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October 2010 | Volume 39, Issue 10

The Presidency and the Constitution

Vice President of the United States

The presidency is the most visible thread that runs through the tapestry of the American government. More often than not, for good or for ill, it sets the tone for the other branches and spurs the expectations of the people. Its powers are vast and consequential, its requirements impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purpose as set forth in the Constitution of the United States.

Isn’t it amazing, given the great and momentous nature of the office, that those who seek it seldom pause to consider what they are seeking? Rather, unconstrained by principle or reflection, there is a mad rush toward something that, once its powers are seized, the new president can wield as an instrument with which to transform the nation and the people according to his highest aspirations.

But, other than in a crisis of the house divided, the presidency is neither fit nor intended to be such an instrument. When it is made that, the country sustains a wound, and cries out justly and indignantly. And what the nation says is the theme of this address. What it says—informed by its long history, impelled by the laws of nature and nature’s God—is that we as a people are not to be ruled and not to be commanded. It says that the president should never forget this; that he has not risen above us, but is merely one of us, chosen by ballot, dismissed after his term, tasked not to transform and work his will upon us, but to bear the weight of decision and to carry out faithfully the design laid down in the Constitution in accordance with the Declaration of Independence.

The presidency must adhere to its definition as expressed in the Constitution, and to conduct defined over time and by tradition. While the powers of the office have enlarged, along with those of the legislature and the judiciary, the framework of the government was intended to restrict abuses common to classical empires and to the regal states of the 18th century.

Without proper adherence to the role contemplated in the Constitution for the presidency, the checks and balances in the constitutional plan become weakened. This has been most obvious in recent years when the three branches of government have been subject to the tutelage of a single party. Under either party, presidents have often forgotten that they are intended to restrain the Congress at times, and that the Congress is independent of their desires. And thus fused in unholy unity, the political class has raged forward in a drunken expansion of powers and prerogatives, mistakenly assuming that to exercise power is by default to do good.

Even the simplest among us knows that this is not so. Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh. Therefore, those who are entrusted with it must educate themselves in self-restraint. A republic is about limitation, and for good reason, because we are mortal and our actions are imperfect.

The tragedy of presidential decision is that even with the best choice, some, perhaps many, will be left behind, and some, perhaps many, may die. Because of this, a true statesman lives continuously with what Churchill called “stress of soul.” He may give to Paul, but only because he robs Peter. And that is why you must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness. For all greatness is tempered by mortality, every soul is equal, and distinctions among men cannot be owned; they are on loan from God, who takes them back and evens accounts at the end.

It is a tragedy indeed that new generations taking office attribute failures in governance to insufficient power, and seek more of it. In the judiciary, this has seldom been better expressed than by Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” In the Congress, it presents itself in massive legislation, acts and codes thousands of pages long and so monstrously over-complicated that no human being can read through them—much less understand them, much less apply them justly to a people that increasingly feel like they are no longer being asked, but rather told. Our nation finds itself in the position of a dog whose duty it is not to ask why—because the “why” is too elevated for his nature—but simply to obey.

America is not a dog, and does not require a “because-I-said-so” jurisprudence; or legislators who knit laws of such insulting complexity that they are heavier than chains; or a president who acts like, speaks like, and is received as a king.

The president is not our teacher, our tutor, our guide or ruler. He does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision. It is not his job or his prerogative to redefine custom, law, and beliefs; to appropriate industries; to seize the country, as it were, by the shoulders or by the throat so as to impose by force of theatrical charisma his justice upon 300 million others. It is neither his job nor his prerogative to shift the power of decision away from them, and to him and the acolytes of his choosing.

Is my characterization of unprecedented presumption incorrect? Listen to the words of the leader of President Obama’s transition team and perhaps his next chief-of-staff: “It’s important that President-Elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one.” Or, more recently, the latest presidential appointment to avoid confirmation by the Senate—the new head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—who wrote last Friday: “President Obama understands the importance of leveling the playing field again.”

“Take power. . .rule. . .leveling.” Though it is the model now, this has never been and should never again be the model of the presidency or the character of the American president. No one can say this too strongly, and no one can say it enough until it is remedied. We are not subjects; we are citizens. We fought a war so that we do not have to treat even kings like kings, and—if I may remind you—we won that war. Since then, the principle of royalty has, in this country, been inoperative. Who is better suited or more required to exemplify this conviction, in word and deed, than the President of the United States?

The powers of the presidency are extraordinary and necessarily great, and great presidents treat them sparingly. For example, it is not the president’s job to manipulate the nation’s youth for the sake of his agenda or his party. They are a potent political force when massed by the social network to which they are permanently attached. But if the president has their true interests at heart he will neither flatter them nor let them adore him, for in flattery is condescension and in adoration is direction, and youth is neither seasoned nor tested enough to direct a nation. Nor should it be the president’s business to presume to direct them. It is difficult enough to do right by one’s own children. No one can be the father of a whole continent’s youth.

Is the president, therefore, expected to turn away from this and other easy advantage? Yes. Like Harry Truman, who went to bed before the result on election night, he must know when to withdraw, to hold back, and to forgo attention, publicity, or advantage.

There is no finer, more moving, or more profound understanding of the nature of the presidency and the command of humility placed upon it than that expressed by President Coolidge. He, like Lincoln, lost a child while he was president, a son of sixteen. “The day I became president,” Coolidge wrote, “he had just started to work in a tobacco field. When one of his fellow laborers said to him, ‘If my father was president I would not work in a tobacco field,’ Calvin replied, ‘If my father were your father you would.’” His admiration for the boy was obvious.

Young Calvin contracted blood poisoning from an incident on the South Lawn of the White House. Coolidge wrote, “What might have happened to him under other circumstances we do not know, but if I had not been president. . . .” And then he continued,

“In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him.”

A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic, but life itself. It communicates that the president feels the gravity of his office and is willing to sacrifice himself; that his eye is not upon his own prospects but on the storm of history, through which he must navigate with the specific powers accorded to him and the limitations placed on those powers both by man and by God.

The modern presidency has drifted far from the great strength and illumination of its source: the Constitution as given life by the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document ever written. The Constitution—terse, sober, and specific—does not, except by implication, address the president’s demeanor. But this we can read in the best qualities of the founding generation, which we would do well to imitate. In the Capitol Rotunda are heroic paintings of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the victory at Saratoga, the victory at Yorktown, and—something seldom seen in history—a general, the leader of an armed rebellion, resigning his commission and surrendering his army to a new democracy. Upon hearing from Benjamin West that George Washington, having won the war and been urged by some to use the army to make himself king, would instead return to his farm, King George III said: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” He did, and he was.

To aspire to such virtue and self-restraint would in a sense be difficult, but in another sense it should be easy—difficult because it would be demanding and ideal, and easy because it is the right thing to do and the rewards are immediately self-evident.

A president who slights the Constitution is like a rider who hates his horse: he will be thrown, and the nation along with him. The president solemnly swears to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He does not solemnly swear to ignore, overlook, supplement, or reinterpret it. Other than in a crisis of existence, such as the Civil War, amendment should be the sole means of circumventing the Constitution. For if a president joins the powers of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.

Is the Constitution a fluctuating and inconstant document, a collection of suggestions whose purpose is to stimulate debate in a future to which the Founders were necessarily blind? Progressives tell us that even the Framers themselves could not reach agreement in its regard. But they did agree upon it. And they wrote it down. And they signed it. And they lived by it. Its words are unchanging and unchangeable except, again, by amendment. There is no allowance for a president to override it according to his supposed superior conception. Why is this good? It is good because the sun will burn out, the Ohio River will flow backwards, and the cow will jump over the moon 10,000 times before any modern president’s conception is superior to that of the Founders of this nation.

