Leadership, character, and presidents -- Presidential nature and historical development -- Two greats : George Washington and Abraham Lincoln -- The ousted one-termers : Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush -- The popular two-termers : Ronald Reagan and William J. Clinton -- The polarizing two-termers : George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- The problematic presidency of a national celebrity : Donald J. Trump -- Performing the presidency : continuity and change.
This article examines President William J. Clinton's use of presidential exemplars from 1991 to 2001. While many observers have called attention to the fact that Clinton made efforts to connect his presidency to Democratic "greats" Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt, his rhetoric reveals a more complex pattern of identification and use of his predecessors. Not only did he reference Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—Republican "greats"—as often as Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt, but he appears to have used them to talk across party lines and move his fellow partisans to the center. This rhetorical pattern became more prominent after the 1994 midterm election, when the Republicans won majority control of Congress. Hence, this article asserts that Clinton used his predecessors to help him carry out his political agenda and his constitutional duties. Further, he learned from his predecessors about how they had used ideological and partisan constructs during their administrations, and this led to his reconsidering the "great debate" between Jefferson and Hamilton. This research concludes that President William J. Clinton left a Hamiltonian—not Jeffersonian—legacy for the Democratic party.
The first debate in 2008 was a turning point in the presidential election campaign: a race that was close before the debate turned decisively in Obama's favor following it. This article explores how the media reached their verdict that "Obama won." We examine two aspects of this problem: how, in practice, the media reached this verdict and whether they made the right decision from a normative standpoint. Based on content analysis of debate transcripts, we argue that the media interpreted the debate by synthesizing three pre-debate narratives in roughly equal proportions. Crucially, two of these narratives favored Obama. We also find that the "Obama won" verdict was consistent with what we might expect had the debate been judged by a public-spirited umpire.
