Suchergebnisse

In Stephen Skowronek's political time schema, Warren G. Harding is a regime manager tasked with restoring the Republican regime established by William McKinley after Woodrow Wilson's interregnum. Harding faced a particularly interesting decision, for although McKinley was the founder of the modern post–Gilded Age Republican regime, his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, was clearly a more dynamic and disruptive force in the party. The overlooked figure in this sequence, however, is William Howard Taft—in some ways a throwback to a pre‐Roosevelt president, but one who prosecuted a reform policy agenda. Presented with three different models of presidential leadership, Harding ignored the progressive conservatism of Taft and returned to a mistakenly Whiggish view of McKinley's leadership. The result was a lost opportunity for Republicans in the 1920s, setting up their repudiation in 1932.

As Prof. Akhil Amar outlines in his work, America's Constitution: A Biography, the Philadelphia Plan and its outline of a stronger executive power inspired replication on the state level. States from Massachusetts to Georgia strengthened the power of their governors, with many granting them independent elections and a veto pen. Over time, most states replicated the Federal terms of office, and currently all but two states hold quadrennial gubernatorial elections balanced with biennial or other staggered legislative terms. Yet, even as many states replicated features of Article II, from the veto to the establishment of "supreme executive power," nearly all failed to replicate the peculiar indirect method of electoral college election found within Article II, Section 1, Clauses 2-3 of the Constitution (later altered by the 12th Amendment), instead moving towards direct election of state governors. However, there is a notable and infamous exception to that trend: Georgia's county unit system.

Abstract
When confronted with racial stigma, how do people manage it? What specific arrangements of objects and tactics do they mobilize to make everyday life more tolerable (if not more equal)? The politics of respectability (respectability) is one such arrangement. Respectability makes life more tolerable by offering a counternarrative that disavows stigma through status-oriented displays. This strategy of action emerged alongside mass consumer culture in the late 19th century, but what relevance does it have to those who are stigmatized in contemporary consumer culture? Based on ethnographic interviews and observations with middle-class African Americans, respectability remains an important strategy that has undergone profound changes since its origins while still operating in similar ways. In the late 20th century it fractured into two related but distinct counternarratives: (1) "discern and avoid," which seeks distance from whatever is stigmatized, and (2) "destigmatize," using black culture as a source of high status. Perceptions of how well either counternarrative manages stigma depend on how ideology, strategy, and consumption are connected via specific sociohistorical features of place and individual power resources. I illustrate those connections through four cases that show perceived success and perceived failure for each counternarrative.

This article constitutes a comparative analysis of nineteenth‐century "restoration presidents"—presidents from the dominant party who come to power immediately following opposition presidents—to determine the extent to which they were able to act as free agents or were bound by prior commitments. These presidents established the pattern for leadership of which George W. Bush is the latest exemplar. Specifically, this article focuses attention on the Jacksonian Democrats following the Whig presidencies (Polk and Pierce) and the Republicans following Cleveland's two administrations (Harrison and McKinley). A recurrent pattern in these presidencies is that they and their regime allies see their immediate opposition party predecessors as illegitimate threats to the dominant party's ascendancy and in response these "restoration presidents" tend to overreach, pushing the regime toward its disjunction. Exploring the common elements among this group of presidents will facilitate a more accurate understanding of similarly placed presidents in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries.

Historical context affects the race for the White House as much as it does presidential leadership. Candidates from the opposition party require several elements to fall into place for them to achieve victory. Is Barack Obama a successful opposition candidate—someone who won office in a fashion similar to Bill Clinton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Woodrow Wilson? Or did he run a campaign that set the stage for a new reconstruction of politics along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan? This paper examines the 2008 presidential election through the lens of political time, evaluating the Obama campaign to determine whether it met the criteria for opposition party victory. The answer to that question helps us understand where President Obama may be placed in political time—and the nature of the opportunities and constraints he possesses as either a president of opposition or a president of reconstruction.

Mel Laracey has done a singular service to presidency studies by highlighting how early premodern presidents were engaged in public discourse. His attempt to consign Jeffrey Tulis's scholarship in The Rhetorical Presidency to the dustbin of history, however, is premature. On a small scale, some of Laracey's evidence countering Tulis's thesis is unconvincing. On a larger scale, much of Laracey's analysis appears to be a case of disputes over definitions, a dispute that does not address the enduring insights of Tulis's work concerning the consequences of constitutional reinterpretation. Finally, the attempt to construct a Kuhnian paradigm shift fails, as much of Tulis's diagnosis of the problem of presidential power in republican government remains valid.