Would it be such a great surprise that a good part of the political strife of our times is because one president after another, rather than keeping faith with it, argues with the document he is supposed to live by? This discontent will only be calmed by returning the presidency to the nation’s first principles. The Constitution and the Declaration should be on a president’s mind all the time, as the prism through which the light of all question of governance passes. Though we have—sometimes gradually, sometimes radically—moved away from this, we can move back to it. And who better than the president to restore this wholesome devotion to limited government?

And as the president returns to the consistent application of the principles in the Constitution, he will also ensure fiscal responsibility and prosperity. Who is better suited, with his executive and veto powers, to carry over the duty of self-restraint and discipline to the idea of fiscal solvency? When the president restrains government spending, leaving room for the American people to enjoy the fruits of their labor, growth is inevitable. As Senator Robert Taft wrote: “Liberty has been the key to our progress in the past and is the key to our progress in the future…. If we can preserve liberty in all its essentials, there is no limit to the future of the American people.”

Whereas the president must be cautious, dutiful, and deferential at home, his character must change abroad. Were he to ask for a primer on how to act in relation to other states, which no holder of the office has needed to this point, and were that primer to be written by the American people, whether of 1776 or 2010, you can be confident that it would contain the following instructions:

You do not bow to kings. Outside our shores, the President of the United States of America bows to no man. When in foreign lands, you do not criticize your own country. You do not argue the case against the United States, but the case for it. You do not apologize to the enemies of the United States. Should you be confused, a country, people, or region that harbors, shelters, supports, encourages, or cheers attacks upon our country or the slaughter of our friends and families are enemies of the United States. And, to repeat, you do not apologize to them.

Closely related to this, and perhaps the least ambiguous of the president’s complex responsibilities, is his duty as commander-in-chief of the military. In this regard there is a very simple rule, unknown to some presidents regardless of party: If, after careful determination, intense stress of soul, and the deepest prayer, you go to war, then, having gone to war, you go to war to win. You do not cast away American lives, or those of the innocent noncombatant enemy, upon a theory, a gambit, or a notion. And if the politics of your own election or of your party intrude upon your decisions for even an instant—there are no words for this.

More commonplace, but hardly less important, are other expectations of the president in this regard. He must not stint on the equipment and provisioning of the armed forces, and if he errs it must be not on the side of scarcity but of surplus. And he must be the guardian of his troops, taking every step to avoid the loss of even a single life.

The American soldier is as precious as the closest of your kin—because he is your kin, and for his sake the president must, in effect, say to the Congress and to the people: ÒI am the Commander-in-Chief. It is my sacred duty to defend the United States, and to give our soldiers what they need to complete the mission and come home safe, whatever the cost.Ó

If, in fulfilling this duty, the president wavers, he will have betrayed his office, for this is not a policy, it is probity. It is written on the blood-soaked ground of Saratoga, Yorktown, Antietam, Cold Harbor, the Marne, Guadalcanal, the Pointe du Hoc, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a thousand other places in our history, in lessons repeated over and over again.

The presidency, a great and complex subject upon which I have only touched, has become symbolic of overreaching. There are many truths that we have been frightened to tell or face. If we run from them, they will catch us with our backs turned and pull us down. Better that we should not flee but rather stop and look them in the eye.

What might our forebears say to us, knowing what they knew, and having done what they did? I have no doubt that they would tell us to channel our passions, speak the truth and do what is right, slowly and with resolution; to work calmly, steadily and without animus or fear; to be like a rock in the tide, let the water tumble about us, and be firm and unashamed in our love of country.

I see us like those in Philadelphia in 1776. Danger all around, but a fresh chapter, ready to begin, uncorrupted, with great possibilities and—inexplicably, perhaps miraculously—the way is clearing ahead. I have never doubted that Providence can appear in history like the sun emerging from behind the clouds, if only as a reward for adherence to first principles. As Winston Churchill said in a speech to Congress on December 26, 1941: “He must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honor to be the faithful servants.”

As Americans, we inherit what Lincoln in his First Inaugural called “the mystic chords of memory stretching from every patriot grave.” They bind us to the great and the humble, the known and the unknown of Americans past—and if I hear them clearly, what they say is that although we may have strayed, we have not strayed too far to return, for we are their descendants. We can still astound the world with justice, reason and strength. I know this is true, but even if it was not we could not in decency stand down, if only for our debt to history. We owe a debt to those who came before, who did great things, and suffered more than we suffer, and gave more than we give, and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for us, whom they did not know. For we “drink from wells we did not dig” and are “warmed by fires we did not build,” and so we must be faithful in our time as they were in theirs.

Many great generations are gone, but by the character and memory of their existence they forbid us to despair of the republic. I see them crossing the prairies in the sun and wind. I see their faces looking out from steel mills and coal mines, and immigrant ships crawling into the harbors at dawn. I see them at war, at work and at peace. I see them, long departed, looking into the camera, with hopeful and sad eyes. And I see them embracing their children, who became us. They are our family and our blood, and we cannot desert them. In spirit, all of them come down to all of us, in a connection that, out of love, we cannot betray.

They are silent now and forever, but from the eternal silence of every patriot grave there is yet an echo that says, “It is not too late; keep faith with us, keep faith with God, and do not, do not ever despair of the republic.”

Mike Pence graduated from Hanover College in 1981 and earned his J.D. from Indiana University School of Law in 1986. After running for Congress in 1988 and 1990, he was named president of the Indiana Policy Review Commission, a state think tank based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1991. He was first elected to Congress from Indiana’s 6th District in 2000 and was most recently elected to a fifth term in 2008. That same year he was elected to serve as House Republican Conference Chairman. During the 109th Congress, he also served as chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus in the House of Representatives.

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The Growth of Presidential Power

May 17, 2016 | yalepress | American History , Political Science

Benjamin Ginsberg—

For most of the nineteenth century, the presidency was a weak institution. In unusual circumstances, a Jefferson, a Jackson, or a Lincoln might exercise extraordinary power, but most presidents held little influence over the congressional barons or provincial chieftains who actually steered the government. The president’s job was to execute policy, rarely to make it. Policy making was the responsibility of legislators, particularly the leaders of the House and Senate.

Today, the presidency has become the dominant force in national policy formation, not all domestic policy springs from the White House but none is made without the president’s involvement. And when it comes to foreign policy and, particularly security policy, there can be little doubt about presidential primacy. Of course, Congress retains the constitutional power to declare war, but the power has not been exercised in sixty-five years. During this period American military forces have been engaged in numerous conflicts all over the world—at the behest of the president.

How did this transformation come about? To some, the study of the presidency is chiefly the study of personality and leadership in an attempt to distinguish between the attributes and conduct of strong and weak presidents or great, near-great and not-so-great presidents. Richard Neustadt, an influential presidential scholar, epitomized this focus on leadership styles and personality when he declared in 1960 that presidential power was the “power to persuade.” In other words, the power of the presidency was derived from the charisma of the president. Some scholars pushed this personalistic approach even further by engaging in psychoanalytic studies of presidents to determine which personality attributes seemed to be associated with presidential success. James David Barber’s well-known book, The Presidential Character is an exemplar of this school of thought.

