Reconstruction or Overreach?

In the afterglow of the 2008 election, Time magazine photo-shopped the new president into Franklin Delano Roosevelt's hat and car, complete with iconic cigarette holder in hand. The caption below proclaimed the coming of “The New New Deal.” After all, Obama had carried 28 states and won the highest vote share of any Democratic candidate since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1964—indeed, a higher percentage of the overall vote than any candidate for two decades. Meanwhile, Democrats added to their congressional majorities with more than 20 new net seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Gallup's polling in late 2008 found only four states it could rate as “solid Republican” and one more leaning that way.Footnote ³

Theda Skocpol's Obama and America's Political Future, which brings together her March 2011 Alexis de Tocqueville lecture at Harvard with responses by Larry Bartels, Suzanne Mettler, and former Congressman Mickey Edwards (R-OK), starts with the Time cover. But in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 midterm elections, Skocpol's own take on the Obama administration is relatively bleak. “Far from the advent of sustained Democratic dominance,” she writes, “the early Obama presidency gave way to conservative backlash” (p. 7) and, at best, a “halfway New Deal” (p. 9).

What happened? While Skocpol does not explicitly use the framework of “political time” proffered by Stephen Skowronek (Reference Skowronek1993), we might frame the question in his terms: Why did a president so widely thought to be reconstructing the American regime wind up a prisoner of it? Skocpol argues, consistent with her seminal work on institutional “fit,” that the structure of both the crisis facing Obama and that of the modern party system were very different from those FDR confronted. On the first point, Roosevelt entered office several years into an ongoing crisis involving the whole economy, while Obama's was breaking news as he took office and linked to the financial sector (meaning that the “fix”—at least the fix chosen—involved sending cash to rich people). Likewise, she posits, where Obama did pursue distributive policies, he was not “starting from scratch” in his programmatic initiatives, but rather tinkering with the low-salience “submerged state” (cf. Mettler's phrase, and Reference Mettler2011 book) in ways that however substantively defensible were hard to see, and so hard to get credit for (p. 40).

Turning to party politics, Skocpol notes Republicans' “all-out opposition to Obama and Democratic initiatives,” characterizing it as a “cold-blooded political bet” that flowed from the “ideological homogenization and polarization” that typifies the contemporary parties, abetted by institutional rules, especially in the Senate (pp. 23–25). The growth (both top down and bottom up) of the Tea Party movement only reinforced the barriers between the parties, giving a narrative to the backlash and pushing GOP views rightward, “very far” from the Eisenhower and even the Reagan days (pp. 87–88). “The early Obama Democrats,” Skocpol concludes (p. 46), “will go down in history as cautiously ambitious reformers who did just enough to provoke political enemies, while leaving their political friends, actual and potential, disappointed and mystified.”

Of the responses, that of Bartels is the most pointed: He is not disappointed and, he claims, far from mystified. Why did anyone think Time's cover was more than birdcage liner? he asks, if not quite in those words; with no little glee, he argues that political science needs to give up on the “fantasy” of transformational politics (p. 109). That fantasy is pummeled here—far more than are the specifics of Skocpol's actual argument, it should be noted. In short: there had been no realignment; the 2008 election was consistent with theories of the economic vote; and the dynamics of the subsequent legislative process, however contentious, “reflect[ed] with remarkable precision” the logic of the pivotal politics model formalized by Keith Krehbiel (p. 98). Where Democrats bit off more than the polity was interested in chewing, they suffered politically, as underlined by research linking the 2010 midterm losses to specific policy choices (e.g., Brendan Nyhan et al. Reference Nyhan, McGhee, Sides, Masket and Greene2012) on global warming or health care.

This disjunction between expectation and reality is also the theme of Overreach, where Edwards takes up the question of presidential leadership and its intersection with the political environment. The book is an Obama-specific extension of his earlier work on the limited effect of the “bully pulpit,”Footnote ⁴ where he cautioned against a naive assumption that presidents can transform public opinion or legislative preferences: “[T]here is not a single systematic study that demonstrates that presidents can reliably move others to support them.”Footnote ⁵ As he argues in Overreach, “successful leadership is not the result of the dominant chief executive of political folklore who reshapes the contours of the political landscape” (pp. 179–80).

