Download or read book Navigating the Post Cold War World written by Jason A. Edwards and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-12-16 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jason A. Edwards explores the various rhetorical choices and strategies employed by former President Bill Clinton to discuss foreign policy issues in a new, post-Cold War era. Edwards argues that each American president has situated himself within the same foreign policy paradigm, drawing upon the same set of ideas and utilizing the same basic vernacular to discuss foreign policy. He describes how former presidents-and President Clinton, in particular-made modifications to this paradigm, leaving a rhetorical signature that tells us as much about the nature of their presidency as it does about the international environment they faced. With the end of the Cold War came the end of a relatively stable international order. This end sparked intense debates about the new direction of American foreign policy. As Bill Clinton took office, he developed a new lexicon of words in order to discuss America's changing role in the world and other major international issues of the time without being able to fall into Cold War-era rhetoric. By examining the nuances and unique contributions President Clinton made to American foreign policy rhetoric, Edwards shows how his distinct rhetorical signature will influence future administrations.
Download or read book The President s Book of Secrets written by David Priess and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every president has had a unique and complicated relationship with the intelligence community. While some have been coolly distant, even adversarial, others have found their intelligence agencies to be among the most valuable instruments of policy and power. Since John F. Kennedy's presidency, this relationship has been distilled into a personalized daily report: a short summary of what the intelligence apparatus considers the most crucial information for the president to know that day about global threats and opportunities. This top-secret document is known as the President's Daily Brief, or, within national security circles, simply "the Book." Presidents have spent anywhere from a few moments (Richard Nixon) to a healthy part of their day (George W. Bush) consumed by its contents; some (Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush) consider it far and away the most important document they saw on a regular basis while commander in chief. The details of most PDBs are highly classified, and will remain so for many years. But the process by which the intelligence community develops and presents the Book is a fascinating look into the operation of power at the highest levels. David Priess, a former intelligence officer and daily briefer, has interviewed every living president and vice president as well as more than one hundred others intimately involved with the production and delivery of the president's book of secrets. He offers an unprecedented window into the decision making of every president from Kennedy to Obama, with many character-rich stories revealed here for the first time.
Download or read book United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions written by Us Congress and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Plum Book is published by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and House Committee on Oversight and Reform alternately after each Presidential election. The Plum Book is used to identify Presidential appointed and other positions within the Federal Government. The publication lists over 9,000 Federal civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointment. The duties of many such positions may involve advocacy of Administration policies and programs and the incumbents usually have a close and confidential working relationship with the agency head or other key officials. The Plum Book was first published in 1952 during the Eisenhower administration. When President Eisenhower took office, the Republican Party requested a list of government positions that President Eisenhower could fill. The next edition of the Plum Book appeared in 1960 and has since been published every four years, just after the Presidential election.
Download or read book The Wartime President written by William G. Howell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-08-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It is the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers. The balance of power between Congress and the president has been a powerful thread throughout American political thought since the time of the Founding Fathers. And yet, for all that has been written on the topic, we still lack a solid empirical or theoretical justification for Hamilton’s proposition. For the first time, William G. Howell, Saul P. Jackman, and Jon C. Rogowski systematically analyze the question. Congress, they show, is more likely to defer to the president’s policy preferences when political debates center on national rather than local considerations. Thus, World War II and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq significantly augmented presidential power, allowing the president to enact foreign and domestic policies that would have been unattainable in times of peace. But, contrary to popular belief, there are also times when war has little effect on a president’s influence in Congress. The Vietnam and Gulf Wars, for instance, did not nationalize our politics nearly so much, and presidential influence expanded only moderately. Built on groundbreaking research, The Wartime President offers one of the most significant works ever written on the wartime powers presidents wield at home.
Download or read book The President and His Inner Circle written by Thomas Preston and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using M. G. Hermann's Personality Assessment-at-a-Distance (PAD) profiling technique as well as exhaustive archival research and interviews with former advisers, the author develops a leadership style typology. He then compares his model's expectations against the actual policy record, using six foreign policy episodes.
