Abstract
Modern presidents, whether Democrat or Republican, are expected to be activists in the White House. It is routinely argued that it is incumbent upon them to advance proposals for change and to mastermind their enactment into law. As a new president takes up office the problems of governance are reduced to activist clichés. He is advised to ‘hit the ground running’ and is expected to exploit fully the opportunities offered by the ‘honeymoon’ relationship with Congress that is is assumed will prevail during the early months of his presidency. At the end of his ‘first hundred days’ in office media pundits and others will calculate how successful he has been in gaining the cooperation of Congress, estimates that will be reactivated at the end of each year in office and again at the conclusion of his term. According to calculations of this type George Bush was consistently found wanting. As we saw in the previous chapter, he was accused of ‘hitting the ground crawling’ and of failing to take advantage of the ‘honeymoon’: analysts found his achievements in his first year to be slim and were similarly unimpressed by his legislative record throughout his presidency.
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Notes
See especially George Edwards, ‘Measuring Presidential Success in Congress: Alternative Approaches’, Journal of Politics, Vol. 47, 1985, pp. 667–685.
Janet Hook, ‘Bush Inspired Frail Support For First Year President’, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 30 December 1989, pp. 3540–3545.
Anthony King, ‘A Mile and a Half Is a Long Way’, in Anthony King, Both Ends of the Avenue: The Presidency, the Executive Branch and Congress in the 1980s ( Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1983 ), pp. 246–273.
Richard Rose, The Postmodern President, 2nd edn ( Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1991 ), p. 313.
Richard Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy ( Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993 ), p. 146.
Federalist Papers, Number 73, The Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library, 1961), pp. 443 and 446.
Max Farrand (ed.), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), Vol. II, p. 76.
Kenneth Walsh, ‘Bush’s Veto Strategy’, U.S. News and World Report, 2 July 1990, pp. 18–20.
Robert Spitzer, The Presidential Veto: Touchstone of the American Presidency ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988 ), p. 85.
Paul Light, The President’s Agenda ( Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982 ), p. 113.
Janet Hook, ‘President’s Mastery of Veto Perplexes Hill Democrats’, Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 27 July 1991, pp. 2041–2045.
Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush ( New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992 ), p. 78.
Terry Eastland, Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency ( New York: The Free Press, 1992 ), p. 73.
David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 234, also 157 and 337.
Charles Kolb, White House Daze; The Unmaking of Domestic Policy in the Bush Years ( New York: The Free Press, 1993 ), p. 11.
Robert Spitzer, ‘Presidential Prerogative Power: The Case of the Bush Administration and Legislative Power’, PS: Political Science and Politics, March 1991, pp. 38–42.
Ibid., pp. 167–168, Spitzer, op. cit., p. 139; and Louis Fisher, Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985 ), pp. 154–162.
Charles Tiefer, The Semi-Sovereign Presidency: The Bush Administration’s Strategy For Governing Without Congress (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), p. xi.
Theodore Sorensen, Decision-Making in the White House ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1963 ), pp. 83–84.
Thomas Geoghegan, ‘Bust the Filibuster’, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 12–18 September 1994, p. 25.
See Charles O. Jones, The Presidency in a Separated System ( Washington DC: Brookings, 1994 ).
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation ( New York: W.W. Norton, 1987 ), p. 415.
The phrase quoted is from Barbara Sinclair, ‘Governing Unheroically (and Sometimes Unappetizingly): Bush and the 101st Congress’, in Colin Campbell and Bert Rockman (eds), The Bush Presidency: First Appraisals ( Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1991 ).
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© 1998 David Mervin
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Mervin, D. (1998). ‘Preventing Bad Laws’. In: George Bush and the Guardianship Presidency. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26719-4_6
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