­The personal characteristics of presidents, though not unimportant, do not seem to offer an entirely satisfactory basis for explaining the transformation in the role of the president that has taken place in recent years. After all, while the power to persuade and other leadership abilities wax and wane with successive presidents, the power of the presidency has increased inexorably, perhaps growing more rapidly under the Roosevelts and Reagans and less so under the Fillmores and Carters of American politics but growing nonetheless. The president is, indeed, a person but the presidency is an office embedded in an institutional and constitutional structure and in an historical setting that limits some possibilities and encourages others. As Steven Skowronek has shown, leadership styles that are effective in one political era may be irrelevant or counterproductive in another.

Even presidential character and style are institutionally conditioned. Presidents today are generally more aggressive and ambitious than their predecessors because of an institutional change–a nominating process that tends to select for these characteristics by awarding the presidency to the survivor of years of harsh political struggles. And, as to the power to persuade, this formula was already beginning to be out of date in 1960 when it was introduced. The 1947 National Security Act had already vastly increased the president’s institutional power to command . Presidents were already becoming more imperial and less dependent upon the fine art of persuasion.

Accordingly, understanding the presidency requires what is generally called a historical-institutionalist approach. This perspective does not ignore leadership but, nevertheless, emphasizes history and institutions as the keys to understanding political phenomena. Presidential history is a guide to understanding the ways in which past events and experiences shape current perspectives and frame the possibilities open to presidents. Institutional rules, particularly the Constitution, help set the parameters for decision making and collective action.

Obviously, talented and ambitious presidents have pushed the boundaries of the office adding new powers that were seldom surrendered by their successors. But, what made this tactic possible was the inherent constitutional imbalance between the executive and Congress. Presidential power has grown less because of the leadership styles of particular presidents, and more because the Constitution puts Congress at an institutional disadvantage and provides the president with an institutional edge.

For example, presidents derive power from their execution of the laws. Decisions made by the Congress are executed by the president while presidents execute their own decisions. The result is an asymmetric relationship between presidential and congressional power. Whatever Congress does empowers the president; presidential actions, on the other hand, often weaken Congress. If it wishes to accomplish any goal, Congress must delegate power to the executive. Sometimes Congress accompanies its delegation of power with explicit standards and guidelines; sometimes it does not. In either eventuality, over the long term, a lmost any program launched by the Congress empowers the president and the executive branch, more generally, whose funding and authority must be increased to execute the law. In effect, every time Congress legislates it empowers the executive to do something, thereby contributing, albeit inadvertently, to the onward march of executive power.

As this example suggests, understanding America’s presidency requires us to do more than assess the relative merits of the presidents. It requires us to look carefully at the institution, its Constitutional place, and its history. The framers of the Constitution thought Congress would be the most important branch of government but the institutional structure they devised led to the gradual and inexorable growth of presidential power.

From Presidential Government by Benjamin Ginsberg , published by Yale University Press in 2016. Reproduced by permission.

Benjamin Ginsberg  is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and chair of the Hopkins Center for Advanced Governmental Studies. He is the co-author of American Government: Power and Purpose, among other titles. He lives in Potomac, MD.

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The Public Presidency

Lumen Learning and OpenStax

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain how technological innovations have empowered presidents
• Identify ways in which presidents appeal to the public for approval
• Explain how the role of first ladies changed over the course of the twentieth century

With the advent of motion picture newsreels and voice recordings in the 1920s, presidents began to broadcast their message to the general public. Franklin Roosevelt, while not the first president to use the radio, adopted this technology to great effect. Over time, as radio gave way to newer and more powerful technologies like television, the Internet, and social media, other presidents have been able to magnify their voices to an even-larger degree. Presidents now have far more tools at their disposal to shape public opinion and build support for policies. However, the choice to “go public” does not always lead to political success; it is difficult to convert popularity in public opinion polls into political power. Moreover, the modern era of information and social media empowers opponents at the same time that it provides opportunities for presidents.

THE SHAPING OF THE MODERN PRESIDENCY

From the days of the early republic through the end of the nineteenth century, presidents were limited in the ways they could reach the public to convey their perspective and shape policy. Inaugural addresses and messages to Congress, while circulated in newspapers, proved clumsy devices to attract support, even when a president used plain, blunt language. Some presidents undertook tours of the nation, notably George Washington and Rutherford B. Hayes. Others promoted good relationships with newspaper editors and reporters, sometimes going so far as to sanction a pro-administration newspaper. One president, Ulysses S. Grant, cultivated political cartoonist Thomas Nast to present the president’s perspective in the pages of the magazine Harper’s Weekly . [1] Abraham Lincoln experimented with public meetings recorded by newspaper reporters and public letters that would appear in the press, sometimes after being read at public gatherings. Most presidents gave speeches, although few proved to have much immediate impact, including Lincoln’s memorable Gettysburg Address.

Rather, most presidents exercised the power of patronage (or appointing people who are loyal and help them out politically) and private deal-making to get what they wanted at a time when Congress usually held the upper hand in such transactions. But even that presidential power began to decline with the emergence of civil service reform in the later nineteenth century, which led to most government officials being hired on their merit instead of through patronage. Only when it came to diplomacy and war were presidents able to exercise authority on their own, and even then, institutional as well as political restraints limited their independence of action.

Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901, at a time when movie newsreels were becoming popular. Roosevelt, who had always excelled at cultivating good relationships with the print media, eagerly exploited this new opportunity as he took his case to the people with the concept of the presidency as bully pulpit , a platform from which to push his agenda to the public. His successors followed suit, and they discovered and employed new ways of transmitting their message to the people in an effort to gain public support for policy initiatives. With the popularization of radio in the early twentieth century, it became possible to broadcast the president’s voice into many of the nation’s homes. Most famously, FDR used the radio to broadcast his thirty “fireside chats” to the nation between 1933 and 1944.

In the post–World War II era, television began to replace radio as the medium through which presidents reached the public. This technology enhanced the reach of the handsome young president John F. Kennedy and the trained actor Ronald Reagan. At the turn of the twentieth century, the new technology was the Internet. The extent to which this mass media technology can enhance the power and reach of the president has yet to be fully realized. In the twenty-first century, presidents face a paradox. While there are more ways than ever to get their message out, be it television channels or social media networks, the complexity of modern media makes the prospects for presidents of directly reaching the public less certain. Former president Donald Trump took going public to the extreme, some days sending dozens of tweets to both promote his agenda and attack political opponents. Even his allies and senior officials would be surprised by some of the tweets.

Other presidents have used advances in transportation to take their case to the people. Woodrow Wilson traveled the country to advocate formation of the League of Nations. However, he fell short of his goal when he suffered a stroke in 1919 and cut his tour short. Both Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s and Harry S. Truman in the 1940s and 1950s used air travel to conduct diplomatic and military business. Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a specific plane, commonly called Air Force One, began carrying the president around the country and the world. This gives the president the ability to take his or her message directly to the far corners of the nation at any time.

GOING PUBLIC: PROMISE AND PITFALLS

The concept of going public involves the president delivering a major television address in the hope that Americans watching the address will be compelled to contact their House and Senate members and that such public pressure will result in the legislators supporting the president on a major piece of legislation. Technological advances have made it more efficient for presidents to take their messages directly to the people than was the case before mass media. Presidential visits can build support for policy initiatives or serve political purposes, helping the president reward supporters, campaign for candidates, and seek reelection. It remains an open question, however, whether choosing to go public actually enhances a president’s political position in battles with Congress. Political scientist George C. Edwards goes so far as to argue that taking a president’s position public serves to polarize political debate, increase public opposition to the president, and complicate the chances to get something done. It replaces deliberation and compromise with confrontation and campaigning. Edwards believes the best way for presidents to achieve change is to keep issues private and negotiate resolutions that preclude partisan combat. Going public may be more effective in rallying supporters than in gaining additional support or changing minds. [2]

LINK TO LEARNING

Today, it is possible for the White House to take its case directly to the people via websites like White House Live, where the public can watch live press briefings and speeches.