If presidents must play the hand they are dealt, they need to be good at counting cards. But in Edwards' view, “the Obama administration overestimated the opportunities for change in its environment and the president's ability to create new opportunities” (p. 180). That environment, for Edwards, is largely determined by the topography of public opinion and legislative preferences. Neither of these, even before the 2010 midterms, suggested support for large-scale change in the directions the new administration proposed. Wandering through a large buffet of survey data (served up with a smattering of political psychology), Edwards reports that a plurality of respondents were eager for job creation to be the first, and perhaps only, priority; they consistently opposed automobile bailouts, the scale of deficit spending, the health-care law, and cap-and-trade legislation, and even felt that the proposals regulating Wall Street misbehavior protected financial institutions more than consumers. Public opinion was, of course, strongly predicted by partisan affiliation, and the patina of supra-partisan unity in the 2008 returns was an inch deep. Along these lines, it is worth recalling that Sen. Lindsey Graham was actually censured by several Republican county committees in his home state of South Carolina for acting (as one such resolution charged) to “weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom, rule of law, and fiscal conservatism,” all “in the name of bipartisanship” (p. 125). This sort of pressure—soon institutionalized, as Skocpol also notes, in the nascent Tea Party movement(s)—made it unlikely that Congress would flock to the banner of a new New Deal: In opposing the Obama program, members were faithfully representing their districts. Against this, “the Obama White House … believes that the president is an irresistible persuader,” (Overreach, p. 80) able to transcend partisan differences. But eloquent speeches were not likely to overcome this confluence of circumstance.

That point is worth expanding, since Skocpol, for one, is quite sympathetic to the idea that communication, rather than substance, was Obama's early problem. She posits that the norms of press coverage amplified opposition voices (“White House and Democratic messages are filtered and garbled by commentators, while conservatives determined to attack Obama and his party have plentiful opportunities to broadcast their attacks” [p. 31]), that the administration was operating in a “rightward skewed media landscape” (p. 33), and also that Obama turned out to be bad at explaining his preferences and their consequences (p. 35).

This trope is favored by the president himself. Obama's broad pique with even the leftward-skewed press is well documented;Footnote ⁶ and as the 2010 midterms approached, Obama said he had focused too much on policy while being too “neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”Footnote ⁷ During the 2012 campaign, likewise, when asked about his “biggest mistake” in office, Obama said that it “was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right…. [People want to know:] ‘Where's the story that tells us where he's going?’”Footnote ⁸

This answer is in itself a nifty piece of agenda setting, shifting quickly past substance with the assumption that the policy itself has, in fact, been gotten right. Edwards, while he would agree with Skocpol (and Obama) that the contemporary fragmentation of audience and press outlets makes authoritative presidential communication more difficult, is skeptical that “better” communication would have made a difference. For him, the problem was not one of educative storytelling; it was what Obama chose to do in the first place. The president's strategic choices forced his agenda up against “the climate of public opinion” (Overreach, p. 112), and climate change is, as we know, a hard issue to address.

Edwards notes, but might do more to credit, one of Obama's dilemmas in this regard. Namely, the hand the president was dealt (with regard to the bailout packages, for instance) forced him to play rather than pass. Karl Rove once observed that “history has a way of intruding upon you,” and presidents' agendas are shaped by those intrusions; as Obama pollster Joel Benenson put it, “these were not matters of choice” (p. 81). Still, if Edwards's model does not replace Neustadt's notion of bargaining as the instrument of presidential power, it usefully extends the boundaries of the bargaining market as something irrelevant to personal characteristics or transactional skill. Presumably, though, presidents could be more or less skilled at learning to rein in their transformational impulses. After all, the likely outcome of lessons unlearned is “sustained failure” (p. 188).

A House United?