Download or read book When the President Calls written by Simon W. Bowmaker and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with thirty-five economic policymakers who advised presidents from Nixon to Trump. What is it like to sit in the Oval Office and discuss policy with the president? To know that the decisions made will affect hundreds of millions of people? To know that the wrong advice could be calamitous? When the President Calls presents interviews with thirty-five economic policymakers who served presidents from Nixon to Trump. These officials worked in the executive branch in a variety of capacities—the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of the Treasury, and the National Economic Council—but all had direct access to the policymaking process and can offer insights about the difficult tradeoffs made on economic policy. The interviews shed new light, for example, on the thinking behind the Reagan tax cuts, the economic factors that cost George H. W. Bush a second term, the constraints facing policymakers during the financial crisis of 2008, the differences in work styles between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the Trump administration's early budget process. When the President Calls offers a unique, behind-the-scenes perspective on US economic policymaking, with specific and personal detail—the turmoil, the personality clashes, the enormous pressure of trying to do the right thing while the clock is ticking. Interviews with Nicholas F. Brady, Lael Brainard, W. Michael Blumenthal, Michael J. Boskin, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Martin S. Feldstein, Stephen Friedman, Jason Furman, Austan D. Goolsbee, Alan Greenspan, Kevin A. Hassett, R. Glenn Hubbard, Alan B. Krueger, Arthur B. Laffer, Edward P. Lazear, Jacob J. Lew, N. Gregory Mankiw, David C. Mulford, John Michael Mulvaney, Paul H. O'Neill, Peter R. Orszag, Henry M. Paulson, Alice M. Rivlin, Harvey S. Rosen, Robert E. Rubin, George P. Shultz, Charles L. Schultze, John W. Snow, Gene B. Sperling, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Lawrence H. Summers, John B. Taylor, Paul A. Volcker, Murray L. Weidenbaum, Janet L. Yellen
Download or read book The President and Immigration Law written by Adam B. Cox and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who controls American immigration policy? The biggest immigration controversies of the last decade have all involved policies produced by the President policies such as President Obama's decision to protect Dreamers from deportation and President Trump's proclamation banning immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations. While critics of these policies have been separated by a vast ideological chasm, their broadsides have embodied the same widely shared belief: that Congress, not the President, ought to dictate who may come to the United States and who will be forced to leave. This belief is a myth. In The President and Immigration Law, Adam B. Cox and Cristina M. Rodríguez chronicle the untold story of how, over the course of two centuries, the President became our immigration policymaker-in-chief. Diving deep into the history of American immigration policy from founding-era disputes over deporting sympathizers with France to contemporary debates about asylum-seekers at the Southern border they show how migration crises, real or imagined, have empowered presidents. Far more importantly, they also uncover how the Executive's ordinary power to decide when to enforce the law, and against whom, has become an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for making immigration policy. This pathbreaking account helps us understand how the United States ?has come to run an enormous shadow immigration system-one in which nearly half of all noncitizens in the country are living in violation of the law. It also provides a blueprint for reform, one that accepts rather than laments the role the President plays in shaping the national community, while also outlining strategies to curb the abuse of law enforcement authority in immigration and beyond.
Download or read book Managing the President s Program written by Andrew Rudalevige and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The belief that U.S. presidents' legislative policy formation has centralized over time, shifting inexorably out of the executive departments and into the White House, is shared by many who have studied the American presidency. Andrew Rudalevige argues that such a linear trend is neither at all certain nor necessary for policy promotion. In Managing the President's Program, he presents a far more complex and interesting picture of the use of presidential staff. Drawing on transaction cost theory, Rudalevige constructs a framework of "contingent centralization" to predict when presidents will use White House and/or departmental staff resources for policy formulation. He backs his assertions through an unprecedented quantitative analysis of a new data set of policy proposals covering almost fifty years of the postwar era from Truman to Clinton. Rudalevige finds that presidents are not bound by a relentless compulsion to centralize but follow a more subtle strategy of staff allocation that makes efficient use of limited bargaining resources. New items and, for example, those spanning agency jurisdictions, are most likely to be centralized; complex items follow a mixed process. The availability of expertise outside the White House diminishes centralization. However, while centralization is a management strategy appropriate for engaging the wider executive branch, it can imperil an item's fate in Congress. Thus, as this well-written book makes plain, presidential leadership hinges on hard choices as presidents seek to simultaneously manage the executive branch and attain legislative success.
