Failure should not be an option in the presidency, but for too long it has been the norm. From the botched attempt to rescue the U.S. diplomats held hostage by Iran in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter and the missed intelligence on Al Qaeda before 9-11 under George W. Bush to, most recently, the computer meltdown that marked the arrival of health care reform under Barack Obama, the American presidency has been a profile in failure. In Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again, Elaine Kamarck surveys these and other recent presidential failures to understand why Americans have lost faith in their leaders—and how they can get it back. Kamarck argues that presidents today spend too much time talking and not enough time governing, and that they have allowed themselves to become more and more distant from the federal bureaucracy that is supposed to implement policy. After decades of "imperial" and "rhetorical" presidencies, we are in need of a "managerial" president. This White House insider and former Harvard academic explains the difficulties of governing in our modern political landscape, and offers examples and recommendations of how our next president can not only recreate faith in leadership but also run a competent, successful administration.

This book examines President Reagan’s and his administration’s efforts to mobilize public and congressional support for seven of the president’s controversial foreign policy initiatives. Each chapter deals with a distinct foreign policy issue, but they each is related in one way or another to alleged threats to U.S. national security interests by the Soviet Union and its allies. When taken together these case studies clearly illustrate the book’s larger thrust: a challenge to the conventional wisdom that Reagan was the indisputable “Great Communicator.” This book contests the accepted wisdom that Reagan was an exemplary and highly effective practitioner of the going public model of presidential communication and leadership, that the bargaining model was relatively unimportant during his administration, and that the so-called public diplomacy regime was a high-value addition to the administration’s public communication assets. The author employs an analytical approach to the historical record, draws on several academic disciplines and grounds his arguments in extensive archival and empirical research. The book concludes that the public communication efforts of the Reagan administration in the field of foreign policy were neither exceptionally skillful nor notably successful, that the public diplomacy regime had more negative than positive impact, that the going public model had minimal utility in the president’s efforts to sell his foreign policy initiatives, and that the executive bargaining model played a central role in Reagan’s governing strategy and essentially defined his presidential leadership role in the area of foreign policy making. This study vividly demonstrates the enormous gap between the real-word Reagan and the one that often exists in public mythology.

Celebrated leadership expert and political scientist Gautam Mukunda provides a comprehensive, objective, and non-partisan method for answering the most important question in the world: is someone up to the job of president of the United States? In Picking Presidents, Gautam Mukunda sets his sights on presidential candidates, proposing an objective and tested method to assess whether they will succeed or fail if they win the White House. Combining political science, psychology, organizational behavior, and economics, Picking Presidents will enable every American to cast an informed vote. In his 2012 book Indispensable, which all but predicted the Trump presidency, Mukunda explained how both the very best and very worst leaders are "unfiltered"—outsiders who take power without the understanding or support of traditional elites. Picking Presidents provides deep analysis of filtered and unfiltered presidents alike, from failed haberdasher and skillful president Harry Truman, to the exceptionally well-qualified—and ultimately reviled—James Buchanan; from Andrew Johnson, who set civil rights back by a century, to Theodore Roosevelt, who evaded party opposition to transform American society. Picking Presidents lays out a clear framework that anyone can use to judge a candidate and answer the all-important question: are they up to the job?

This book argues that we can learn a great deal about leadership from the experiences of eight US presidents who have served in the White House since Watergate. The eight presidents considered here differed widely in their family backgrounds, wealth, education, age, prior political experiences, and motivations for power. But they all made the same promise—to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the US and ... preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States”—and they all faced considerable challenges in fulfilling that promise. While all eight presidents had policy successes and failures, the author argues that we gain real insight on their leadership acumen by analyzing the deeper structures of leadership effectiveness that all leaders need to address: vision, execution, management, and decision-making. The book assesses the performance of each president along these four dimensions of leadership and extends lessons learned to leaders in other sectors.

It used to be that "deep state" was a shadowy term used to describe developing nations whose governments operated outside of democratically elected leaders. The term has evolved and has been applied to transparent countries such as the United States. What is the deep state and how does it apply to the United States and other democratic governments? This fascinating and informative volume presents a variety of perspectives that helps readers to decide whether a deep state is something to fear or simply a conspiracy theory.

