Obama's "Big Bang" Presidency
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Steven E Schier
Barack Obama’s large policy ambitions have made him a highly polarizing figure for Americans, just as his predecessor George W. Bush, also a person of grand ambitions, had been. Obama has pursued a “directive” presidency, in which the chief executive serves as the director of change, who creates opportunities to move in new directions and lead others where they otherwise would not go. One consequence of this is growing popular disapproval of Obama’s presidential agenda. Maintaining popular support is hard and frustrating work, and in seeking to maintain it, presidents encounter widespread constraints. Recent presidents in times of popular disapproval have resorted to emphatic employment of executive powers. In such a situation, a president, by unresponsively trying to direct events, can effectively destroy his popular support—the presidential power trap. That is the central threat to Obama’s presidency at present.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- The Politics Missed by Political Science
- Fiction, Facts, and Truth: The Personal Lives of Political Figures
- Armed with Practice: Learning to Engage with the Military
- Whether and Whither an Applied Career Track for Doctoral Political Scientists
- Political Science and Practical Politics: A Journalist's Journey
- Is Political Science Relevant? Ask an Expert Witness
- Academics Outside the Academy
- Healing the Rift between Political Science and Practical Politics
- Political Science and Practical Politics
- Building a Political Science Public Sphere with Blogs
- Political Science at the State University in the State Capital
- Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don't
- Obama's "Big Bang" Presidency
- Forecasting Control of State Governments and Redistricting Authority After the 2010 Elections
- Review
- Review of The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike - An Essay in Numbers
- Review of The American Public Mind: The Issues Structure of Mass Politics in the Postwar United States
- Review of A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America