Download or read book By Order of the President written by Greg Robinson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On February 19, 1942, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese Army successes in the Pacific, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed a fateful order. In the name of security, Executive Order 9066 allowed for the summary removal of Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent from their West Coast homes and their incarceration under guard in camps. Amid the numerous histories and memoirs devoted to this shameful event, FDR's contributions have been seen as negligible. Now, using Roosevelt's own writings, his advisors' letters and diaries, and internal government documents, Greg Robinson reveals the president's central role in making and implementing the internment and examines not only what the president did but why. Robinson traces FDR's outlook back to his formative years, and to the early twentieth century's racialist view of ethnic Japanese in America as immutably "foreign" and threatening. These prejudicial sentiments, along with his constitutional philosophy and leadership style, contributed to Roosevelt's approval of the unprecedented mistreatment of American citizens. His hands-on participation and interventions were critical in determining the nature, duration, and consequences of the administration's internment policy. By Order of the President attempts to explain how a great humanitarian leader and his advisors, who were fighting a war to preserve democracy, could have implemented such a profoundly unjust and undemocratic policy toward their own people. It reminds us of the power of a president's beliefs to influence and determine public policy and of the need for citizen vigilance to protect the rights of all against potential abuses.
Download or read book Calling the Shots written by Daniel Paul Gitterman and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern presidents are CEOs with broad powers over the federal government. The United States Constitution lays out three hypothetically equal branches of government--the executive, the legislative, and the judicial--but over the years, the president, as head of the executive branch, has emerged as the usually dominant political and administrative force at the federal level. In fact, Daniel Gitterman tells us, the president is, effectively, the CEO of an enormous federal bureaucracy. Using the unique legal authority delegated by thousands of laws, the ability to issue executive orders, and the capacity to shape how federal agencies write and enforce rules, the president calls the shots as to how the government is run on a daily basis. Modern presidents have, for example, used the power of the purchaser to require federal contractors to pay a minimum wage and to prohibit contracting with companies and contractors that knowingly employ unauthorized alien workers. Presidents and their staffs use specific tools, including executive orders and memoranda to agency heads, as instruments of control and influence over the government and the private sector. For more than a century, they have used these tools without violating the separation of powers. Calling the Shots demonstrates how each of these executive powers is a powerful weapon of coercion and redistribution in the president's political and policymaking arsenal.
Download or read book The Particularistic President written by Douglas L. Kriner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the holders of the only office elected by the entire nation, presidents have long claimed to be sole stewards of the interests of all Americans. Scholars have largely agreed, positing the president as an important counterbalance to the parochial impulses of members of Congress. This supposed fact is often invoked in arguments for concentrating greater power in the executive branch. Douglas L. Kriner and Andrew Reeves challenge this notion and, through an examination of a diverse range of policies from disaster declarations, to base closings, to the allocation of federal spending, show that presidents, like members of Congress, are particularistic. Presidents routinely pursue policies that allocate federal resources in a way that disproportionately benefits their more narrow partisan and electoral constituencies. Though presidents publicly don the mantle of a national representative, in reality they are particularistic politicians who prioritize the needs of certain constituents over others.
Download or read book Investigating the President written by Douglas L. Kriner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although congressional investigations have provided some of the most dramatic moments in American political history, they have often been dismissed as mere political theater. But these investigations are far more than grandstanding. Investigating the President shows that congressional investigations are a powerful tool for members of Congress to counter presidential aggrandizement. By shining a light on alleged executive wrongdoing, investigations can exert significant pressure on the president and materially affect policy outcomes. Douglas Kriner and Eric Schickler construct the most comprehensive overview of congressional investigative oversight to date, analyzing nearly thirteen thousand days of hearings, spanning more than a century, from 1898 through 2014. The authors examine the forces driving investigative power over time and across chambers, identify how hearings might influence the president's strategic calculations through the erosion of the president’s public approval rating, and uncover the pathways through which investigations have shaped public policy. Put simply, by bringing significant political pressure to bear on the president, investigations often afford Congress a blunt, but effective check on presidential power—without the need to worry about veto threats or other hurdles such as Senate filibusters. In an era of intense partisan polarization and institutional dysfunction, Investigating the President delves into the dynamics of congressional investigations and how Congress leverages this tool to counterbalance presidential power.
