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AT: Jacobs and KingJacobs and King does NOT say that political capital is irrelevant--Proves our argument that it’s about more than personality but also structural factorsConcludes that presidential leadership DOES matter in close votesCriticisms of Obama’s PC are from people who expected him to be the secular messiah- there ARE instances where he can seize opportunities and be successfulJacobs and King 10, University of Minnesota, Nuffield College, (Lawrence and Desmond, “Varieties of Obamaism: Structure, Agency, and the Obama Presidency,” Perspectives on Politics (2010), 8: 793-802) But personality is not a solid foundation for a persuasive explanation of presidential impact and the shortfalls or accomplishments of Obama's presidency. Modern presidents have brought divergent individual traits to their jobs and yet they have routinely failed to enact much of their agendas. Preeminent policy goals of Bill Clinton (health reform) and George W. Bush (Social Security privatization) met the same fate, though these presidents' personalities vary widely. And presidents like Jimmy Carter—whose personality traits have been criticized as ill-suited for effective leadership—enjoyed comparable or stronger success in Congress than presidents lauded for their personal knack for leadership—from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan.7 Indeed, a personalistic account provides little leverage for explaining the disparities in Obama's record—for example why he succeeded legislatively in restructuring health care and higher education, failed in other areas, and often accommodated stakeholders. Decades of rigorous research find that impersonal, structural forces offer the most compelling explanations for presidential impact.8 Quantitative research that compares legislative success and presidential personality finds no overall relationship.9 In his magisterial qualitative and historical study, Stephen Skowronek reveals that institutional dynamics and ideological commitments structure presidential choice and success in ways that trump the personal predilections of individual presidents.10 Findings point to the predominant influence on presidential legislative success of the ideological and partisan composition of Congress, entrenched interests, identities, and institutional design, and a constitutional order that invites multiple and competing lines of authority. The widespread presumption, then, that Obama's personal traits or leadership style account for the obstacles to his policy proposals is called into question by a generation of scholarship on the presidency. Indeed, the presumption is not simply problematic analytically, but practically as well. For the misdiagnosis of the source of presidential weakness may, paradoxically, induce failure by distracting the White House from strategies and tactics where presidents can make a difference. Following a meeting with Obama shortly after Brown's win, one Democratic senator lamented the White House's delusion that a presidential sales pitch will pass health reform—“Just declaring that he's still for it doesn't mean that it comes off life support.”11 Although Obama's re-engagement after the Brown victory did contribute to restarting reform, the senator's comment points to the importance of ideological and partisan coalitions in Congress, organizational combat, institutional roadblocks, and anticipated voter reactions. Presidential sales pitches go only so far. ---their card ends--- Yet if presidential personality and leadership style come up short as primary explanations for presidential success and failure, this does not render them irrelevant. There is no need to accept the false choice between volition and structure—between explanations that reduce politics to personality and those that focus only on system imperatives and contradictions. The most satisfying explanations lie at the intersection of agency and structure—what we describe as structured agency. Presidents have opportunities to lead, but not under the circumstances they choose or control. These circumstances both restrict the parameters of presidential impact and highlight the significance of presidential skill in accurately identifying and exploiting opportunities. Indeed, Obama himself talks about walking this tightrope—exercising “ruthless pragmatism” in seizing opportunities for reform while accepting the limits and seeking to “bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future”.12 The extraordinary economic and political circumstances under which Obama took office as well as the dramatic disparity between his administration's successes and failures underscore the need to synthesize the study of presidency with the analysis of political economy, American political development, and comparative policy analysis.13 Such an analysis would focus on the intermeshing of government policy making with differentially organized interests; the relative advantages or disadvantages that different institutional settings provide to different organized groups; and the ways in which substantive policy decisions both reflect and shape political struggles. Such structural constraints and differences in organizational power do not literally prohibit Obama, or any president, from taking initiatives—say, nationalizing the banks—but they do create two significant barriers to dramatic policy change: a political environment in which members of Congress, independent regulatory bodies, and officials in his administration (especially in the Department of Treasury) can reject, stymie, or sabotage policies that threaten key relationships (such as sources of campaign contributions or future employment); and an economic environment in which private firms and their customers could respond to policy proposals by taking actions that drive down profitability or by shifting capital out of the US, as happened in Latin America during its debt crisis and in France after the election of Socialist Francois Mitterrand as president. Obama's presidency can thus be viewed as a delicate dance to formulate policies that navigate these barriers and blunt conflicts with established economic/political relationships. Such a politics of compromise has thus far generated dueling frustrations: liberals and progressives steam that Obama's policy proposals are too tepid and too easily stymied by stakeholders, while conservatives fume at his temerity in successfully challenging the basic market-deferring precepts of American political economy. In short, the structured agency perspective integrates two critical components of social science analysis. First, it situates Obama's initiatives within the existing political economic structure of organizational combat, institutions, and policy. Second, it scrutinizes Obama's strategic and tactical decisions to mobilize coalitions that are targeted at points of political economic vulnerability and to use his expressive powers to manage the political narrative, to control expectations, and to frame challenges to the existing power structure in ways that sustain and broaden support. A political economy perspective offers distinct contributions to analyzing the Obama presidency and especially his domestic policies. The first is to recalibrate expectations of presidential leadership and, in particular, Obama's capacity for change. The initial expectation that Obama would transform America—which he himself encouraged—needs to be refocused on the opportunities and constraints within the existing US political economy. This shifts attention from Obama as a kind of secular messiah to the strategic challenge of seizing opportunities within existing institutional and economic structures and instituting changes that instigate future developmental paths in desired directions. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.3 Mb. Share with your friends:
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