THE FIRST LADY: A SECRET WEAPON?

The president is not the only member of the First Family who often attempts to advance an agenda by going public. First ladies increasingly exploited the opportunity to gain public support for an issue of deep interest to them. Before 1933, most first ladies served as private political advisers to their husbands. In the 1910s, Edith Bolling Wilson took a more active but still private role assisting her husband, President Woodrow Wilson, afflicted by a stroke, in the last years of his presidency. However, as the niece of one president and the wife of another, it was Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s who opened the door for first ladies to do something more.

Eleanor Roosevelt took an active role in championing civil rights, becoming in some ways a bridge between her husband and the civil rights movement. She coordinated meetings between FDR and members of the NAACP, championed antilynching legislation, openly defied segregation laws, and pushed the Army Nurse Corps to allow Black women in its ranks. She also wrote a newspaper column and had a weekly radio show. Her immediate successors returned to the less visible role held by her predecessors, although in the early 1960s, Jacqueline Kennedy gained attention for her efforts to refurbish the White House along historical lines, and Lady Bird Johnson in the mid- and late 1960s endorsed an effort to beautify public spaces and highways in the United States. She also established the foundations of what came to be known as the Office of the First Lady, complete with a news reporter, Liz Carpenter, as her press secretary.

Betty Ford took over as first lady in 1974 and became an avid advocate of women’s rights, proclaiming that she was pro-choice when it came to abortion and lobbying for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She shared with the public the news of her breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy. Her successor, Rosalynn Carter, attended several cabinet meetings and pushed for the ratification of the ERA as well as for legislation addressing mental health issues.

The increasing public political role of the first lady continued in the 1980s with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” antidrug campaign and in the early 1990s with Barbara Bush’s efforts on behalf of literacy. The public role of the first lady reached a new level with Hillary Clinton in the 1990s when her husband put her in charge of his efforts to achieve health care reform, a controversial decision that did not meet with political success. Her successors, Laura Bush in the first decade of the twenty-first century and Michelle Obama in the second, returned to the roles played by predecessors in advocating less controversial policies: Laura Bush advocated literacy and education, while Michelle Obama has emphasized physical fitness and healthy diet and exercise. Nevertheless, the public and political profiles of first ladies remain high, and in the future, the president’s spouse will have the opportunity to use that unelected position to advance policies that might well be less controversial and more appealing than those pushed by the president.

INSIDER PERSPECTIVE

A New Role for the First Lady

While running for the presidency for the first time in 1992, Bill Clinton frequently touted the experience and capabilities of his wife. There was a lot to brag about. Hillary Rodham Clinton was a graduate of Yale Law School, had worked as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff during the height of the Watergate scandal in Nixon’s administration, and had been a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund before becoming the first lady of Arkansas. Acknowledging these qualifications, candidate Bill Clinton once suggested that by electing him, voters would get “two for the price of one.” The clear implication in this statement was that his wife would take on a far larger role than previous first ladies, and this proved to be the case. [3]

Shortly after taking office, Clinton appointed the first lady to chair the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. This organization was to follow through on his campaign promise to fix the problems in the U.S. health care system. Hillary Clinton had privately requested the appointment, but she quickly realized that the complex web of business interests and political aspirations combined to make the topic of health care reform a hornet’s nest. This put the Clinton administration’s first lady directly into partisan battles few if any previous first ladies had ever faced.

As a testament to both the large role the first lady had taken on and the extent to which she had become the target of political attacks, the recommendations of the task force were soon dubbed “Hillarycare” by opponents. In a particularly contentious hearing in the House, the first lady and Republican representative Dick Armey exchanged pointed jabs with each other. At one point, Armey suggested that the reports of her charm were “overstated” after the first lady likened him to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a physician known for helping patients commit suicide. [4] The following summer, the first lady attempted to use a national bus tour to popularize the health care proposal, although distaste for her and for the program had reached such a fevered pitch that she sometimes was compelled to wear a bulletproof vest. In the end, the efforts came up short and the reform attempts were abandoned as a political failure. Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton remained a political lightning rod for the rest of the Clinton presidency.

What do the challenges of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s foray into national politics suggest about the dangers of a first lady abandoning the traditionally safe nonpartisan goodwill efforts? What do the actions of the first ladies since Clinton suggest about the lessons learned or not learned?

CHAPTER REVIEW

See the Chapter 12.4 Review for a summary of this section, the key vocabulary , and some review questions to check your knowledge.

• Wendy Wick Reaves. 1987. "Thomas Nast and the President," American Art Journal 19, No. 1: 61–71. ↵
• George C. Edwards. 2016. Predicting the Presidency: The Potential of Persuasive Leadership. Princeton: Princeton University Press; George C. Edwards and Stephen J. Wayne. 2003. Presidential Leadership: Politics and Policy Making. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. ↵
• Rupert Cornwell, "Bill and Hillary’s double trouble: Clinton’s ‘two for the price of one’ pledge is returning to haunt him," Independent, 8 March 1994, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/bill-and-hillarys-double-trouble-clintons-two-for-the-price-of-one-pledge-is-returning-to-haunt-him-1427937.html (May 1, 2016). ↵
• Tamar Lewin, "First Person; A Feminism That Speaks For Itself," New York Times, 3 October 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/03/weekinreview/first-person-a-feminism-that-speaks-for-itself.html . ↵

Theodore Roosevelt’s notion of the presidency as a platform from which the president could push an agenda

a term for when the president delivers a major television address in the hope that public pressure will result in legislators supporting the president on a major piece of legislation

The Public Presidency Copyright © 2022 by Lumen Learning and OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Origins of the Modern American Presidency

The presidency, penned Alexander Hamilton in 1788 following the tumultuous Constitutional Convention, should be “energetic” for good government to exist. But what “are the ingredients which will constitute this energy,” he asked in the Federalist #70. “How far can they be combined with those other ingredients which constitute safety in the republican sense? And how far does this combination characterize the plan which has been reported by the convention?” Hamilton concluded that energy in the executive needed to be combined with “a due depended on the people and a due responsibility.”  1  But, though Federalists and Anti-Federalists would continue to debate the strength of the federal government versus the rights of the states and the individual, they could agree on the establishment of an executive branch that would be equal, if not subordinate, to the legislative branch. The president would be “Our Fellow-Citizen of the White House,” who would hold “office hours” with citizens who could visit the White House and comment on his performance. As a result, the early American presidency had a small staff and a “personalized office” and the White House itself had become a “ramshackle building that was showing its age by the end of the nineteenth century.”  2

As historian Lewis Gould notes, party politics notably set apart the nineteenth- and twentieth-century presidency. Rather than becoming a “Citizen-in-Chief,” nineteenth-century presidents bestowed patronage, adhering to the “mores of the party” and giving “heed to the council of Republican and Democratic elders.”  3   Winning the presidency meant federal jobs for loyal party workers.  Moreover, as historian Gil Troy notes, the president himself did not actively campaign for the nomination.  4  Though he frequently pulled strings behind the scenes to secure it, the idea of the “public servant called to office” shaped cultural expectations of the American presidency. Though Troy argues that this was more an ideal than a reality, the culture of honor and public service of the early republic influenced rhetoric and campaign strategies for those seeking and winning the presidency.

