B & T Local 01-23-2010 $26.00.

While the presidency has always been a political office, the distinction between campaigning and governing has become increasingly blurred in recent years. Yet no one until now has documented the phenomenon of the "permanent campaign" and analyzed its impact on the executive office. In this eye-opening book, Brendan Doherty provides empirical evidence of the growing focus by American presidents on electoral concerns throughout their terms in office, clearly demonstrating that we can no longer assume that the time a president spends campaigning for reelection can be separated from the time he spends governing. To track the evolving relationship between campaigning and governing, Doherty examines the strategic choices that presidents make and what those choices reveal about presidential priorities. He focuses on the rise in presidential fundraising and the targeting of key electoral states throughout a president's term in office-illustrating that recent presidents have disproportionately visited those states that are important to their political prospects while largely neglecting those without electoral payoff. He also shows how decisions about electoral matters previously made by party officials are now made by voter-conscious operatives within the White House. Doherty analyzes what these changing dynamics portend for the nature of presidential leadership, contending that while such strategies can at times strengthen a president's hand, they can also undermine his role as a unifying national leader, heighten public cynicism, and limit prospects for bipartisan compromise. He further shows how trends in presidential fundraising undermine the conventional understanding of the predatory relationship between the president and his party. Drawing on new systematic evidence of presidential fundraising and travel, archival research at presidential libraries, and accounts by presidents and their aides, Doherty musters a mountain of evidence to offer an objective, comprehensive argument about the causes, indicators, and implications of the rise of the permanent campaign as no previous book has done-an evenhanded account that seeks to disparage no individual president. Concise and accessible, The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign engages crucially important questions about the development of the presidency-as well as larger normative questions about what we want in a leader-as it challenges the convention in political science that has long kept most scholarship on presidential campaigns separate from the study of the presidency itself.

The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

On taking office in 2001, Dick Cheney crowned himself the first imperial vice president in the nation's history, transforming a traditionally inconsequential office into a de facto fourth branch of government. Taking a less journalistic and personal approach to Cheney than previous biographers, this critical new biography shows exactly how Cheney engineered his arrogation of vast executive powers—and the dire consequences his power grab has had and will long continue to have for the office of the vice presidency, the balance of powers, the Constitution, geopolitics, and America's security, strength, and prestige. Taking advantage of the administration's global war on terrorism, a president inexperienced in matters of war and peace, and a Republican Congress that rated party power above institutional prerogatives, Vice President Cheney moved with astonishing speed and energy to assume a dominant role on the national and international stage as the effective president-in-proxy of the United States. Cheney asserted that all constitutional checks and balances and all individual liberties under the Bill of Rights are subservient to the president's powers as commander-in-chief in confronting international terrorism. Although former administrations had made power grabs in the past in times of national crisis, no president-and certainly no vice president-has ever exerted such sweeping claims of executive power on so many fronts in violation of the bedrock principles of the Constitution.