail to meet expectations, Americans turn on them, making their already precarious position much worse. Given the perilous nature of the office, Genovese examines the skills required to achieve success and the roles of power and persuasion. He also examines how globalization and the rapid pace of change contribute to the decline of presidential power. This accessible synthesis of scholarship is geared toward an audience that is hungry to unravel the dilemmas of presidential leadership. Students of the presidency will find it insightful; general readers will find it illuminating.

The histories presented here are of a select group of US presidents, their inspired leadership characteristics, and how they may inspire us today. The traits these presidents possessed were cultivated over a lifetime of lived experience and immortalized through the power of the presidential word—speeches, letters, and addresses—which collectively represent the most transcendent documents in American history. Viewed through the lens of nuance, complication, human emotion, pathos, and drama, William Haldeman sets forth the lives of these presidents in ways to help inform our own lives, from leveraging our experience and instincts to making the right calls when they matter the most. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach, Haldeman appeals to both scholars and general audience readers alike, offering a refreshing view of presidential leadership that not only elevates leadership as a central part of the scholarly field, but also broadly engages American presidency enthusiasts and readers of history, biography, politics, and leadership development.

This book examines the highly emotional context of the 2016 US presidential campaign through the scope of political theater and emotional attribution. It takes inventory of the political landscape that defined the campaign and advances the argument that the campaign’s high intensity generated a more interest-attentive citizenry and became an exercise in political theater. A framework operationalizing the components of political spectacle anchors the analysis treating emotions, affect transfer and the rise of negative partisanship. The analytical scope is focused specifically on voters’ emotional responses toward Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and empirically demonstrates the effects of discrete feelings on five emotional dimensions including pride, hope, fear, anger, and disgust on attitudes about issues ranging from the economy to immigration to the 2016 Supreme Court vacancy. Anchored in the Affective Intelligence Theory and affect transfer, the findings lend support to the principles of negative partisanship that characterized the 2016 presidential contest.

This book examines how presidents from Nixon to Obama have faced the challenges of global leadership in a dramatically changing world—one with more limited resources and an increasing number of threatening challengers. The immediate post-World War II era was undeniably a period of American power and influence. Even during the Cold War, the United States was the leader of the West, exerting wide-ranging power internationally. But beginning with the Vietnam War, America began experiencing a series of setbacks and challenges to its power. The Post-Heroic Presidency: Leveraged Leadership in an Age of Limits examines how U.S. presidents have attempted to reverse or contend with this new era of limited power in which presidential leadership is hamstrung due to an increasingly globalized and interdependent world—one where power is more diffuse and the system of checks and balances bind a president in an age of hyper-partisanship. The book examines presidents of the 20th and 21st centuries, explaining how the first U.S. president to confront this new age was Richard Nixon, who—along with Henry Kissinger—developed a sophisticated approach to deal with the recalibration of American power. It documents how other recent presidents have either tried to make peace with limited power (Jimmy Carter), reverse the decline (Ronald Reagan), ignore the implications of limits (George W. Bush), or find ways to lead that were less ambitious, more prudent, and less unilateral (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama). In the cases of Clinton and Obama, this shift to using "soft power," persuasion, and multilateralism earned them criticism that they are "weak," thereby undermining their efforts to lead—both at home and abroad.

In The Presidential Road Show: Public Leadership in an Era of Party Polarization and Media Fragmentation, Diane J. Heith evaluates presidential leadership by critically examining a fundamental tenet of the presidency: the national nature of the office. The fact that the entire nation votes for the office seemingly imbues the presidency with leadership opportunities that rest on appeals to the mass public. Yet, presidents earn the office not by appealing to the nation but rather by assembling a coalition of supporters, predominantly partisans. Moreover, once in office, recent presidents have had trouble controlling their message in the fragmented media environment. The combined constraints of the electoral coalition and media environment influence the nature of public leadership presidents can exercise. Using a data set containing not only speech content but also the classification of the audience, Diane J. Heith finds that rhetorical leadership is constituency driven and targets audiences differently. Comparing tone, content, and tactics of national and local speeches reveals that presidents are abandoning national strategies in favor of local leadership efforts that may be tailored to the variety of political contexts a president must confront.

divFinds that presidents are responsive to the public in selecting issues to focus on, but pay less attention to public opinion when making a policy /DIV

Mexico is reinventing itself. It is moving toward a more tolerant, global, market oriented, and democratic society. This new edition of "Changing Structure of Mexico" is a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of Mexico's political, social, and economic issues. All chapters have been rewritten by noted Mexican scholars and practitioners to provide a lucid and informative introductory reader on Mexico. The book covers such topics as Mexico's foreign economic policy and NAFTA; maquiladoras; technology policy; and Asian competition; as well as domestic economics such as banking, tax reform, and oil/energy policy; the environment; population and migration policy; the changing structure of political parties; and values and changes affecting women.

