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April 2015 will go down in history as the month that the 2016 race for the White House began in earnest. Hillary Clinton’s online declaration of her presidential candidacy was the critical moment. With it America’s two major political parties have locked horns with each other. The Democrats intend to continue their control of the presidency for another four years; Republicans hope to finally make good on a conservative bumper sticker that began appearing on automobiles as early as the summer of 2009 and that read, “Had Enough Yet? Next Time Vote Republican.”

The post Do America’s political parties matter in presidential elections? appeared first on OUPblog.

Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the two-term precedent set by George Washington by running for and winning a third and fourth term. Pressure for limiting terms followed FDR’s remarkable record. In 1951 the Twenty-Second constitutional amendment was ratified stating: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…” Accordingly, reelected Presidents must then govern knowing they cannot run again.

The post From Carter to Clinton: Selecting presidential nominees in the modern era appeared first on OUPblog.

By David Sehat On Aug. 6, Texas Gov. Rick Perry will lead a prayer rally in Houston despite criticism that his event violates the separation of church and state. Though Perry said recently that he felt “called” to run for the presidency, he also told a Christian radio show that the rally will not be political. “This is simply people calling out to God,” he said.

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By Gil Troy

As we mark the centennial (Feb. 6th, 2011) of Ronald Reagan’s birth, the tug of war over his legacy continues. Reagan’s popular image – and popularity — have fluctuated as wildly as the stock market. One way to make sense of this is to think of Ronald Reagan as having nine public lives.

Central to the Reagan legend is this conservative Republican president’s origins as a Hollywood Democrat. Ronald Reagan was a New Deal Democrat who by the 1950s felt that the Democratic Party had lost its way. He always insisted: “Maybe my party changed. I didn’t.” And yes, Reagan was an actor. Actually, he never understood how anyone could be in politics without first having been in showbiz.

By 1966, when he ran successfully to become California’s governor, Reagan’s transformation was complete. During his two terms as governor, and during his triumphal 1980 run for the presidency, Reagan was known as a Conservative Ideologue, beloved by the right, disdained by the left. Although he won in an ABC election, with most Americans choosing Anybody But Carter, Reagan claimed he received a mandate for change.

Reagan started strong in his third incarnation, as the Reagan Revolutionary. He promised to cut the budget, reduce taxes, trim the bureaucracy, revive America, face down the Soviets. During his first seven and a half months in office, Reagan secured the largest budget cut in history – some $35 billion in domestic spending from Jimmy Carter’s request – and reduced the personal income tax rate by almost one quarter. Initially, Democrats were flummoxed. But by the summer of 1981, with Americans experiencing the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, Democrats attacked what they now called the “Reagan Recession.” Getting traction on the “Fairness Issue,” critics attacked the President as Mr. Magoo, a bumbling anti-Communist cowboy, a reverse Robin Hood and warmonger. They said he cut taxes for the rich and burdened the poor while risking nuclear war by calling the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire.” They mocked his gaffes, from blaming trees for causing air pollution to counting ketchup as a vegetable (which actually emanated from the Department of Agriculture not him). After Democrats surged in the 1982 Congressional midterm elections, pundits started eulogizing Reagan’s failed presidency.

Fortunately for Reagan, the economy revived before he had to face the electorate for re-election. With inflation tamed, jobs being created, American pride returned. Reagan reigned as a Popular Patriot. He blessed the prosperity as “Morning in America.” He pushed for a peaceful ending to the Cold War by going to Berlin to say to his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall.” He repeatedly spurred Americans to build their county as “a shining city upon the hill.”

Yet by the time Reagan retired in January, 1989, even many Republicans were losing enthusiasm for him. By promising a “kinder, gentler” nation, Vice President George H.W. Bush became president implicitly casting Reagan as the Unkind, Ungentle President. The disrespect for Reagan in the Bush White House as lazy, ignorant, detached, became so overt that former President Richard Nixon fired off a note to Bush’s Chief of Staff John Sununu urging discretion. Bush then called Reagan to apologize.

When Bill Clinton ran for President in 1992, he joined the pile-on, targeting Reaganite “greed” and accusing Reagan of neglecting middle class Americans.

As Reagan faded into the haze of Alzheime

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at presidents and church. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

Americans do impose a religious litmus test on our presidents, and there is a tradition that proves it. President Obama and his family attended Easter service at St John’s Episcopal Church. Just across from the White House, it is known as the “Church of the Presidents,” the unofficial White House Chapel. Almost every president since James Madison has found occasion to worship in this church and in particular at pew 54, the presidential pew.