This section offers a look at the origins of the modern American presidency.  Debates about the institution in the early republic and the nineteenth century set the rules and parameters that modern presidents—from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama—would at times challenge and reconfigure, and at other times, accept and adapt. By the twenty-first century, presidents would be labeled as the “most powerful individual in the world” and their every private and public action and utterance would be analyzed, dissected, and criticized. But, this transformation involved changes in the institutional authority of the executive branch, communications technologies, electoral procedures, and voting demographics over the course of the twentieth century. Going back to the origins of the American presidency and its limited role in American political life during the nineteenth century illuminates how dramatically the political, cultural, and economic role of the modern president changed over the course of the twentieth century—the historical focus of this website. 

The 1800 Election: Competing Visions for the American Presidency:

The presidential election of 1800 was bitter and polarizing. The candidates—incumbent president and Federalist John Adams and the Democratic-Republican challenger Thomas Jefferson—hurled personal attacks against one another as they both claimed the survival of the newly founded Republic was at stake.

With pockets of support across the North, Adams espoused a belief in a strong central government with an economic future in commerce and foreign trade. Jefferson countered this vision with a belief that the future of the newly joined United States of America was in the countryside where yeomen farmers could sustain themselves. The farmers in the slave-holding South and on the western frontier agreed with the Democratic-Republican.

The campaign became personal and bitter.  In what historian Jeffrey Pasley calls, “newspaper politics,” each side used the press to attack one another.  Adams went so far as to use his executive power to pass the Sedition Acts to prosecute printers who spoke out against the Federalists.  5

Each side maneuvered within an uncertain and non-uniform system of presidential electors to win the presidency. Though Thomas Jefferson beat John Adams 73 to 65 in electoral votes, electors did not distinguish between their presidential and vice-presidential selection, resulting in a tie between Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr. The race moved to the House of Representatives, and after six days of vote casting, Thomas Jefferson finally gained the majority to win the presidency. When presidential leadership passed from one party to another, the newly elected president called the bitter contest the “Revolution of 1800”—as power shifted from one party to another without shattering the newly founded republic.  Pasley, however, argues that the election was not so much a revolution of government, but of political culture towards a more popular politics. 

Though George Washington famously warned for the country to avoid party politics in his 1796 “Farewell Address,” the 1800 election demonstrated the propensity toward organizing around factions, with each faction espousing a different ideological interpretation of the Constitution. Following that election, new rules established the defining parameters of the “presidential game.”  6  The Twelfth Amendment (1804)—which clarified the rules for the Electoral College selection process by establishing a unified ticket for the presidential and vice-presidential nominees (rather than the vice-president being determined by the runner-up to the presidency)—set the stage for the party politics that would dominate American political life over the next century. The Election of 1800 provides a window into debates about the role of the American presidency and the ways in which Americans should elect the individual to this office. Though the Constitution outlined the broad parameters for the election to office and the responsibilities of the office, the Founding Fathers debated how the vague and uncertain rules in the Constitution should be applied. As historian Joanne Freeman argues, “democracy was a problem in the early republic,” and the “real question at the heart of the period’s politics was precisely how democratic a republic America should be.”  7  The early republic was “underdeveloped and unsteady, a political experiment with an uncertain outcome,” and as the election of 1800 demonstrated, a climate of crisis surrounded every debate about the American presidency as republican ideals conflicted with democratic realities.

Suggested Reading:

SECONDARY SOURCES

• Joanne B. Freeman, “Explaining the Unexplainable: The Cultural Context of the Sedition Act,” in  The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History,  ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 20–49.
• Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Devolution of 1800: Jefferson’s Election and the Birth of American Government,” in  America at the Ballot Box: Elections and Political History,  ed. Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

PRIMARY SOURCES

• The Constitution of the United States of America
• President George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796
• Federalist No. 70.  Alexander Hamilton, “The Executive Department Further Considered,” March 15, 1788.
• The Election of 1800 Primary Source Collection by the Library of Congress

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• What different visions existed for the functions and responsibilities of the American presidency?
• What do these contrasting visions illuminate about the debate between republicanism and democracy?
• Why does George Washington view factions as dangerous? Does the election of 1800 prove his prediction right or wrong?
• How do these alternative views of the republic’s future permeate the election of 1800? How do Adams and Jefferson use the press to articulate their visions?  How does each side attempt to manipulate the presidential selection process?

RESEARCH ACTIVITY

Popular democracy and antebellum party politics.

Two decades after the “Revolution of 1800,” the democratic impulse grew and the trend toward party institutionalization intensified. State legislatures, especially in the North, revised suffrage requirements to allow all white men (not simply landholding white men) the right to vote, and parties also changed the Electoral College to a winner takes all competition, strengthening the state party system. Parties encouraged popular participation, using tools such as newspapers, political cartoons, catchy songs, and community picnics to capture the excitement and loyalty of voters. Presidents emerged as the symbolic head of party and the controller of patronage. The nineteenth-century presidency shifted from the “republican executive” Alexander Hamilton had envisioned to the “prize” of a party game.

Andrew Jackson used the idea of popular democracy as a rallying cry in his 1824 pursuit of the presidency. When his victory of electoral and popular votes met with manipulation of the presidential nominating procedures in the House of Representatives to result in the election of John Quincy Adams, he spent the next four years building the Democratic Party, which he labeled the party of the common man. Winning the presidency four years later, Andrew Jackson brought his electoral coalition to staff the federal bureaucracy. The result was a new kind of partisan institution, what historian Richard John calls a “mass party,” which “was a self-perpetuating organization that mobilized a large and diverse electorate on a regular basis to win elections and shape public policy.” For the first time, the party “championed democracy.”  8  Andrew Jackson’s presidency transformed an electoral coalition into a political party with patronage. “To the victor belonged the spoils,” but for Jackson, “the spoils would increasingly come to refer merely to the perquisites that party leaders lavished on campaign workers. Rather than something to fight for, the spoils became, as it were, something to fight with.”  9  Not surprisingly, Jackson’s opponents, led by figures like Henry Clay, organized a similar institution to fight for and then with the spoils of winning the presidency. From 1840–1860, party politics dominated American political culture and shaped citizens’ perceptions of the presidency.

Have students research campaigns during the antebellum era and discuss ways in which the presidency is constructed as a symbol of the parties.

Divide students into 6 groups and have each group research a specific election through the website  http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/message .

By exploring the campaign histories, candidates, party platforms, and popular music of each campaign, students can gather information about the party goals and juxtapose it with the image of the president constructed during the campaign to promote specific partisan platforms. After answering the research questions below, have students design a political cartoon about the presidential candidates that encapsulates the popular imagery from the music and the message of each party’s platform.

