Lessons

  • Lesson 1: Introduction, Notions of the President's Role, & the Framers' Thoughts on the Presidency. The objective of this course is to help you understand what we should expect from our presidents, under what constraints they operate, and how we should judge their performance. In this lesson, we compare three prominent views about the role of the presidency in the political system: President Teddy Roosevelt, President William Howard Taft, and the political scientist Richard Neustadt. We conclude with a discussion of the framers' design of the executive branch.
  • Lesson 2: The Presidency & the Constitution. In this lesson, we examine the constitutional design of the executive branch. We also examine the presidency of George Washington to see how his behavior as president established precedents that are still relevant for the presidency today.
  • Lesson 3: The Evolving Presidency I—Expanding, Contracting, & Democratizing. In this lesson, we examine the democratization of the presidency during the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who made the office more accessible to average citizens than the framers of the Constitution originally intended. We also examine how these two presidents expanded presidential power.
  • Lesson 4: The Evolving Presidency II—Prerogative Power Grows. In this lesson we examine the growth and use of presidential power by two very different presidents, James K. Polk and Abraham Lincoln. We then examine the suppression of presidential power following the Civil War, which lasted until the presidencies of Grover Cleveland and William McKinley, who began to lead the presidency into the modern era. Finally, we study Teddy Roosevelt, who helped the role of the presidency emerge as a leader in the American system of government.
  • Lesson 5: The Evolving Presidency III—The Birth of the Modern Presidency. In this lesson we study the continued emergence of the presidency as an equal partner, or maybe even a leader, in the American system of government. We study the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry S. Truman and the development of what political scientists call the modern presidency.

  • First Exam (covers Lessons 1–5)

  • Lesson 6: The Evolving Presidency IV—The Postmodern Presidency. In this lesson we briefly examine the presidents following Harry S. Truman through Bill Clinton, noting developments in the institution and the ways in which the job of being president was made permanently more difficult by Franklin Roosevelt's presidency.
  • Lesson 7: The Evolving Presidency V—George W. Bush & Presidential Spouses. In this lesson we make a preliminary examination of the presidency of George W. Bush, the forty-third president. We also consider the important role played in our system by a person who is neither elected, nor appointed—the presidential spouse.
  • Lesson 8: The Evolving Presidency VI—Vice Presidents & the President's Staff. In this lesson we look beyond the president to two other important actors in the executive branch—vice presidents and the president's staff. We consider the growth of the vice presidency since the 1950s and the evolution of the president's staff, especially in the twentieth century and beyond.
  • Lesson 9: Presidents & Domestic Policy. In this lesson we examine the president's role in domestic policy making, both with Congress and as the head of the bureaucracy. This role includes executing the laws, proposing policies in the form of legislation, creating policies in the form of executive orders, and drafting the annual federal budget. There are many ways presidents wield power in the domestic arena and many ways that they are constrained.

    The president's most visible interaction is with Congress. Presidents work through Congress to get laws passed, and Congress has the ability to either fulfill or frustrate the president's objectives. The framers designed the two institutions to check each other, and that is what they spend a great deal of time doing. In order to understand the relationship between the president and Congress, we first need to review the president's constitutional role in the lawmaking process. We begin with an in-depth examination of the president's most potent constitutional power, the veto.
  • Lesson 10: Presidents & the Judiciary. In this lesson we examine the relationship between presidents and the judicial branch. Most of the president's activities involve interacting with the executive branch and Congress, but the president also has an ongoing relationship with the judiciary, and that relationship can have profound effects on American politics. We have already seen one way the two branches interact with each other: in Supreme Court decisions that define the extent and limits of presidential power (such as Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company vs. Sawyer, Myers vs. United States, United States vs. Curtiss-Wright). However, court cases are not the only form of interaction between the president and the judiciary.

  • Second Exam (covers Lessons 6–10)

  • Lesson 11: Presidents & Foreign Policy. In this lesson, we consider the role presidents play in foreign policy making. One major lesson to be learned is that presidents have considerably more influence in the foreign policy arena than they do in domestic policy, although there are certainly constraints from the other branches of government and from the international community.

    If the president's role in lawmaking is inherently conflicting, his role in foreign policy is often seen as the opposite. Many people, even politicians, assume that the president's role in foreign policy is plenary (complete, absolute). It is certainly true that presidents in American history have been able to exercise greater autonomy in this area than in domestic policy, which might stem from the president's principal objective to ensure security of the nation. In our examination of the president's role in this policy arena, we try to figure out what makes this arena different from domestic lawmaking.
  • Lesson 12: Presidents & the Media. In this lesson we examine the interaction between the president, the executive branch, and the news media. Presidents both respond to and try to control the coverage they receive in the news media. This has consequences for the way they govern, and the way they govern has consequences for the American people. How do presidents use the media? How do journalists cover the presidency? This lesson also explains a topic relevant to more than just the presidency—going public. All politicians engage in going public, but presidents are able to do it most effectively.
  • Lesson 13: Rankings, Ratings, Character, & Other Ways to Assess Presidents & Presidential Candidates. People love to rank presidents, as Michael Nelson demonstrated in Chapter 1 of The Presidency and the Political System. In this lesson we examine various ways people have tried to assess the performance of past presidents and predict the performance of future presidents. We focus primarily on two perspectives. The first deals with the importance of historical context, which has been best explored by political scientist Stephen Skowronek and further expanded upon by political scientist David Crockett. The second deals with presidential character and its impact. The best known scholar of this approach is political scientist James David Barber.

    One aspect of the presidency is its historical context. The focus of "modern presidency" scholarship is on what has changed to make the presidency different. Different scholars focus on different change points—philosophical (Wilson), institutional (Franklin Roosevelt), personal (usually Kennedy or later), and electoral (usually 1968–1972 and beyond). A different way to look at the presidency in historical context, however, is not to focus on what all "modern" presidents have in common, but what factors make various presidents throughout history similar to or different from each other. In this endeavor, we want to discover points of commonality or difference shared by all presidents and see if we can make reasonable generalizations about them.
  • Lesson 14: Presidential Campaigns. In this lesson, we examine presidential campaigns. The framers thought as much about how the president should be elected as they did about the institutional arrangements of the government. We are not going to study the mechanics of campaigns and elections in depth, but we will examine: a) two critical elections in American history for the impact they had in creating the system we have now (1840 and 1896); b) the question of how Americans should use campaigns to make informed voting decisions and; c) how campaigns impact the presidency and affect presidential power. Many things go into a presidential campaign, but the dominant question at the end—other than who wins—tends to concern a new president's mandate for governing.

  • Final Exam (covers Lessons 11–14)