Taking the Initiative

Leadership Agendas in Congress and the "Contract With America"

John B. Bader

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780878406296, 9780878406289
• eBook ISBN: 9781589018280
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Taking the Initiative shows that majority party leaders in Congress have set and successfully pushed their own policy agendas for decades—revealing the 'Contract With America' as only the most recent, and certainly not the most successful, example of independent policy making.

Cutting deeply into the politics and personalities of three decades of party leadership, John B. Bader probes the strategies and evaluates the effectiveness of House and Senate leaders operating in a divided government, when Congress and the presidency are controlled by different political parties. He provides a historical context for analyzing the"Contract" and shows that aggressive agenda-setting has long been a regular feature of majority party leadership.

Bader interviewed more than seventy congressional leaders, staff members, party officials, and political consultants, including speakers Thomas "Tip" O'Neill and Jim Wright, for this book. He supplemented these interviews with research in largely unexplored archival materials such as press conference transcripts, notes from White House leadership meetings, and staff memoranda on strategy.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Setting Priorities in Divided Government
• 2 Learning Aggressive Leadership
• 3 Strategic Goals
• 4 Evaluating the Issues
• 5 Six Leader Goals, Six Case Studies
• 6 The "Big Picture": Democratic Priorities in Five Congresses
• 7 Familiar Strategies, New Faces: The "Contract with America"
• 8 Conclusions and Prospects for Policy Leadership in Congress
• Appendix A: Methodology
• Appendix B: Legislative Impact of Priorities
• Appendix C: Congressional vs. Presidential Initiatives
• Appendix D: Triggering Events
• Appendix E: Fate of the "Contract with America"
• References
• Index