Research Questions:

• Who are the presidential candidates?
• What party do the candidates represent?
• What are the important issues to the party?
• How is the image of the president constructed to promote the party’s message though music and political cartoons? What characteristics are emphasized? What aspects of the presidential candidate are overlooked?
• 1840 Election: Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren vs. Whig candidate William Henry Harrison
• 1844 Election: Democratic candidate James K. Polk vs. Whig candidate Henry Clay
• 1848 Election: Democratic candidate Lewis Cass vs. Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren vs. Whig candidate Zachary Taylor
• 1852 Election: Democratic candidate Franklin Pierce vs. Free Soil candidate John P. Hale vs. Whig candidate Winfield Scott
• 1856 Election: Democratic candidate James Buchanan vs. Whig candidate Millard Fillmore vs. Republican candidate John C. Frémont
• 1860 Election: Northern Democratic candidate Stephen Douglas vs. Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge vs. Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell vs. Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln
• ↑ Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist #70: The Executive Department Further Considered.” March 15, 1788,  http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/federalist-no-70/ .
• ↑ Lewis Gould,  The Modern American Presidency,  2nd ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009), 2.
• ↑ Gould, 3.
• ↑ Gil Troy,  See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate . (New York: Free Press, 1991). 
• ↑ Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Devolution of 1800: Jefferson’s Election and the Birth of American Government,” in  America at the Ballot Box: Elections and Political History,  ed. Gareth Davies and Julian E. Zelizer, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).  For more on the personal attacks between the two, see Joanne Freeman,  Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic.   (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.) For more on the political history in the early republic, see Jeffry L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher,   Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 
• ↑ Richard McCormick,  The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics.  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
• ↑ Joanne B. Freeman, “Explaining the Unexplainable: The Cultural Context of the Sedition Act,” in  The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History,  ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 20.
• ↑ Richard R. John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in  The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History,  ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 51.
• ↑ John, “Affairs of Office,” 65.

U.S. Political Institutions: Congress, Presidency, Courts, and Bureaucracy

Examine the three branches of the u.s. federal government.

How is power shared among the Congress, president, and the Supreme Court? Find out in this course taught by Harvard Kennedy School Professor Thomas E. Patterson.

What You'll Learn

How do the three branches of government operate? How is power shared among Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court? What role is played by federal agencies that have no direct constitutional authority of their own?

In this part of our series on American Government, we will examine the separation of powers among the three branches of government, and the role of voters, political parties, and the broader federal bureaucracy. We’ll explore how “the people” affect the behavior of members of Congress, what constitutes success in a president’s domestic and foreign policies, and how much power an unelected judiciary should have in a democratic system.

The course will be delivered via edX and connect learners around the world. By the end of the course, participants will understand:

• How Congress members are influenced by their constituencies
• What causes political polarization between Republicans and Democrats
• How Congress’s structure limits progress on significant issues
• How executive orders expand the powers of the presidency
• Why presidents are less constrained in foreign policy than in domestic policy
• The influence of politics on Supreme Court decisions

Course Outline

In this session, we will examine how their constituencies affect the behavior of members of Congress, including their influence on the type of bills that members are most likely to support. The 2014 farm bill will be used to highlight constituency influence.

This session will describe the role of parties in Congress and explain the developments that have contributed to party polarization within Congress. We’ll examine the 2013 government shutdown as a case study in party conflict. The session will also explain why Congress’s fragmented structure makes it difficult for Congress to take the lead on major national issues while making it perfectly suited to taking on scores of smaller issues at once.

This session will examine the factors that affect presidential success in the area of domestic policy. Several factors will be mentioned, but the focus will be the partisan makeup of Congress—whether a majority of its members are from the president’s party. The 1964 food stamp bill and the 1996 welfare bill will be used to illustrate the relationship between presidential success and Congress’s partisan makeup.

In this session, we’ll examine the president’s comparative advantages—for example, control over information—in the making of foreign policy. We’ll look particularly at the president’s war power and at executive agreements—treaty-like arrangements authorized solely by the president. President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 will serve as a case study.

In this session, we’ll examine the federal bureaucracy—its structure, staffing, and operation. We’ll also explore the challenge of holding the bureaucracy accountable for its actions. The Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet program will serve as a case study of bureaucratic politics.

This session will examine judicial power and the influence of politics on Supreme Court decisions. We will also consider the normative question of how much power an unelected judiciary should have in a democratic system. The primary case study in this session will be the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which struck down an act of Congress prohibiting independent campaign expenditures by corporations and labor unions.

Your Instructor

Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is author of the book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism , published in October 2013. His earlier book, The Vanishing Voter , looks at the causes and consequences of electoral participation, and his book on the media’s political role, Out of Order , received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye , was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century. He is also the author of the award winning Mass Media Election (1980), and a general American government text, We the People , now in the 11th edition. His articles have appeared in Political Communication , Journal of Communication , and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. His research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundations. Patterson received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971.

Ways to take this course

When you enroll for this course, you will have the option of pursuing a Verified Certificate or Auditing the Course.

Alternatively, learners can Audit the course for free and have access to select course material, activities, tests, and forums.  Please note that this track does not offer a certificate for learners who earn a passing grade.

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How do you govern a country as large, diverse, and complex as the United States? Find out in this course taught by Harvard Professor Thomas E. Patterson. .

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Course: US history   >   Unit 4

• Jacksonian Democracy - background and introduction
• Jacksonian Democracy - the "corrupt bargain" and the election of 1824
• Jacksonian Democracy - mudslinging and the election of 1828
• Jacksonian Democracy - spoils system, Bank War, and Trail of Tears
• Expanding democracy

The presidency of Andrew Jackson

• Indian Removal
• The Nullification crisis
• The age of Jackson
• Manifest Destiny
• Annexing Texas
• Developing an American identity, 1800-1848
• James K. Polk and Manifest Destiny
• Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States. He served two terms in office from 1829 to 1837.
• During Jackson’s presidency, the United States evolved from a republic—in which only landowners could vote—to a mass democracy, in which white men of all socioeconomic classes were enfranchised.
• Jackson oversaw the Indian Removal Act , which forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Native Americans and had a devastating effect on the Native population.

The early life of Andrew Jackson

The election of 1828 and the bank war, jackson’s indian policy, what do you think.

• H.W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, New York: Random House, 2005.
• For more on the War of 1812, see Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012 and Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War that Forged a Nation , New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
• For more on the First Seminole War, see Deborah A. Rosen, Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• For more on the election of 1828, see Lynn Hudson Parsons, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828 , New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• For more, see Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War , New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967.
• For more on Jackson’s Indian policies, see Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians , Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974 and Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians , New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

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US Presidency Essay Plans - A-LEVEL GOVERNMENT & POLITICS (2017)

Subject: Government and politics

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

20 September 2022

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This resource contains x11 A4 essay plan templates. This includes 5-6 full points with Point, Evidence, Analysis and counter arguments, and space to fill in introduction and conclusions.

Essay plans are a fantastic way to put your learned knowledge into practice. Familiarising yourself with essay titles is a great way to approach revision.

For more Government & Politics essay plans, please visit my profile.

• Assess the significance of the Executive Office of the President.
• Evaluate the extent to which the label imperial presidency is an appropriate description of the executive branch under Bush and Obama.
• Evaluate the extent to which the power of the president is affected by the strength of his electoral mandate.
• Evaluate the extent to which the President can get his way in Congress.
• Presidential careers can never live up to expectations. Do you agree?
• There are no effective checks on Presidential power. Do you agree?
• To what extent can the President control foreign policy.
• To what extent is the cabinet significant in the Executive branch.
• To what extent is the modern presidency an imperial presidency.
• To what extent is the power to persuade the president’s most important power?
• Weak at home, strong abroad. Discuss this view of the power of the president.

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189 President Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re writing an open letter to the government or trying to analyze some political topics, this page is for you. You will find these President essay examples collected by our team helpful.

🏆 Best President Essay Examples & Topics

👍 good topics to write to the president about, 🔍 great president ideas for research, ✅ interesting topics to write about president, 🎓 simple & easy president essay topics.

