Abstract
Facing a worsening situation in Iraq, a relatively jobless economic recovery, large budget deficits, mixed media coverage, a united and well-funded Democratic opposition, mediocre performance in two of the three presidential debates, and a relatively pessimistic public mood, President George W. Bush nonetheless won reelection in 2004, by a surprising popular and Electoral College vote majority over Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.1 Indeed, Bush won the first popular vote majority since his father’s win over another Massachusetts liberal, Michael Dukakis, in 1988.
[For Bush] there is only one possible governing strategy: a quiet, patient and persistent bipartisanship …
—Joe Klein after the 2000 election
They misunderestimated me.
—George W. Bush, November 6, 2000
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Notes
See, for example, Peter Beinart, “Self Image,” New Republic (August 2, 2004), p. 6, which laments that while the conservative GOP highlighted moderates at its convention, Democrats promoted liberals at theirs.
Fred Barnes, “Double or Nothing: Bush’s High-Stakes Second Term,” The Weekly Standard, January 31, 2005, pp. 10–12, p. 10.
Hartmut Wasser, “Politics and Politicians in Current Democratic Systems or: Democracy and its Discontents,” paper presented at the International Conference on Democracy and the New Millennium, Malibu. Center for Civic Education (2000), via http://www.civiced.org/german_conference2000_wasser.html.
Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan ( New York: Free Press, 1990 ).
Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 ).
Kenneth T. Walsh, “Bush 2.0,” U.S. News and World Report 138: 3 (January 24, 2005 ), pp. 16–22.
Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997 ).
James A. Stimson, Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004 ).
Paul C. Light, The President’s Agenda: Domestic Policy Choice from Kennedy to Clinton ( Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999 ).
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), and for market-related ideas in particular
Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
For an empirical treatment of how this impacts the Washington bureaucracy, see Robert Maranto and Karen M. Hult, “Right Turn? Political Ideology in the Higher Civil Service,” American Review of Public Administration 34: 2 (June 2004), pp. 199–222.
Duncan Currie, “And They’re Off!,” The Weekly Standard (January 31, 2005), pp. 18–19.
James P. Pfiffner, The Strategic Presidency: Hitting the Ground Running ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996 ).
John P. Burke, Presidential Transitions:From Politics to Practice ( Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000 ), pp. 3–4.
James P. Pfiffner, The Strategic Presidency: Hitting the Ground Running. ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996 ).
Charles O. Jones, The Presidency in a Separated System ( Washington: Brookings Institution, 1994 ).
Walsh, “Bush 2.0”; Barnes, “Double or Nothing”. See also Andrew Ferguson “Operation Overreach: the downside of big-government conservatism,” The Weekly Standard 10: 33 (May 16, 2005), pp. 12–14. The conservative Ferguson argues that Bush’s over-broad agenda has caused a public backlash by showing the same sort of lack of restraint which once characterized liberalism.
Paul Krugman, “The Oblivious Right,” The New York Times, April 25, 2005.
Richard P. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency. ( New York: John Wiley, 1983 );
also see Robert Maranto, Politics and Bureaucracy in the Modern Presidency: Careerists and Appointees in the Reagan Administration ( Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993 ); Pfiffner, 1996, The Strategic Presidency.
Donald E Kettl, Team Bush ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003 ).
Charles E. Walcott and Karen M. Hult, Governing the White House ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995 ).
Ibid., p. 258 and pp. 261–262. For a related discussion of recent transitions and partisan learning theory, see Douglas M. Brattebo, “The Failure to Govern Oneself: Partisan Learning and Clinton’s Flawed Presidential Transition,” White House Studies 3 (3) (August 2003), pp. 291–302.
Joseph A. Pika, John Anthony Maltese, and Norman C. Thomas, The Politics of the Presidency, 5th ed. ( Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002 ), p. 401.
See also John P. Burke, Becoming President: the Bush Transition 2000–2003 ( Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2004 ).
See, for example, Robert Maranto, “‘Government Service is a Noble Calling’: President Bush and the U.S. Civil Service,” in Honor and Loyalty: Inside the Politics of the George H. W. Bush Presidency, ed. Leslie D. Feldman and Rosanna Perotti, pp. 97–108 ( Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002 ).
Franklin Foer, “Closing of the Presidential Mind,” The New Republic 234(4) (July 5, 2004) pp. 17–21.
Alfred Zacher, Trial and Triumph: Presidential Power in the Second Term ( Fort Wayne, IA: Presidential Press, 1996 ).
Richard P. Nathan, The Plot that Failed (New York: John Wiley, 1975); Richard P. Nathan, The Administrative Presidency. 38.
Dick Morris, Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties ( New York: Random House, 1997 ).
Ryan C. Hendrickson, The Clinton Wars: The Constitution, Congress and the War Powers ( Vanderbilt: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004 ).
Paul E. Peterson, “The President’s Dominance in Foreign Policy Making,” Political Science Quarterly 109: 2 (Summer 1994), pp. 215–234.
On the division between the domestic and foreign policy presidencies, see Aaron Wildaysky, “The Two Presidencies,” in The Two Presidencies: A Quarter Century Assessment, ed. Steven Shull, pp. 11–25 ( Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1991 );
Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildaysky, Dilemmas of Presidential Leadership from Washington through Lincoln ( New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989 ).
Douglas Kinnard, President Eisenhower and Strategy Management: A Study in Defense Politics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1977).
Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan ( New York: Free Press, 1990 ).
Victoria A. Farrar-Myers, “The Collapse of an Inherited Agenda: George Bush and the Reagan Foreign Policy Legacy,” White House Studies 1: 4 (2001); reprinted in Robert P. Watson, ed., Contemporary Presidential Studies: A Reader ( New York: NOVA, 2002 ).
Terrence Hunt, “A Rocky First 100 Days for New Bush Term,” Washingtonpost.com, April 29, 2005.
Stanley Renshon, In His Father’s Shadow (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
For example, see pp. x and 42 of Robert Maranto’s Beyond a Government of Strangers ( Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2005 ).
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© 2006 Robert Maranto, Douglas M. Brattebo, Tom Lansford
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Johnson, J., Brattebo, D., Maranto, R., Lansford, T. (2006). Are Second Terms Second Best? Why George W. Bush Might (or Might Not) Beat the Expectations. In: Maranto, R., Brattebo, D.M., Lansford, T. (eds) The Second Term of George W. Bush: Prospects and Perils. The Evolving American Presidency Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403984418_1
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