The authors in the books just discussed define success, at least implicitly, as policy achievement. Yet in one sense, of course, Obama became a consequential president by the simple fact of his existence. As the nation's first black president (and while he is of course multiracial, he marked his 2010 census form simply as “black”), he provides proof that—as he told Morehouse College graduates—“over the last 50 years … barriers have come tumbling down, and new doors of opportunity have swung open, and laws and hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks just like you can somehow come to serve as President of these United States of America.”Footnote ⁹ In his introduction to The Obama Phenomenon, Henry states the volume's central question as “whether race will no longer occupy the pivotal role it has for the past four decades” (p. 7). In short, even if Obama has failed to unite the Senate, can he unite Lincoln's famous House—the “house divided”?

Three books here are centered on that topic, and they too argue that Obama comes up short. Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith's very title makes the point. While Still a House Divided, Fredrick C. Harris's The Price of the Ticket, and the volume edited by Henry, Robert L. Allen, and Robert Chrisman vary dramatically in intent, scope, and methodology, all agree that Obama's impact on the role of race in American politics is truncated, either by circumstance or design. This is true, intriguingly enough, not just on the lines of the policy change they crave but even along the dimension of ascriptive symbolism. At best, they posit, Obama is constrained from promoting policies that would aid racial minorities because of the fiscal pressures imposed by the mounting U.S. budget deficit and the 2008–9 financial crisis. At worst, the Obama brand transcended issues of race by ignoring them—thus, as with the paradox of partisanship, his ability to change societal norms (even as his existence assuages white guilt) was undercut by the circumstances that brought him power to act in the first place. And that impasse, King and Smith tell us, is unlikely to change because party and race are more tightly interwoven than ever.

Still a House Divided is actually not particularly dependent on Barack Obama at all. While his presidency certainly provides a better hook for the book's narrative arc than a McCain presidency would have—it begins with Obama distancing himself from his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, during the 2008 campaign—the research project the book represents began before Obama burst onto the national stage. Tied to a wide swath of American policy history, it is the most empirical of the three books dealing specifically with race and the one likely to have the longest-lasting influence in the discipline.

King and Smith argue that the United States finds itself in its third era of racial politics, each defined by “racial alliances” that coalesce around key policy issues linked to race. From the colonial era to the Civil War, of course, the main issue was slavery; afterwards, until the mid-1960s, the “Jim Crow” era centered on the rights and civic status of African Americans. By the end of the nineteenth century, white supremacy was institutionalized, only for egalitarian drives for Civil Rights to be seen taking hold in the streets, courts, and laws from the 1940s on. The battles to overturn de jure segregation and disenfranchisement won, however, the present era is driven by arguments over how to deal with the de facto residue of the past. King and Smith claim that these quarrels distill to whether policy should be “color-blind” or “race conscious”—a distinction perhaps most salient in the controversies surrounding affirmative action but relevant to a wide range of other issues. Indeed, the last two-thirds of the book provide cogent policy synopses of the part of race in debates over housing, crime, immigration, education, and voting. The last is focused on the creation of majority-minority legislative districts; the 2012 election season's battles over voter identification are not anticipated here, although the book's framework is certainly compatible with the battle lines drawn between the parties in that theater, too.

While the taxonomy of “racial alliances” is usefully systematic, it is not quite clear how specifying actors and groups with certain policy preferences, working with and against other such actors and groups through the institutions they can respectively command to promote their preferences, is different from analyzing, well, “politics.” Importantly, though, the narrative here shows that those politics shift, that racial alliances evolve, and that—consistent with the broader polarization separately observed by Skocpol and Edwards—they have mapped much more closely onto party identities over time. Even in areas where voters might diverge from party views on a given issue (e.g., minority respondents tend to favor school vouchers), elites do not. This makes the cross-partisan “strange bedfellow” coalitions of the past more difficult to forge (Still a House Divided, pp. 235–36). And this, in turn, is problematic for the “mixed measures”—combining race-neutral and race-conscious policies in practical ways—that the authors want to promote (p. 288).