• 💡 Most Interesting President Topics to Write about
• President Obama’s Inaugural Speech Analysis In his speech, Obama was seen to take advantage of the significance of that moment to address the Americans’ main concerns.
• Comparison of the U.S. President and the President of Mexico The U.S.president serves as the head of state, the head of the government, the person in charge of the executive arm of the federal government, and he is also one of the two nationally elected […]
• The Egyptian Pharaoh vs. US President Comparison The Pharaoh was each temple’s high priest in Egypt and was the earthly representative of the Egyptian gods. The President is the head of State and does not meddle in Church/ religious affairs.
• Obama vs. Lincoln: Presidents’ Comparison The people of the nation are the first line to be affected with how the president handles the state that is why they are very keen in evaluating the current president.
• Bill Clinton’s Accomplishments as President Besides the record-high surpluses and the record-low poverty rates, the economy could boast the longest economic expansion in history; the lowest unemployment since the early 1970s; and the lowest poverty rates for single mothers, black […]
• President Cleveland Where Are You? He gives the money to his brother who purchases a corsage for Sally and a new black shoe for the dance.
• Dwight D. Eisenhower: World War II Hero and U.S. President In addition to his leading role as a peace and desegregation crusader, prior to his election as the 34th American president and even after his rise to the top seat, Eisenhower was a well known […]
• US President vs. the Canadian Prime Minister As the leader of the executive, the President must appoint the top officials in all of the major federal agencies such as the CIA, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Board.
• Four Freedoms by President Roosevelt Throughout the discussion we shall elaborate the four freedoms in a broader way for better understating; we shall also describe the several measures that were put in place in order to ensure the four freedoms […]
• An Analysis of President Nelson Mandela’s Speech It is of importance to note that in his speech; Mandela was very sincere and direct especially when he was talking about the light that is found within the human soul.
• Wendy’s Restaurant Vice President of Operations New Barkery Company is owned by Wendy’s and is tasked with the responsibility of supplying buns to some of the restaurant’s branches.
• The U.S. President’s Powers During the early years of the inception of the U.S.presidency, presidents had limited executive power. However, a ‘unitary executive’ has helped in increasing the powers of the Executive Office of the President.
• Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford as Presidents In addition to excellent academic performance, Nixon was also the leader of the student’s body in the college. In the Navy, he rose in ranks to a lieutenant commander and served in the pacific especially […]
• “The Qualities of Effective Presidents” by Fred I. Greenstein Finally, Greenstein explains the most influential of these characteristics, emotional intelligence, as having the most profound impact on any administration. Of these six, emotional intelligence is the sleeping giant.
• Ronald Reagan as a President and a Person He was against the ideas of communism, and he thus worked hard to ensure that communism did not find a place in Hollywood.
• Korean President Roh Suicide From Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Perspective According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization is the peak of experience when a person reaches understanding and harmony with his/herself and the surrounding people.
• The Impacts of President Lincoln’s Death The impact of the assassination of President Lincoln on Reconstruction is one of the most debated topics in American history. On the other hand, Lincoln’s policy and the fight against slavery became the leading cause […]
• Santa Anna, a Mexican President The President and a history maker originated from a monk a family that gave him the power to be able to control of Mexico.
• Abraham Lincoln Leadership: American Ex-Presidents Abraham Lincoln was a participatory leader, which is described as a style of leadership that encourages individuals and societal systems to change.
• President Hoover’s Role During the Great Depression Although a significant percentage of the causative constituents emanated from the previous government’s economic strategies, President Hoover elevated the conditional outlier.
• Speech by President von Der Leyen at the European Parliament Plenary In the conclusion, she summarized the impact of the invasion on Ukrainians and cemented the speech with a message of hope.
• President Obama’s Justification for Killing bin Laden In Schlag’s opinion, the secrecy of lawyers in working on the legal actions surrounding the plot of Bin Laden’s death raised concerns regarding the justification of his killing.
• Speech of President Abraham Lincoln on Gettysburg Field The Battle of Gettysburg is one of the most significant and well-known not only during the Civil War but also in the entire history of the United States.
• President Biden’s State of the Union Address in 2022 The measures taken to date will help reduce the share of unresolved problems and give some impetus to the development of the well-being of America and its citizens.
• History of the President Power It is essential to note that the president’s power expanded in proportion to the advancement of American society and not because of changes in the Constitution.
• President Franklin Roosevelt’s Acts and Laws Thus, the president managed not only to engage people to participate in the agricultural spectrum but also promoted improvement of the African American, immigrants, and workers conditions.
• President Obama’s Inaugural Address in 2009 First, the inclusion of certain phonological elements such as alliteration, consonance, and assonance works to beautify the language, which causes it to resonate with the listener.’Pounded the pavement’ or ‘picked up the phones’ is an […]
• Inside the President’s War Room Documentary Terrorists aimed two of the planes at the business symbol of New York the World Trade Center towers, and the other two at the Pentagon and, presumably, the White House or the Capitol.
• Progressive Ideology by President Roosevelt In addition, the key role of the progressive lies in addressing the problems of the other, for which reason they are to remain enthusiastic and inspiring under any circumstances.
• The President as a Legitimate Authority Nonetheless, a person has the right to disagree with the policy of the President but must respect him as the head of the country.
• The COVID-19 Bill Proposal by President Biden As the standing committees to introduce the bill to, the budget committees of the House and the Senate will be involved.
• Foreign Policy Actions of Three Presidents George Washington believed that the treaty is beneficial to the United States due to the stabilization of the relationship with England.
• The Contribution of Former U.S. Presidents in Overcoming the Great Depression The Great Depression presents an event in which the U.S.developed progressive leadership policies to improve living standards. Modern politics in the U.S.has caused social divisions similar to the period of Unravelling.
• President Obama’s and Sen. Cruz’s Hanukkah Greetings The speeches reveal that upholding the celebration is an important event in commemorating the justice of redemption of Jerusalem and rededication of the second temple at the beginning of the Maccabean revolt.
• President Roosevelt’s New Deal in Tennessee The United States was in the middle of the Great Depression when Roosevelt was elected. In conclusion, the election of Roosevelt seemed like a solution to the impacts of the Great Depression.
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Meet Allan Lichtman, the professor who predicted the president (and the last 9)

Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C, has correctly predicted the outcome of nine out of the 10 most recent presidential elections since Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984.

So how does he do it? With a crystal ball? Tarot readings? Ayahuasca retreats in the desert? No, he does it with science. Specifically, by applying the science of plate tectonics to American history and politics.

Lichtman developed the metrics for his predictions with the help of an earthquake specialist from Moscow in 1981 and uses 13 historical factors or “keys” to determine presidential races—four of those factors are based on politics, seven on performance, and two on the candidate’s personality. The incumbent party would need to lose six of those factors, or “keys,” to lose the White House.

In a recent phone interview with USA Today, Lichtman shared how he developed his method and what his thoughts are on the 2024 presidential race between the two party's presumptive nominees: President Joe Biden, and former President Donald Trump.

How did you become interested in presidential politics?

I grew up in a very political family and we’d always discuss politics at the dinner table. In 1960, when I was 13 years old, I got to go to a John F. Kennedy rally in New York City and was utterly inspired. He just blew us young people away, and since then, I have followed up on my interest in politics.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

More: Professor Allan Lichtman's 2024 presidential pick

How did your knack for predicting presidential elections develop?

Like so many other good ideas, I came across the keys serendipitously when I was a visiting distinguished scholar at the California Institute of Technology in southern California in 1981.

There I met the world’s leading authority on earthquake prediction, Vladimir Keilis-Borok, the head of the Institute of Pattern Recognition and Earthquake Prediction in Moscow and it was his idea to collaborate. Get this: In 1963 he was a member of the Soviet Scientific Delegation that came to Washington D.C. under JFK and negotiated the most important treaty by far in the history of the world: the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

Keilis-Borok said, “In Washington, I fell in love with politics and always wanted to use the methods of earthquake prediction to predict elections.” But, he said, “I live in the Soviet Union – elections? Forget it. It’s the supreme leader or off with your head. But you, you’re an expert in American history and politics, together we can solve the problem.”