The selective presidential need to prove a religious point proves my point. Consider the case of President Eisenhower, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and whose home served as the local meeting hall for Witnesses for 19 years. Twelve days after his first inauguration, Eisenhower was baptized, confirmed, and became a communicant in the Presbyterian Church. No president before or after him has ever had to perform such rites while in office. The religious litmus test was so powerful in this case that it was voluntarily taken by a president who had already been endorsed by the people and sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.

Contrast Eisenhower to President Reagan or Bush, neither of whom belonged to a congregation or attended church regularly (or even sporadically) while in Washington, justifying their decision on the basis that the security requirements would be too onerous and disruptive to the congregations they joined. Faith is a personal thing only if the public already believes that a president possesses it. If not, no security arrangement is too onerous to trump the need to publicize it. This is true of President Clinton when he attended Foundry United Methodist Church while in Washington (one of the candidates for the Obamas’ new home church by the way), and it is also true of presidential candidate John Kerry when he made much public display of his Sunday church attendances.

The speculation about which church the Obamas will ultimately settle on as a home church in DC has been fueled, in part, by his past association with the controversial Jeremiah Wright and his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ. The speculation about where the Obamas will end up has taken on more than normal political significance because there is a greater need for this president, unless others who didn’t even have to attend church, to demonstrate that his religious views are squarely in the mainstream.

So on this Easter weekend, to those who bemoan the secularization of America, take heart, because presidents who appear godless know that they will be judged on earth before they are judged in heaven; to those who believe the separation of church and state is not yet complete, take stock, because where and whether or not President Obama ends up worshiping every Sunday has become a topic of paramount political importance to the administration. So much so that White House aides reportedly considered over a dozen churches before deciding on St John’s as the safest place for a president to go to observe Easter Sunday.

Elvim Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.

In recent weeks, some political commentators have observed that Senator Barack Obama is all talk, but no substance. Where his supporters see an orator of the highest order, his detractors see only a smooth talker.

Flash back to the 1980s, and we had the same bifurcated response to Ronald Reagan. Whereas some saw profundity and deep meaning in his speeches, Reagan’s detractors heard only vacuous platitudes. Indeed, Reagan’s supporters even used the same words as some liberals do today to describe Obama’s “soaring oratory.” How did Reagan score with the Reagan Democrats? By being all things to all people. The Obamacans in this year’s elections are being swayed by a parallel strategy. Talk a lot, but mean nothing.

Consider Obama’s response this week in Georgia when he addressed charges that he had been “flip flopping” between his positions : “I’m not just somebody who is talking about government as the solution to everything. I also believe in personal responsibility. I also believe in faith.” the Senator sagely declared.

But who doesn’t believe in faith? Such rhetoric misses the point, ending rather than initiating debate - a strategy consummately deployed by President Bush in selling “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by exploiting our universal and creedal belief in liberty. The question is how we should balance our respect for the identity and autonomy of religious charities with our belief in the separation of church and state. And the question is whether freedom in Iraq can and should be bought with the sacrifice of our freedoms at home and the suspension of some of our constitutional principles. By design, Obama’s and Bush’s words elided these difficult, but pressing questions.

“I also believe in personal responsibility” are also coded words Obama’s speechwriters designed to woo conservative audiences without explicitly repudiating the liberal point of view that governmental programs are the other side of the rhetorical equation that ought to have been addressed. Reverend Jesse Jackson was understandingly aggravated. Yet while Jackson has apologized for his crude verbal gaffe, we have yet to take Obama to task for his rhetorical sleight of hand because this is what we have come to expect from political candidates seeking the highest office of the land.

We are not going to face the complex problems of our time if our would-be leaders continue to take the rhetorical path of least resistance, to buy our assent without any content. To say nothing even when one talks a lot is to fulfill the rhetorical formula for, literally, empty promises. There were times in this election season when Obama rose above the anti-intellectual fray, just like there were times when Ronald Reagan and George Bush used the bully pulpit to educate rather than to merely seduce the American people. This year, when conservatives see in a liberal political candidate the same rhetorical flaws as what liberals saw in Reagan and George Bush, perhaps we will come closer to recognizing a systemic flaw in our political system, and it is the Anti-intellectual Presidency.

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We take our politics seriously here at Summer Friend. The best president ever was Dana Carvey's George Bush, as seen in this historic moment:


I also like Phil Hartman's Clinton and his Reagan.

Darrell Hammond's Clinton is a write-in candidate. (I couldn't find any clips.)

by Andrew Clements Simon and Schuster 2007 It's boys versus girls in a 48 hour dare to see who can talk the least. The agreement is made during lunch when Dave, who had gone the entire morning without speaking as an experiment, reaches his boiling point when Lynsey blathers on and on about a sweater at the mall. "Don't you ever shut up," he effectively says, prompting the inevitable argument