Given the continuing chasm between the races in terms of economic achievement, King and Smith do stress policy rather than attitudes, consequences rather than principles. One might think that this would work in Obama's favor, given his basic pragmatism and Inaugural advocacy of “what works.” But they assess Obama's own impact on key issues as limited, with an energetic record in some areas (housing) and close to nothing in others (crime). Certainly, the authors argue that the president could lead a national conversation—to, yes, tell a story—that might help bridge the chasm between the two racial alliances (p. 288). Yet he has not done so; Obama “speaks about racial issues rarely and then carefully,” King and Smith suggest (p. 216). Even his ballyhooed 2008 Constitution Center speech was, for them, simply an eloquent expression of empathy rather than an effort to persuade either side of the racial divide that prosperity and peace, without loss of pride, could be found in middle ground.

In short, for King and Smith, the fact of a black president has not made much difference—at least not yet—to the trajectory of racial politics in the United States.

This conclusion is consistent with those of Harris's book and the Phenomenon volume, though they have a different edge: Their guiding spirit is not Abraham Lincoln but James Baldwin. Harris's eloquent take on “the rise and decline of black politics” acknowledges that explicitly, taking his epigraph from Baldwin's preface to a 1985 collection of his nonfiction entitled, not coincidentally, The Price of the Ticket.Footnote ¹⁰ “We have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white,” Baldwin wrote. “And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.”Footnote ¹¹

In a series of loosely connected chapters, Harris seeks to contrast the general decline of the development of an independent “black political force” (as advocated by Malcolm X, for example) as compared to the intra-Democratic-coalition political strategy embodied by, among others, Bayard Rustin. Harris argues that “today's so-called postracial politics,” exemplified by Obama, is “a repackaged version of the coalition school” (p. 7). He is underwhelmed by the gains the black community has realized therefrom. It is not so much that a deal could not be cut—but rather that the coalition school has cut a bad deal, receiving tokens and concessions but not power.

The argument traces the careers of Shirley Chisholm (who ran for president in 1972), Jesse Jackson, and, as part of a revealing treatment of Chicago politics more broadly, that city's first black mayor, the towering figure of Harold Washington. Carol Moseley Braun, in her winning race for the U.S. Senate in 1992, showed that one could “build on the Washington formula beyond the boundaries” of Chicago (p. 52); but Harris also sees in Obama's pedigree the ghost of Mel Reynolds, a young African American Rhodes Scholar who attracted immense money, media attention, and white support in his rise to Congress (D-IL). Obama, like Reynolds (but without the sad denouement),Footnote ¹² pushed aside the older black establishment and what he saw as “protest politics” (p. 59) in beginning his political career.

By the time he began to run for president barely a decade later, Harris argues, Obama had abdicated any role “as a national voice for black interests” (p. 69). The fiscal crisis, by constraining expansionist policy options, “made Obama … a ‘hollow prize’ for black America” (p. 187). But even before that, his candidacy was predicated on “racially transcendent rhetoric” that appealed to white voters but which was tied to an older notion of “the politics of respectability,” that is, of uplifting the “black masses so that blacks as a group could be accepted by white America” (pp. 102–4). Harris implies that Obama (“Mr. Respectability in Chief”) was too busy arguing that he just “happens to be black” to pay attention to the structural social and economic barriers that prevent other, poorer people who happen to be black from their own equality of opportunity. It seems likely that Harris did not much appreciate Obama's stressing to those Morehouse graduates that “we've got no time for excuses…. Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was.”Footnote ¹³ And while he concedes that Obama, “by any stretch of the imagination, is not Clarence Thomas”—to the relief of both men, one suspects—he suggests that Obama's support among the black electorate reflects the same “proclivity for symbolism over substance” (p. 159) that benefited Thomas's nomination.