A Washington Post 2019 Notable Selection A vivid and inspiring account of the "bromance" between Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The extraordinary partnership of Barack Obama and Joe Biden is unique in American history. The two men, their characters and styles sharply contrasting, formed a dynamic working relationship that evolved into a profound friendship. Their affinity was not predestined. Obama and Biden began wary of each other: Obama an impatient freshman disdainful of the Senate's plodding ways; Biden a veteran of the chamber and proud of its traditions. Gradually they came to respect each other's values and strengths and rode into the White House together in 2008. Side-by-side through two tension-filled terms, they shared the day-to-day joys and struggles of leading the most powerful nation on earth. They accommodated each other's quirks: Biden's famous miscues kept coming, and Obama overlooked them knowing they were insignificant except as media fodder. With his expertise in foreign affairs and legislative matters, Biden took on an unprecedented role as chief adviser to Obama, reshaping the vice presidency. Together Obama and Biden guided Americans through a range of historic moments: a devastating economic crisis, racial confrontations, war in Afghanistan, and the dawn of same-sex marriage nationwide. They supported each other through highs and lows: Obama provided a welcome shoulder during the illness and death of Biden's son Beau. As many Americans turn a nostalgic eye toward the Obama presidency, Barack and Joe offers a new look at this administration, its absence of scandal, dedication to truth, and respect for the media. This is the first book to tell the full story of this historic relationship and its substantial impact on the Obama presidency and its legacy.

The 2016 presidential primaries are on the horizon and this new edition of Elaine Kamarck’s Primary Politics will be there to help make sense of them. Updated to include the 2012 election, it will once again be the guide to understanding the modern nominating system and some of its arcana, including the “robot rule.” In Primary Politics, political insider Elaine Kamarck explains how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today. Her focus is the largely untold story of how presidential candidates since the early 1970s have sought to alter the rules in their favor and how their failures and successes have led to even more change. She describes how candidates have sought to manipulate the sequencing of primaries to their advantage and how Iowa and New Hampshire came to dominate the system. She analyzes the rules that are used to translate votes into delegates, paying special attention to the Democrats' twenty-year fight over proportional representation. Drawing on meticulous research, interviews with key figures in both parties, and years of experience, this book explores one of the most important questions in American politics -- how we narrow the list of presidential candidates every four years.

Constitutional reform is a topic of perennial academic debate, perhaps now more than ever amid sharp polarization in the electorate and government. At once a cogent, new contribution to the scholarly literature and appropriate for American politics and government students, this book mounts a provocative, nonideological defense of the US Constitution, directly engaging proposals for reform and providing a rare systematic argument for continuity: Our politics may be broken but our system is not. Writing from an international perspective with an array of fascinating data, the author draws on theory, law, and history to defend the republican order under political stress and intellectual challenge.

The common roots of success and failure in economic growth and development lie in the systemic governance and fragmentation of institutional complementarities, respectively, but not in the unilateral adaptation of market-led or state-led models. To substantiate this argument, Akan utilizes case countries from the United States, South Korea, and Turkey—an advanced developed, a recently developed, and a developing country. Akan provides a simple framework for understanding two points that go beyond ideological obsession. The first is how a model of G&D works and evolves; with its economic, financial, industrial, and political dynamics intertwining. The second is why a market-led or state-led model succeeds and fails in both developed and developing countries.

Deliberative democracy has been one of the main games in contemporary political theory for two decades, growing enormously in size and importance in political science and many other disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy takes stock of deliberative democracy as a research field, in philosophy, in various research programmes in the social sciences and law, and in political practice around the globe. It provides a concise history of deliberative ideals in political thought and discusses their philosophical origins. The Handbook locates deliberation in political systems with different spaces, publics, and venues, including parliaments, courts, governance networks, protests, mini-publics, old and new media, and everyday talk. It engages with practical applications, mapping deliberation as a reform movement and as a device for conflict resolution, documenting the practice and study of deliberative democracy around the world and in global governance.