Volume 7, Issue 1 - The Obama Administration: Setting Up a Government

This issue of The Forum brings a focus on elements shaping the new presidential administration. One cluster of articles concentrates on key influences going into the Obama Administration: Wendy Cho and James Gimpel on the differential influences from an economic meltdown; Charles O. Jones on the place of prior political experiences; Todd Estes on lessons from the beginnings of the Clinton Administration; Casey Dominquez on the mandate and the honeymoon; and Matt Grossman on the interest group environment. A second cluster of articles considers the new administration as it moves forward: Fred Greenstein on key strengths and weaknesses that Barack Obama brings to the job; Sidney Milkis and Jesse Rhodes on the interaction of this president with his own party; Dennis Thompson on the fortunes of his proposed ethics initiatives; Sheldon Goldman on his potential place in the politics of judicial selection; Steve Schier on institutional evolution, regime structure, and available skills, and David Magleby, Bradley Jones, and David Lassen on the shifting environment for campaign finance. In the book reviews, John Kenneth White asks about the current political structure as portrayed in Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, while Bruce Oppenheimer celebrates one of the great analysts and interpreters of American politics, by way of Richard F. Fenno, Jr., Congressional Travels.

We examine variations in the impact of several components of economic hardship on the 2008 presidential vote by county. High gas prices, mounting foreclosures, and rising unemployment all enhance the Democratic vote share in areas critical to winning an Electoral College majority. Using Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), however, we show the varying impact of these forces, controlling for previous Democratic voting, race, age, and income. Economic problems do not produce anything like a uniform response, and not merely because they are geographically uneven in their intensity. Some populations hit by economic downturn would not have voted for the incumbent's party under any circumstances, while others supported the in-party in spite of hard times. Even so, the combined weight of rising jobless claims and escalating foreclosures was sufficiently unsettling in key states to make for an early call on Election Night.

Experience in politics and administration is typically thought of as legitimizing leadership. However, what if those with experience are judged to be poor performers in the premier leadership post in American politics—the presidency? History provides a number of such cases—indeed, nearly a quarter of the presidents can be so designated. This article identifies these instances and the successions to those presidents with little or no national-level political or executive experience. The conclusion: greater legitimacy is accorded to inexperience, with all of its accompanying risks. The cases are comparatively analyzed and lessons identified for the forty-fourth president—Barack Obama.

This article examines the first year of the Clinton presidency and identifies the internal and external factors that led to problems and low approval ratings. It then analyzes the incoming Obama administration along the same lines and evaluates Clinton's first-year experiences as a series of cautionary tales that could help Obama avoid repeating the same mistakes at the outset of his administration.

This paper considers whether President Obama won a mandate during the 2008 election, and whether he is experiencing the expected honeymoon with the press, public, and Congress in 2009. It finds that the electorate did instruct him to "fix" the economy, but that given his relatively narrow victory and the electorate's indecisive rejection of conservative principles, the limited mandate he won is not necessarily going to help him govern. This paper also argues that he is experiencing a normal first-year honeymoon with the press and public, while his partisan advantage in Congress overwhelms any Republican reluctance to be deferential to him. Between the limited mandate, high public approval ratings, and large partisan majorities in Congress, prospects for his first year in office look fairly good.

President Obama, like countless politicians before him, has pledged to cleanse Washington of the unseemly influence of interest groups on the policymaking process. His plan is to expand the scope of group participation and eliminate quid pro quo exchanges. Yet early signals indicate that he has brought the same previously prominent interest groups (both conservatives and liberals) into policy discussions over the stimulus bill, children's health insurance, health care reform, and entitlement control. Early policy changes also appear to offer substantial benefits to interest groups and constituencies associated with the Democratic Party.I argue that these patterns are typical and should be expected to continue. The involvement of various interest groups and constituencies in Washington policymaking is governed by their relative organizational mobilization, independent of ideology. Yet the extent to which party leaders heed their advice follows largely from their ties to partisan coalitions and their views. Despite campaign claims that interest group influence must be hindered before policy proposals can move forward, policy change comes much more easily to Washington than changes in the role of interest groups in the policymaking process.

This article presents a highly distilled account of the formative experiences and political rise of Barack Obama. It draws on the sources that were available at the time of his inauguration. The article concludes by examining Obama's leadership qualities in the realms of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. The article went into production one month after Obama entered the White House.

Ascending to the presidency in the midst of a severe economic crisis and an ongoing war on terrorism, Barack Obama faces numerous political and policy challenges. We examine an oft-obscured facet of presidential leadership: the president's relations with his party. We argue that Obama has benefited from and abetted the development of a new relationship between the president and the parties that features presidents as strong party leaders who invest heavily in mobilizing voters, raising campaign funds, and articulating party doctrine. As we show, Obama's party leadership may hold both promise and peril for the practice of American democracy. Just as previous Republican presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush used their powers in ways that bolstered their parties, Obama's exertions have strengthened the Democratic Party's capacity to communicate with constituents, mobilize voters, and raise funds. However, Obama must take care to avoid the pitfalls of presidential party leadership that ultimately undermined Reagan's and Bush's presidencies. In particular, recent history suggests that Obama must avoid forms of administrative aggrandizement that alienate citizens from government; and that he must forego leadership strategies that threaten the independence and integrity of the party apparatus.

Obama's "ethics agenda" is the most ambitious ever set out by a new administration. It promises a tougher approach not only to the usual problems such as conflict of interest and the revolving door, but also to broader challenges such as political influence on career officials and lack of transparency in government. The goals of the agenda are a step forward insofar as they focus more on improving the democratic process than disciplining political miscreants. But the means relied on to carry out the goals are less impressive. They perpetuate a major deficiency of the current ethics regime—its disjointedness, which undermines the transparency and accountability necessary for a robust democracy. What is needed is a coordinated approach, led from the White House itself, that takes a more comprehensive view of ethics regulation throughout the government.

This essay speculates on what an Obama judiciary might look like and how the selection process is likely to play out. This is presented against the backdrop of past experience. First, the essay traces the demographic diversification of the federal bench from the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt through George W. Bush. Second, this essay considers ideological diversity and presents voting data from the first three completed terms of the Roberts Court. Third, the essay considers the selection process, including confirmation of lower-court judges by the Senate. It concludes that President Obama can be expected to promote further gender, race, and ethnic diversification as well as to seek to moderate the current ideological imbalance on the courts. He will likely keep the existing institutional apparatus of judicial selection and will restore the American Bar Association to the role it had prior to George W. Bush's presidency. Confirmation may well prove to be a challenge in a Senate that is not filibuster-proof.

This article provides a variety of concepts for understanding the Obama presidency as it proceeds. One can fruitfully comprehend the next four years in terms of Obama's theory of presidential power, amount of political capital, progress in establishing a political regime, demonstration of political skills and ability to preserve and expand his political authority. The strengths and weaknesses of Obama's personality -- in terms of its levels of extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness -- will be come evident in time. Together, these concepts will explain much about his presidency.

The BCRA soft money ban enacted in 2002 posed a serious challenge to Democrats. Could they compete in fundraising with the Republicans in a hard money only environment? Some even went so far as to suggest that BCRA was a "suicide bill" for the Democrats. Such dire predictions have not proven true. Democrats have exploited good candidates, strong party committee leadership, messaging, and technology to be competitive with the Republican Party overall in fundraising among individuals. The surge in individual donors to the Democrats is most pronounced in the 2008 presidential race but extends to the two congressional campaign committees as well.