The Unsustainable Presidency

Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Beyond

W. Grover, J. Peschek

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137371812
• eBook ISBN: 9781137485984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Unsustainable Presidency develops a structural theory of the office by challenging and redefining the twin imperatives upon which the modern chief executive was constructed and by applying the theory to the three most recent presidents: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Notes

1 Theories of the American Presidency

1. Antonia Juhasz, “Two Years Later: BP’s Toxic Legacy,” The Nation, May 7, 2012. See also Naomi Klein, “Gulf Oil Spill: A Hole in the World,” The Guardian (UK), June 20, 2010. The Exxon-Valdez spill occurred in 1989. For an account of the record $4.5 billion settlement between BP and the Department of Justice in November of 2012, see Jason Leopold, “BP Will ‘Kill Again,’ Former EPA Officials, Attorney Warn,” Truthout, November 18, 2012. For an analysis of the oil spill, see also William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling, Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

2. Dahr Jamail, “Gulf Ecosystem in Crisis Three Years after BP Spill,” Al Jazeera English, October 21, 2013. Rebecca Leber, “Judge Deals a Blow to BP’s Efforts to Dodge Deepwater Horizon Payments, Nation of Change, December 26, 2013.

3. President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Climate Change,” The White House, June 25, 2013.

4. Ibid.

5. Obama, quoted in Bill McKibben, “Our Protest Must Short Circuit the Fossil Fuel Interests Blocking Obama,” The Guardian (UK), January 6, 2013.

6. See William F. Grover, The President as Prisoner: A Structural Critique of the Carter and Reagan Years, Albany, NY: SUNY, 1989, especially Chapter 1, “The Rise and Decline of Presidency Fetishism.” Some of the language and analysis in this chapter is from The President as Prisoner.

7. Ibid., pp. 1–5. See also the discussion of Hamilton’s fuller meaning in Michael A. Genovese, ed., Contending Approaches to the American Presidency, Washington, DC: SAGE/CQ Press, 2012, pp. 12–19.

8. Grover, The President as Prisoner, p. 5. See also p. 188, note 9.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid, p. 6.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid, p. 16.

13. Ibid., p. 17.

14. See Genovese, Contending Approaches to the American Presidency, pp. 11–19, for a solid brief discussion of the Framers’ effort to balance Hamiltonian energy with republican safety.

15. Theodore Lowi, The Personal President, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 96.

16. Ibid, p. 115.

17. See Grover, The President as Prisoner, Chapter 1, for a full account of the Expansivist-Restrictivist debate among a wider range of authors within Political Science. Genovese uses the language of this debate in his analysis. See Genovese, Contending Approaches to the American Presidency, p. 11.

18. Harold Laski, The American Presidency: An Interpretation, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940, p. 11.

19. Ibid., p. 274.

20. Ibid., p. 123.

21. Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency, revised ed., New York: Mentor Books, 1960, p. 14.

22. Grover, The President as Prisoner, p. 26. See also note 34 on p. 193.

23. Rossiter, The American Presidency, p. 102.

24. Ibid., p. 140.

25. Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp.32–39. Among many accounts, see also Thomas E. Cronin and Michael A. Genovese, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 107–115; Stephen Skowronek, “Mission Accomplished,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4, December 2009, pp. 795–804; and Michael Nelson, “Neustadt’s ‘Presidential Power’at 50,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010.

26. Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1980, p. 136.

27. Genovese, A Presidential Nation: Causes, Consequences and Cures, Boulder, CO: Westview, 2013, p. 3.

28. Lori Cox Han, New Directions in the American Presidency, New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 4.

29. For an account of this crisis of the office, see Grover, The President as Prisoner, pp. 7, 39–61.

30. Edward S. Corwin, The President: Office and Powers, 4th ed., New York: New York University Press, 1957, pp. 29–30, 307.

31. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., War and the American Presidency, New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. See especially Chapter 3, “The Imperial Presidency Redux.”

32. Schlesinger, War and the American Presidency, p. 45.

33. Thomas E. Cronin, The State of the Presidency, 2nd ed., Boston: Little Brown, 1980; Cronin and Genovese, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, especially Chapter 1; and Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• One  Theories of the American Presidency
• Two  Beyond Institutions-as-Structure: A Deeper Structural Perspective
• Three  Bill Clinton and the Neoliberal Presidency
• Four  The Conservative Mirage: George W. Bush and Empire Waning
• Five  Change You Can Believe In? The Barack Obama Presidency
• Six  Toward a Deep Presidency: Coming to Terms with Our Constitutional Catastrophe-in-Chief
• Notes
• Index