Legislative Veto

As the scope and size of the U.S. government has expanded, the importance of good management to the success of a presidency has also increased. Although good management cannot guarantee political or policy success, poor management can certainly undermine good policy and political efforts.

In this second edition of The Managerial Presidency James P. Pfiffner brings together both classic analyses and more recent treatments of managerial issues that affect the presidency. Some of the foremost presidency scholars have contributed to this volume, including Richard Neustadt, Charles O. Jones, Hugh Heclo, George Edwards, and Louis Fisher. This second edition includes more recent scholarship by Roger Porter, Steven Kelman, Peri Arnold, and Ronald Moe.

The focus of this collection is the extent to which presidents can exercise control over the executive branch bureaucracies and whether it is wise for them to exert that control. Part one deals with the question of how to organize the White House staff.If this organizational problem is not resolved, solving the broader problems of organization and policy will be that much more difficult. Part two addresses the question of how much control presidents should exert over the departments and agencies of the executive branch and how the White House staff and other political appointees relate to career civil servants. The final section examines presidential managerial reform efforts and the congressional role in managing the government.

Although the contributors to this collection do not all agree on how the presidency should be managed, there is surprising consensus on which questions ought to be asked. The analyses addressing those questionswill be of interest to students and scholars of the modern presidency as well as those interested in executive leadership and public administration.

What, exactly, do Americans want from their president? A strong, innovative leader or someone who simply follows the will of the people? A president who insists on the ideals of a party or someone who builds bipartisan support? A president who exercises power forcefully or someone who establishes consensus before doing anything? The answer, according to Thomas E. Cronin and Michael A. Genovese in their provocative new book, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, is that Americans want the president to be a leader and a follower, partisan and bipartisan, innovative and conservative. For example, we expect our presidents to provide visionary leadership, and yet at the same time to be ever-sensitive to public opinion polls. We want a president with the power to solve the nation's problems, yet we are inherently suspicious of centralized leadership and the abuse of power. Such conflicting demands put the president in an impossible position.Indeed, Cronin and Genovese contendt the duties and challenges of the office are so capacious and the public's expectations often so inconsistent that whatever course of action a president takes may result in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of criticism. While there is no way out of the constant paradoxical dilemmas presidents face, there are ways to deal with these conflicting and sometimes inflated expectations. Yet even master political statecraft is often inadequate in reconciling these paradoxes of the American presidency. In a book sure to encourage debate, The Paradoxes of the American Presidency gives us a fresh new understanding both of the presidential office and the public's inevitable dissatisfaction with it.