Abstract
The Obama Presidency brings together a selection of accomplished scholars to examine, in the succinct terms of the book’s preface, the ‘policy and politics in the Obama presidency’ (p. vii). The book delves into certain specific policy issues on which Obama placed emphasis during his first term, examines coalitional and party dynamics both in government and in the electorate, and considers issues of public opinion and representation tied to the Obama administration. Although the book as a whole may not offer more than the sum of its parts, scholars from a wide range of subfields in the discipline would do well to consider examining one or more chapters tied to their particular interests.
The three policy-oriented chapters – James A. Morone’s ‘Obama’s Health Reform: The Managerial President and the Political Storm’, John C. Berg’s ‘Environmental Policy: The Success and Failure of the Obama Presidency’, and Lawrence C. Reardon’s ‘Shifting Global Paradigms and Obama’s Adaptive Foreign Policy’ – individually are well-written examinations of their respective areas and collectively provide the most cohesive set of chapters. Each chapter provides a historical narrative of the key events and policies in Obama’s first term, but then more importantly seek to place these events and policies in a broader analytical framework. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the policy dichotomies, or unpredictability, of Obama’s first term: from the broad-reaching policy objectives to the ‘non-liberal programmatic agenda’ (p. 41), and from the failures when success was at hand to the accomplishments achieved when success did not seem likely.
Another set of chapters explores various aspects of coalitional and party politics during the Obama administration to date: R. Lawrence Butler’s ‘Minority Party Strategies and Political Successes in Opposition to the Obama Policy Agenda’, Arthur C. Paulson’s ‘Coalitional Divisions and Realignment Dynamics in the Obama Era’, and Maureen F. Moakley’s ‘Recalibrating the Obama Presidency: The Off-Year Elections and Their Consequences.’ Each of these chapters individually stands well on its own. Butler, for example, examines both the Republicans’ minority party strategies and the Democrats’ legislative shortcomings during Obama’s first two years in a framework based on the Responsible Party theory. Paulson explores the historical dynamics that have helped shaped the polarized party system found during the Obama presidency. Moakley breaks down the factors that led to the Democratic ‘shellacking’ in the 2010 midterm elections. Despite the occasional overlap among these chapters, though, they do not tie together as a collection as well as the policy-oriented chapters.
Two other chapters share a common approach in that they use public opinion and survey research data to put the Obama presidency in broader, albeit quite different perspectives: Bruce E. Caswell’s ‘Obama by the Numbers: A Comparison with Previous Presidents’ and Shayla C. Nunnally’s ‘African-American Perspectives of the Obama Presidency’. Caswell compares Obama’s public opinion approval against all other presidents from Truman forward, as well as performance in such policy areas as employment, deficits and debt, and income inequality. Nunnally, using data from the Pew Research Center’s Racial Attitudes in America II Survey, ‘elucidate(s) how perceptions of President Obama’s treatment are, indeed, racially divided’ (p. 143). A first and last chapter by the editor, William Crotty, round out the volume. The former is purposefully descriptive in nature as it examines some of the key policy battles early in the Obama administration. The latter revisits what may be perhaps the overriding dichotomy of Obama’s first term: from the transformative promise of his campaign to his more limited performance in office.
The book, taken as a whole, experiences a limitation found in many assessment volumes like this. For example, although the book purports to cover Obama’s first term, most of the chapters are limited in scope to his first two years in office, with occasional reference to or passing analysis of events that occurred after the 2010 midterm elections. Also, although the volume was intentionally varied in its thematic focus, topics, and perspectives, it does not tie its individual chapters as cohesively as one might like. The chapters could have been formally grouped in the manner discussed herein, with introductory segments discussing the themes to be addressed; instead, the chapters just run continuously without any structure or framework. Alternatively, the introductory or final chapters could have been recast to highlight key lessons that could be culled from the volume as a whole. Such an approach would have provided a more comprehensive examination of the first part of the Obama presidency and perhaps even provided lessons about how a president could govern in times of ‘economic crisis, continuing wars and budgetary deficits’ (p. vii). Overall, though, the individual contributions each author makes to this volume are not diminished and, as noted above, The Obama Presidency offers something worth exploring to a wide variety of readers.