This does raise an interesting query. President George H. W. Bush's choice in 1991 was not the counterfactual that Harris presents (p. 159)—between Justice Thomas and a white liberal—but between Thomas and a white conservative. Likewise, is it actually worse to have Obama in place than a President Clinton or McCain or Romney? Other analysts (e.g., M. Stephen Weatherford Reference Weatherford, Rockman, Rudalevige and Campbell2012) are more sanguine about Obama's broad approach to issues of economic inequality than is Harris; and the demand for a minimum wage increase made by Harris, for example (p. 168), showed up in the 2013 State of the Union address. While Harris contrasts Obama's attentiveness to the demands of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community in counterpoint to the patience urged on, say, the Congressional Black Caucus (pp. 176–78), it is worth noting that given the de jure issues that still characterize the push for gay Civil Rights, here Obama can be a member of the Moses generation instead of its Joshuan successors. As Harris concedes, Joshua still had to knock down the walls of Jericho (p. 192), and (as King and Smith make plain) those walls are high.

Still, Harris's disappointment packs a punch, and it parallels many of the contributions to the The Obama Phenomenon, an edited volume with so much variety that it is best aggregated rather than synthesized. It contains work from more than 20 authors, featuring chapters by political scientists (including Dianne Pinderhughes and the late, great Hanes Walton) but also essays by scholars in law, religion, sociology, African American Studies, and American Studies, and even, for good measure, one by Alice Walker. Some authors are angry, others despondent, others somewhat self-congratulatory—albeit more about the pivotal rise in participation by African American voters in 2008 than about Obama himself. (Walker's contribution, a brief open letter written during the 2008 primaries, is one of the few wholly positive references to the president in all of the books under review; she refers to Obama as “a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning” [p. 145]).

The Obama Phenomenon is not, perhaps, for quantitative micromanagers. There are occasional factual errors (George W. Bush did not win either Iowa or New Mexico in the 2000 election, for instance, contra p. 69), and much is assumed when it should probably be argued, preferably with reference to relevant political science research.Footnote ¹⁴ The volume is far more useful as a cross-sectional, sometimes oddly informal, inventory of black scholars' views on American politics and culture circa 2009. As noted, there are interesting intersections with Harris's book. Both note (as Harris puts it) that “advocates of black causes are fearful that the Right will discredit Obama by exploiting black demands” (p. 179); in the edited volume, Robin Kelley concludes that “President Obama … knows that his race is a liability when it comes to addressing racial disparities. It is sadly ironic that the president perhaps most sensitive to racial inequality would have to ignore race, lest he be accused of partisanship” (p. 255). Harris urges black Americans to “move on and begin anew, placing interest above pride,” lest symbolism wind up “legitimizing conditions as they are” (p. 188); Robert Allen's conclusion notes that “African Americans will get the president's attention only to the extent that there is an independent social movement that can bring political pressure to bear” (p. 311).

While James Baldwin does not appear in the index to The Obama Phenomenon, his spirit animates large portions of the volume. In the same paragraph that provides Harris's epigraph, Baldwin wrote: “There was not, then, nor is there, now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution…. Spare me … any further examples of American white progress. When one examines the use of this word in this most particular context, it translates as meaning that those people who have opted for being white congratulate themselves on their generous ability to return to the slave that freedom which they never had any right to endanger.”Footnote ¹⁵ A number of the essays reflect that sentiment. “For the established order,” as Maulana Karenga writes, “Obama serves as a moral mask to … camouflage its continuing imperial thrust…. So regardless of Obama's election, Whites monopolize wealth and power in and out of government” (pp. 150–51). Julianne Malveaux, in turn, rather blithely discusses a “capitalist patriarchy that has, as its foundation, the exploitation of the surplus value of work by imported and enslaved Africans” (p. 83). If that is what needs to be changed, the assessment of Obama's shortcomings is easy to understand.

The Fourth Wave?

After all of this, it might come as a comfort to President Obama to realize that some people do think he has made a difference. As Skocpol notes, “the enemies of the cautious Obama New Deal knew what was up—even if they were more paranoid than actual policy changes justified” (Obama and America's Political Future, p. 45.) Charles Kesler would reject the modifier “cautious,” and recall the old saw that even paranoids have enemies. It is here, from the right, that Obama is portrayed as immensely consequential.

