Presidential Studies Quarterly articles from September 1998

Presidential Studies Quarterly archives from September 1998

About This Issue.
September 22, 1998... The Clinton Presidency in Crisis In the spring of 1998, it became clear that the Clinton presidency was deeply enmeshed in scandal. There was a crisis in the sense that important issues were at stake and that the future of his presidency...

The Once to Future Worlds of Presidents Communicating.
September 22, 1998... The question I ask myself is how did we ever get from there to here? From those halcyon days of 1958 when I joined the White House staff as a twenty-five-year-old speech writer for President Dwight Eisenhower to forty years later awaiting the...

Bill Clinton and His Crisis of Governance.
September 22, 1998... The dramatic Republican congressional victory in the 1994 elections created a crisis of governing for Bill Clinton. His party was soundly defeated at the polls, and the Republicans obtained majorities in both houses of Congress for the first...

The Clinton Reelection Machine: Placing the Party Organization in Peril.(Pres Bill Clinton)
September 22, 1998... By most accounts, the 1996 presidential election was a yawner. On this conventional view, President Clinton had the early edge because his opponent, the former Senate majority leader Bob Dole, was an uninspiring candidate. Dole's nomination,...

No Place for Amateurs: Some Thoughts on the Clinton Administration and the Presidential Staff.(Pres Bill Clinton)
September 22, 1998... When apportioning blame for the missed opportunities of the Clinton presidency, history may well accord the greatest weight not to the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky/Katherine Willey sex scandals but to the series of political misjudgments Clinton...

With Enemies Like This, Who Needs Friends?(1996 political campaign)
September 22, 1998... Hillary was right. There is a Clinton conspiracy. Although she did not name names, she indicated that we all knew who they were. And we do. In the first year, it was Robert Dole, who so skillfully engineered the filibuster of Clinton's...

The Public Presidency Hits the Wall: Clinton's Presidential Initiative on Race.(Pres Bill Clinton)
September 22, 1998... President Clinton, June 14, 1997 When President Bill Clinton made a public appeal for all Americans to begin "a candid conversation on the state of race relations today," he promised both to lead the dialogue and to encourage public...

Bill Clinton and the Politics of Second Terms.
September 22, 1998... A president's second term almost invariably turns out to be less successful than the first term. Historians may argue about whether the second terms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James...

Military Action against Iraq.
September 22, 1998... During his first six years in office, President Bill Clinton embraced a broad definition of the power of commander in chief, claiming that it enables him to send troops anywhere in the world, at any time, for any reason, without first seeking...

The Item Veto Dispute and the Secular Crisis of the Presidency.
September 22, 1998... America's brief experiment with a presidential item veto came to an abrupt, if expected, end when the Supreme Court ruled on June 25, 1998, that Congress had improperly ceded to the president the de facto power to rewrite legislation when it...

The Constitutional and Popular Law of Presidential Impeachment.
September 22, 1998... The Constitution is incomplete, ambiguous, or silent on key issues involving impeachment of a president. Democrats and Republicans are inconsistent in their constitutional analysis, each party borrowing from the other's past legal arguments,...

Executive Privilege in the Lewinsky Scandal: Giving a Good Doctrine a Bad Name.(Monica Lewinsky)
September 22, 1998... Executive privilege is the right of the president and high executive branch officers to withhold information from Congress, the courts, and ultimately the public. It is now a well-established constitutional power--one with a long-standing...

The "Public" versus the "Private" President: Striking a Balance between Presidential Responsibilities and Immunities.
September 22, 1998... Recent and ongoing political events have raised, once again, the issue of whether the president is or should be "above the law." This has been an enduring concern of the American polity, most recently debated in the context of President Nixon's...

Executive-Legislative Conflict and the Nomination-Confirmation Controversy in the Lower Federal Judiciary.
September 22, 1998... In systems of governance such as the one in the United States, where there is a separation of powers and where separate elections determine who will control the distinct institutions, executive-legislative relations are cumbersome and perhaps...

The Judicial Confirmation Crisis and the Clinton Presidency.(Pres Bill Clinton)
September 22, 1998... At a Senate Judiciary Committee business meeting on April 2, 1998, the chair of the committee, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), announced that he had been asked and had decided "to hold over the judges until the next meeting." This provoked an...

The Sound of One Hand Clapping: The World Moves Away from the White House.
September 22, 1998... The concept of leadership implies that there are also followers. A unique feature of the modern presidency is its leadership of the free world or even of the world in its entirety. However, the behavior of followers is usually neglected. The...

Public Purposes and Private Pursuits: Questions about Bill Clinton.
September 22, 1998... Some years ago, I appeared as a guest on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour to discuss the moral expectations Americans have of their politicians. One of the other guests had written a book about the hypocrisy of political men who pretended to be good...

When Is Presidential Behavior Public and When Is It Private?
September 22, 1998... On February 27, 1998, the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted a hospital administrator who runs a Republican professional women's group in Louisiana as saying, Well, let me tell you about my dearest friend. Her son has a rare heart ...

Evaluating Presidential Character.
September 22, 1998... During the 1992 presidential campaign, the "character" issue for Bill Clinton hinged on charges, aptly summarized by Bush's political director, Mary Matalin, that he was a "pot-smoking, draft-dodging, womanizer."(1) Near the end of the...

The Clinton Crisis and the Double Standard for Presidents.
September 22, 1998... This article makes four points: 1. By demanding that politicians, and particularly presidents, be more traditionally moral in private behavior than either private sector leaders or average citizens, the American media has applied a double...

Sexual Probity and Presidential Character.
September 22, 1998... In 1998, members of the Clinton administration found themselves playing roles in a drama that the president had created, but they were not sure whether they were involved in a farce or a tragedy. In truth, the sexual imbroglio the president had...

The Enabler.
September 22, 1998... When the Free Press published my book, All the President's Kin, in 1981, I very much doubt that the majority of my colleagues in political science were sympathetic to its basic argument. It was a time when, rare exceptions notwithstanding, the...

President Clinton and Character Questions.
September 22, 1998... President Clinton's critics relentlessly attack him on the character issue. His supporters no longer even bother to put up much of a defense of the president, shrugging their shoulders and saying, "Well, at least he is doing a good job." It is...

Coping with the Politics of Scandal.
September 22, 1998... The crisis of the Clinton presidency is in many ways a reflection of a much broader and critically important phenomenon in contemporary American politics: the remarkable prominence of the politics of scandal. American politicians, journalists,...

Epilogue.
September 22, 1998... As the twentieth century closed, historians recorded that the president of the United States had dallied with a lover in the White House itself. A longtime philanderer, the president had assignations outside as well as inside the executive...