20 Module 7: The Presidency
Objectives
- Characterize the expectations for and the backgrounds of presidents and identify paths to the White House and how presidents may be removed.
- Evaluate the president’s constitutional powers in relation to the constitutional power of the Governor of Arizona.
- Describe the roles of the vice president, cabinet, Executive Office of the President, White House staff, and First Lady.
- Assess the impact of various sources of presidential influence on the president’s ability to win congressional support.
- Analyze the president’s powers in making national security policy and the relationship between the president and Congress in this arena.
- Identify the factors that affect the president’s ability to obtain public support.
- Characterize the president’s relations with the press and news coverage of the presidency.
- Assess the role of presidential power in the American democracy and the impact of President Taft’s veto of the original Arizona Constitution.
Read
- American Government Chapter 12
- Supplemental Reading: Review the Constitution of the State of Arizona, Article V
- Supplemental Reading: Review the US Constitution
Chapter Summary
This chapter examines how presidents exercise leadership and looks at limitations on executive authority. Americans expect a lot from presidents (perhaps too much). The myth of the president as a powerhouse distorts the public’s image of presidential reality.
Presidents operate in an environment filled with checks and balances and competing centers of power. Other policymakers with whom they deal have their own agendas, their own interests, and their own sources of power. To be effective, the president must have highly developed political skills to mobilize influence, manage conflict, negotiate, and build compromises. Political scientist Richard Neustadt has argued that presidential power is the power to persuade, not to command.
The Presidents
Throughout American Government, the authors have pointed out the American political culture’s strong belief in limited government, liberty, individualism, equality, and democracy. These values generate a distrust of strong leadership, authority, and the public sector in general. Americans are of two minds about the presidency. On the one hand, they want to believe in a powerful president, one who can do good. On the other hand, Americans dislike a concentration of power. Although presidential responsibilities have increased substantially in the past few decades, there has been no corresponding increase in presidential authority or administrative resources to meet these new expectations. Americans are basically individualistic and skeptical of authority.
Most presidents reach the White House through the electoral process. About one in five presidents assumed the presidency when the incumbent president either died or (in Nixon’s case) resigned. Almost one-third of twentieth-century presidents have been “accidental presidents.” Once in off