The Poverty of Presidential Government

This book is a philosophical study of the presidency. Its purpose is to improve presidential analysis by critically evaluating the office from the point of view of the political system as a whole. It seeks to redress an error committed near universally by contemporary scholarship. By topically fragmenting understanding through historic outlines, legal limits, and observed behaviors, the sometimes noticed difficulties of the office-its pretensions to charismatic leadership, its frequent undemocratic character-have been taken to be occasional short-comings to be guarded against. This analysis, by contrast, will reveal these to be deeply defining characteristics of the institution itself. The centralizing argument of the book is that the Framers incorporated radically different notions of democracy into the offices' design and that the contradiction between these different notions has left the office inherently unstable and ambiguous. Once noted, the issues that face the modern office are significantly reframed. This book should be useful to anyone with a concern about the presidency, American government, or the health of American democracy in general.