This does not prevent Obama being mocked for daring to think that he is immensely consequential. But although its tone is often light, sometimes glib, Kesler's I Am the Change provides a serious critique of liberalism, by which he means leftish progressivism, not John Stuart Mill; the book does not pander to those who claim that Obama is somehow “anticolonial” (whatever that means in a nation that threw off colonial rule) or that he hates America. That Obama is bad for America, though, Kesler has no doubt. The president, as “the most left-wing liberal to be elected to national executive office since Henry Wallace” (p. x), possesses “partisan ambition of a high order, masquerading as high-toned bipartisanship or post-partisanship” (p. 16).

Between two chapters on Obama, Kesler presents what is effectively a punctuated equilibrium model of liberalism and its impact on American policy and polity. He posits three waves, which he denotes as political, economic, and cultural, each associated with a president (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, respectively) who was dedicated to having government do more and more for the American public. Wilson invented the “living constitution,” placing the president in charge of “infusing [its] spirit into the old body of our laws and institutions” as they evolved to meet new needs (pp. 75–76). Roosevelt added a panoply of new economic rights (“the right to make a comfortable living”) grounded in “politically inviolable benefit programs” (pp. 133, 125). And Johnson, finally, oversaw a shift from quantitative to qualitative liberalism, in seeking to make a “great” society that, having solved problems like poverty and racism, could provide liberals seeking self-fulfillment with “full satisfaction of their postmateralist needs” (p. 159).Footnote ¹⁶ Eventually, the majority of Americans became less silent about their unease with all of this, and “when liberals rejected the majority, the majority rejected the liberals” (p. 175). Obama has learned from this history, and seeks to advance it—Obamacare being the chief vehicle—away from the imperfections of the past and forward (always forward) toward “what can be called, without exaggeration, gradual regime change at home” (p. 199).

Kesler is clearly on familiar substantive and rhetorical ground in the historical middle chapters, and if their targets are sometimes sitting, even prone (ranging from Hegel to the student pablum of the late 1960s) they are nonetheless dispatched with incisive flair. Likewise, his lengthy analysis of “the crisis of liberalism” contains observations on the “difficulties both philosophical and fiscal” with the current trajectory of entitlement programs that the Left should take seriously (p. 227). Obama's protestations that he seeks only “what works” are rejected; anything he proposes is progressive, and thus represents progress, and therefore, as Harvey Mansfield has put it, should not and cannot be reversed (p. 198).

The “new New Deal” framework just noted tends to see Obama as a protagonist in a drama set against—and seeking to dismantle—an “Age of Reagan”Footnote ¹⁷ either disturbingly successfully (Krauthammer Reference Krauthammer2012) or disturbingly unsuccessfully (e.g., most of the books discussed in this essay). But Reagan gets little play here, and the two Bushes even less. The 1980s seem to be an almost inconvenient interregnum between the ambitious advancing stages of liberalism; and the younger Bush's advocacy of Wilsonian moral principles abroad goes unmentioned.

This is important less historically than institutionally, perhaps. Kesler wants to argue that to favor Progressivism is to oppose the Constitution (p. 231): Obama receives an extended scolding for his impatience with checks and balances (p. 194). It is certainly true that Wilson and others steeped in scientific management were dubious about the efficiency of a separation-of-powers system.Footnote ¹⁸ But so are all presidents. Such frustration is a hazard of the institution, not an offshoot of ideology. Kesler paraphrases Mario Cuomo as saying that “liberalism campaigns in poetry but governs in prose,” which he terms a “bait and switch” (p. 170). But Cuomo, no mean practical politician himself, did not say “liberalism” but “you”—meaning all elected officials. Any bait and switch (or double standard, another frequent charge) is universal. Many of the unilateral tools of the “administrative presidency,” in fact, were pioneered enthusiastically by recent Republican presidents before their adoption by Bill Clinton and Obama.Footnote ¹⁹ In this area, the analysis seems to elide generic presidential ambition with political philosophy.