This comprehensive two-volume guide is the definitive source for researchers seeking an understanding of those who have occupied the White House and on the institution of the U.S. presidency. Readers turn Guide to the Presidency and the Executive Branch for its wealth of facts and analytical chapters that explain the structure, powers, and operations of the office and the president’s relationship with Congress and the Supreme Court. The fifth edition of this acclaimed reference completes coverage of the George W. Bush presidency, the 2008 election, and the first 3 years of the presidency of Barack Obama. This includes coverage of their handling of the economic crisis, wars abroad, and Obama’s healthcare initiatives. The work is divided into eight distinct subject areas covering every aspect of the U.S. presidency, and all chapters in each subject area have been revised and updated: Origins and Development of the Presidency, including constitutional beginnings, history of the presidency and vice presidency, and presidential ratings Selection and Removal of the President, including the electoral process, a chronology of presidential elections, removal of the president and vice president, and succession Powers of the Presidency, including the unilateral powers of the presidency and those as chief of state, chief administrator, legislative leader, commander in chief, and chief economist The President, the Public, and the Parties, including presidential appearances, the president and political parties, the president and the news media, the presidency and pop culture, public support and opinion, and the president and interest groups The Presidency and the Executive Branch, including the White House Office, the Office of the Vice President, supporting organizations, the cabinet and executive departments, presidential commissions, and executive branch housing, pay, and perquisites Chief Executive and Federal Government, including the president and Congress, the president and the Supreme Court, and the president and the bureaucracy Presidents, their Families, and Life in the White House and Beyond, including the daily life of the president, the first lady, the first family, friends of presidents, and life after the presidency Biographies of the Presidents, Vice Presidents, First Ladies This new volume also features more than 200 textboxes, tables, and figures. Major revisions cover the supporting White House organizations and the president’s role as chief economist. Additional reference materials include explanatory headnotes, as well as hundreds of photographs with detailed captions.

In 1891 Benjamin Harrison, the first president engaged in conservation, had to have this new area of public policy explained to him by members of the Boone and Crockett Club. This didn’t take long, as he was only asked to sign a few papers setting aside federal timberland. But from such small moments great social movements grow, and the course of natural resource protection policy through 22 presidents has altered Americans’ relationship to the natural world in then almost unimaginable ways. Presidents and the American Environment charts this course. Exploring the ways in which every president from Harrison to Obama has engaged the expanding agenda of the Nature protection impulse, the book offers a clear, close-up view of the shifting and nation shaping mosaic of both “green” and “brown” policy directions over more than a century. While the history of conservation generally focuses on the work of intellectuals such as Muir, Leopold, and Carson, such efforts could only succeed or fail on a large scale with the involvement of the government, and it is this side of the story that Presidents and the American Environment tells. On the one hand, we find a ready environmental engagement, as in Theodore Roosevelt’s establishment of Pelican Island bird refuge upon being informed that the Constitution did not explicitly forbid it. On the other hand, we have leaders like Calvin Coolidge, playing hide-and-seek games in the Oval Office while ignoring reports of coastal industrial pollution. The book moves from early cautious sponsors of the idea of preserving public lands to crusaders like Theodore Roosevelt, from the environmental implications of the New Deal to the politics of pollution in the boom times of the forties and fifties, from the emergence of “environmentalism” to recent presidential detractors of the cause. From Harrison’s act, which established the American system of National Forests, to Barack Obama’s efforts on curbing climate change, presidents have mattered as they resisted or used the ever-changing tools and objectives of environmentalism. In fact, with a near even split between “browns” and “greens” over those 22 administrations, the role of president has often been decisive. How, and how much, distinguished historian Otis L. Graham, Jr., describes in in full for the first time, in this important contribution to American environmental history.

A president who distances himself from stagecraft will find himself upstaged. George H. W. Bush sought to “stay the course” in terms of policy while distancing himself from the public relations strategies employed during the administration of Ronald Reagan, his predecessor. But Bush discovered during his one-term presidency that a strategy of policy continuity coupled with mediocre communication skills “does not make for a strong public image as an effective and active leader in the White House", as author and scholar Lori Cox Han demonstrates in A Presidency Upstaged. Incorporating extensive archival research from the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University—including documents only recently available through requests made under the Freedom of Information Act—Han thoroughly examines the public presidency of George H. W. Bush. Han analyzes how communication strategies, relationships with the press, and public opinion polling shaped and defined his image as a leader. The research for this study also includes content analysis of press coverage (both print and television) and major public addresses during the Bush administration. "Lori Cox Han skillfully uses archival materials, interviews and leading academic studies to present a thorough analysis of George H.W. Bush's public presidency. Her book is a valuable addition to the literature on presidential communications, media, and politics, and also stands as a very useful resource on the events of the first Bush presidency."-Mark Rozell, professor of Public Policy, George Mason University and author, Power and Prudence