So, we became " The Odd Couple " of political research and we re-conceptualized presidential elections in earthquake terms: As stability – the party holding the White House keeps the White House, and earthquake – the party is turned out.

With that in mind, we looked at every American presidential election from the horse-and-buggy days of politics, the election of Lincoln in 1860 to the election of Reagan in 1980, using Keilis-Borok’s mathematical method of pattern recognition.

It was that retrospective investigation that led to the "13 Keys to the White House": simple true-false questions that probe whether or not there’s going to be stability or earthquake, and our six-key decision rule, or the six keys that go against the White House party.

What did we see in 2020?

Very interesting election, where I did correctly predict Trump would lose and Biden would win.

In 2019, Trump was only down four keys. Remember, it takes six keys to count out the White House party. I hadn’t made a prediction yet, but things were looking pretty good. Then the pandemic hit.

When I predicted Trump’s victory in 2016 – which you can imagine did not make me very popular in 90% Democratic Washington D.C. where I teach – Trump actually sent me a note on the Washington Post article where I predicted his win that said, “Congrats Professor, good call.”

He appreciated my call but he didn’t understand the meaning of the keys. The keys primarily probe the strength and performance of the White House party.

The big message: It is governance, not campaigning, that counts. Trump didn’t understand that. So when the pandemic hit, instead of dealing substantively with the pandemic like the keys would have indicated, he tried to talk his way out of it. Of course, it didn’t work; the economy tanked, and he lost two additional keys: The short- and long-term economy. That put him down six keys, enough to predict his defeat.

You don’t plan to unveil your 2024 prediction until around August, but what are you thinking and seeing now?

Forget the polls, forget the pundits.

Polls six months, five months, even closer to the election have zero predictive value.

Forget all of the pundits who have said Biden’s too old. Democrat’s only chance to win is with Biden running for re-election. One of my keys is incumbency, he obviously wins that. Another key is party contest, he’s not been contested. That’s two keys off the top that Biden wins. That means six keys out of the remaining 11 would have to fall to predict his defeat.

I’ve also said while I have no final prediction, a lot would have to go wrong for Biden to lose.

Are there any upsets on the horizon that we should keep an eye out for?

Right now, Biden is only down, for sure, two keys: The mandate key, because the Democrats lost seats in the House 2022 elections; and the incumbent charisma key because Biden is no JFK. But there are four very shaky keys:

• Third-party: Now, to win the third-party key, the third-party candidate has to get at least 5% of the popular vote. Very few have gotten that. There has to be a stabilization of the vote for the third-party candidate as we get closer to the election, and right now, RFK Jr. is all over the map. I’ve seen him as low as 3% and as high as 15%. That key is shaky but uncertain.
• Social unrest: I thought it was pretty well locked in, in favor of the incumbent but the campus protests made it shaky.
• And of course, the two foreign policy keys: Success and failure – both shaky, given that we have two very uncertain wars raging in the Middle East and in Ukraine.

Biden would have to lose all four of those or some other unexpected event like a sudden recession, to lose.

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Biden, Announcing A.I. Center, Highlights a Win of His and a Failing of Trump’s

The president’s visit to Wisconsin celebrated the investment by Microsoft in a center to be built on the site of a failed Foxconn project negotiated by his predecessor.

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By Erica L. Green

Reporting from Racine, Wis.

President Biden on Wednesday announced the creation of an artificial intelligence data center in Wisconsin, highlighting one of his administration’s biggest economic accomplishments in a crucial battleground state — and pointing to a significant failure by his predecessor and 2024 challenger.

At the Gateway Technical College in Racine, Mr. Biden said the $3 billion project, which will be built by Microsoft, was an example of how he has delivered on promises that former President Donald J. Trump did not.

The Microsoft data center will be built on grounds where Mr. Trump, as president, announced in 2017 that Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, would build a $10 billion factory for making LCD panels. Mr. Trump promised that it would be the “eighth wonder of the world,” and visited the site with elected officials and golden shovels. But the project never materialized as expected.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden took direct aim at the failed promise. “Look what happened — they dug a hole with those golden shovels, and then they fell into it,” Mr. Biden told the crowd.

“During the previous administration, my predecessor made promises, which he broke more than kept, left a lot of people behind in communities like Racine,” Mr. Biden said. “On my watch, we make promises and we keep promises.”

In his fourth trip to Wisconsin this year, Mr. Biden continued his aggressive campaign to paint a contrast with Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, who is in the fourth week of his criminal trial in connection with payments to a pornographic film star.

While in Wisconsin, Mr. Biden also attended a campaign event, where he spoke to Black voters about the 2024 election.

“I really think democracy is at stake here,” Mr. Biden told the crowd of about 100 volunteers and supporters. He also warned that another Trump administration would threaten his accomplishments, telling the crowd that “Trump means what he says.”

The Microsoft project is part of Mr. Biden’s “Investing in America” agenda , which has focused on bringing billions of private-sector dollars into manufacturing and industries such as clean energy and artificial intelligence. Microsoft expects that the new data center will create 2,300 union construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs.

Mr. Biden called Racine a “great comeback story,” after the once-booming manufacturing town lost the Foxconn project, and thousands of jobs, under Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden said Wisconsin had seen substantial job and manufacturing growth during his tenure. “We’re doing what has always worked in this country,” Mr. Biden said, “giving people a fair shot, leaving nobody behind, growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down.”

The Republican National Committee issued a statement during Mr. Biden’s visit calling it part of his “Bankrupting America Tour.”

“Joe Biden is trying to save face in Racine County as Wisconsinites feel the pain of Bidenomics,” Michael Whatley, chairman of the committee, said in the statement. “Manufacturing has stalled, family farms are shuttering, and costs are up for everything from electricity and gas to food and housing.”

The Foxconn factory was supposed to be one of Mr. Trump’s marquee domestic manufacturing victories: the first major factory run by the electronics supplier in Wisconsin, with a promised 13,000 jobs.

Instead, the company abandoned its ambitious plans and produced only a fraction of the promised jobs, even after receiving millions in subsidies and bulldozing homes and farms to build the factory.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Foxconn defended its record in Wisconsin, saying that despite “changes in market demand and other challenges,” the company “continues to grow with its community in Wisconsin.”

Microsoft plans to work with Gateway Technical College to develop a “Datacenter Academy” that trains 1,000 workers across the state for data center and science and technology roles by 2030, according to the White House. The company also said it would expand its “Girls in STEM” program to two additional middle schools.

Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of Microsoft, who is also a Racine native, said the project represented that “we are a country where people come together, where people work together, where they address hard challenges and we get great things done.”

Data centers can provide thousands of jobs to build, but they often do not require as many people to operate. The announcement’s focus on providing training, particularly for manufacturers, reflects a central anxiety over whether A.I.’s promise to boost productivity will kill more jobs than it can enable.

Microsoft has built a tight alliance with the White House, even as it has recently suffered damaging and embarrassing hacks by groups affiliated with China and Russia. The Biden administration has positioned Microsoft as a key partner to secure U.S. leadership in the race with China to develop A.I. Last month, it helped orchestrate Microsoft’s $1.5 billion investment in G42, an artificial intelligence giant in the United Arab Emirates, to put pressure on China’s influence in the Gulf.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to their A.I. systems.

Karen Weise contributed reporting from Seattle.

Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent, covering President Biden and his administration. More about Erica L. Green

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