It does, however, provide an intersection with the scholarship under discussion. As Edwards discusses perhaps most explicitly, the fact that Obama is president is part of what makes him act the way he does, and part of his success and failure. As Robin Kelley notes in The Obama Phenomenon, “It is simply impossible to be a drum major for justice in the White House” (p. 260). Institutions matter. So perhaps do expectations. Indeed, Kesler joins the scholars on race and politics who think that people have settled for too little with Obama. He would not, though, urge that they seek large-scale change in place of empty symbolism—but, with too much change already in place, hopes instead that they “remain attached to their government and laws” (p. 237).

Preaching to the Choir

These intersections are real, I think, but they are not actually interactions. That is, these books are not engaged in a common conversation. Perhaps that is an unfair demand, given their divergent fields and aims. Nonetheless, the collective impression is that such a conversation is not just absent but nigh impossible. It is disconcerting to see the same events described as if they occurred in parallel universes: You say “mindless obstruction,” I say “principled opposition”; I say “transformational ambition,” you say “cautious incrementalism.” Along the way, the Left and Right alike preach bon mots—whether about Obama's ego or Fox News's intelligence—with the safe presumption that their in-house choir will chortle appreciatively and that those who disagree will not be in the pews to begin with. To an unfortunate degree, these books maneuver past one another on different vectors.

In that, of course, they are much like the rest of American political discourse. Much ink has been spilled—some of it in this essay—on the fragmentation of the broadcast media world into small niches of “narrowcasting.”Footnote ²⁰ People can evade coverage of civic affairs with relative ease, cocooned in cable stations or Internet sites devoted to the perpetual study of football, cookery, or celebrity romance. But those who do choose to follow politics can ensure that they do so via sources that agree with them and reinforce their preexisting beliefs.

One result is snarly stalemate—or, rather than “reconstruction,” an extended version of what Skowronek (Reference Skowronek1993) called the politics of “disjunction.” Obama's young second term has so far only reemphasized the difficulty of change in a system built to favor the status quo, especially when positions are polarized into deeply held worldviews that do not need to be argued, merely asserted. This is not new; after all, Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist 76 that “it will rarely happen that the advancement of the public service will be the primary object either of party victories or of party negotiations.” But it does not make it less problematic.

Political science has an important role to play in rating the president. In the end, strong versus weak may be the right question—disappointment might even be the right answer—but we need to do more to know the grounds for evaluating those terms. What are our standards for judgment? When should we be disappointed?

Here we should end on an optimistic note: what Bartels terms the “triumphal progressive punditry” (Obama and America's Political Future, p. 94) of 2008 takes at least an intermittent beating in these books, and not just at his hands. Conversely, in the 2012 campaign, it was triumphal conservative punditry (regarding the reliability of survey research, for instance) that political scientists pummeled. And in light of the headlines that continue into Obama's second term, where the president has been critiqued (most infamously by columnist Maureen Dowd [Dowd Reference Dowd2013]) for failing to twist legislative arms to his will, it might be noted that dystopian punditry can be just as wrongheaded. Even its arm-twisting exemplar Lyndon Johnson was well aware, after all, that “you can't start yelling ‘frog’ at everybody and expect ‘em to jump.”Footnote ²¹

Our challenge, then, is to develop a systematic view of presidential influence grounded in historical context and informed by institutional constraint. If politics is the art of the possible, students of the presidency must delineate the boundaries within which possibilities are enhanced and beyond where they simply fade away. We already know, for instance, something about the parameters of legislative success, grounded in party majorities, agenda setting, and veto bargaining;Footnote ²² about other aspects of interbranch relations, ranging from battles over foreign policy to the struggles of the “presidential branch” with the wider bureaucracy;Footnote ²³ and about the contingencies of public leadership and “the provisional pulpit” (Rottinghaus Reference Rottinghaus2010).Footnote ²⁴ More can and should be done in all of these areas, and many others. For if it is inevitable that “the meaning of Obama” goes beyond the empirical, empirical political science can at least help us deliberate that meaning on real, and realistic, common ground.