Download or read book President as Leader written by Michael E Siegel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By analyzing the leadership skills of five recent American presidents, this book seeks to de-mystify the elements and dynamics of effective presidential leadership which our democracy has come to depend upon and value. Building on the pioneering work of political scientist Fred Greenstein and others, this book argues that leadership in the White House can be explained and assessed by using a consistent set of criteria to analyze presidential performance. Siegel shows that presidential leadership is exercised by real, flawed human beings, and not by superheroes or philosopher-kings beyond the reach of scrutiny or critique.
Download or read book What a President Should Know written by Lawrence B. Lindsey and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The winner of the presidential election will need to get quickly up-to-speed on how to manage the government. What are the likely issues he will encounter on the first day in the Oval Office? What does he do about the cost of the Iraq War? He'll get blamed if there's another terrorist attack, so what does he need to do that first day and the days and weeks to come to realistically and prudently prevent such an attack? How's the economy? What kind of policies can he now really propose based upon the present state of the economy and the tax-base that supports federal programs? He promised during the campaign to tackle big issues like healthcare, education, energy, immigration, international trade, and taxation. If he's going to hold himself to his own campaign rhetoric then he'd better surround himself with political savvy, fiscally astute advisers—like Lindsey and Sumerlin. This book is for the next president of the United States, all the policy-makers-in-waiting, and, most importantly, political junkies who appreciate that these authors were Oval Office advisors and that they understand what it takes to get a new administration up-and-running.
Download or read book Who Leads Whom written by Brandice Canes-Wrone and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who Leads Whom? is an ambitious study that addresses some of the most important questions in contemporary American politics: Do presidents pander to public opinion by backing popular policy measures that they believe would actually harm the country? Why do presidents "go public" with policy appeals? And do those appeals affect legislative outcomes? Analyzing the actions of modern presidents ranging from Eisenhower to Clinton, Brandice Canes-Wrone demonstrates that presidents' involvement of the mass public, by putting pressure on Congress, shifts policy in the direction of majority opinion. More important, she also shows that presidents rarely cater to the mass citizenry unless they already agree with the public's preferred course of action. With contemporary politics so connected to the pulse of the American people, Who Leads Whom? offers much-needed insight into how public opinion actually works in our democratic process. Integrating perspectives from presidential studies, legislative politics, public opinion, and rational choice theory, this theoretical and empirical inquiry will appeal to a wide range of scholars of American political processes.
Download or read book Who Governs written by James N. Druckman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America’s model of representational government rests on the premise that elected officials respond to the opinions of citizens. This is a myth, however, not a reality, according to James N. Druckman and Lawrence R. Jacobs. In Who Governs?, Druckman and Jacobs combine existing research with novel data from US presidential archives to show that presidents make policy by largely ignoring the views of most citizens in favor of affluent and well-connected political insiders. Presidents treat the public as pliable, priming it to focus on personality traits and often ignoring it on policies that fail to become salient. Melding big debates about democratic theory with existing research on American politics and innovative use of the archives of three modern presidents—Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan—Druckman and Jacobs deploy lively and insightful analysis to show that the conventional model of representative democracy bears little resemblance to the actual practice of American politics. The authors conclude by arguing that polyarchy and the promotion of accelerated citizen mobilization and elite competition can improve democratic responsiveness. An incisive study of American politics and the flaws of representative government, this book will be warmly welcomed by readers interested in US politics, public opinion, democratic theory, and the fecklessness of American leadership and decision-making.
Download or read book Wreath Layer Or Policy Player written by Paul Kengor and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, American vice presidents have played an ever-increasing role in the nation's foreign policy. This study of the foreign-policy activities of five key vice presidents--Richard Nixon, Walter Mondale, George Bush, Dan Quayle, and Al Gore--provides the first comprehensive analysis of the role of the vice president in foreign-policy affairs. In order to bring readers to a better understanding of this role, Paul Kengor asks incisive questions: Did the vice presidents' involvement in foreign policy actually benefit the administration? If so, what useful lessons can be drawn from their experiences? Is there good reason to approve or reject an enhanced role in foreign policy for future vice presidents? How, specifically, might the vice president be used in conducting the nation's international affairs? The answers to these questions are crucial reading for scholars of the presidency and foreign policy, for policy makers, and for all of us assessing vice presidents past and future.
