Image is everything. Today, our television and movie stars, our athletes, and our politicians carefully craft images for public consumption. Even our country's Executive Chief is not immune to a bit of image manipulation. If presidents can not always actually satisfy the public's excessive, contradictory, and unrealistic expectations, they can at least present a compelling image of presidential leadership and success. When it comes to the modern presidency, tennis star Andre Agassi was correct, ?Image is everything.?Image creation is a serious business with critically important implications for the success of any politician. But presidents must be careful in deciding how they craft the ways in which we perceive them. If they are to succeed, presidents must present an appropriate image of leadership to the American people; an image that is appropriate for the particular needs of the time when the president governs and is appropriate to the personality of that president. Their ultimate goal is to convince the public that they are actually providing leadership, even if in reality they have only a limited ability to effect outcomes.This book examines the way American presidents in the media age have shaped their public personas as a means of cultivating and advancing their political and ideological agendas. Images play an important role in the perceived success or failure of our presidents. Since public expectations are most often aimed directly at the White House and its central occupant, it is more important than ever that a president control his image, as well as presenting the right image to the American public. Reality thus becomes secondary and image is everything.

Image is everything. Today, our television and movie stars, our athletes, and our politicians carefully craft images for public consumption. Even our country's Executive Chief is not immune to a bit of image manipulation. If presidents can not always actually satisfy the public's excessive, contradictory, and unrealistic expectations, they can at l

Image is everything. Today, our television and movie stars, our athletes, and our politicians carefully craft images for public consumption. Even our country's Executive Chief is not immune to a bit of image manipulation. If presidents can not always actually satisfy the public's excessive, contradictory, and unrealistic expectations, they can at least present a compelling image of presidential leadership and success. When it comes to the modern presidency, tennis star Andre Agassi was correct, ?Image is everything.?Image creation is a serious business with critically important implications for the success of any politician. But presidents must be careful in deciding how they craft the ways in which we perceive them. If they are to succeed, presidents must present an appropriate image of leadership to the American people; an image that is appropriate for the particular needs of the time when the president governs and is appropriate to the personality of that president. Their ultimate goal is to convince the public that they are actually providing leadership, even if in reality they have only a limited ability to effect outcomes.This book examines the way American presidents in the media age have shaped their public personas as a means of cultivating and advancing their political and ideological agendas. Images play an important role in the perceived success or failure of our presidents. Since public expectations are most often aimed directly at the White House and its central occupant, it is more important than ever that a president control his image, as well as presenting the right image to the American public. Reality thus becomes secondary and image is everything.

This engaging look at presidential candidate images features a wide range of essays that dissect how these images are formed and manipulated during campaigns. As more and more emphasis is placed on a candidate's persona and how it affects our voting decisions, Presidential Candidate Images provides a variety of frameworks and cases for analyzing candidate images in past, current, and future elections.

Throughout American history presidents have been accused of being liars, of deceiving others for political gain, of being corrupt, or of violating the Constitution. Such criticism is, to some extent, a facet of our political culture. Yet, in recent years the intensity and depth of hostility coming from news reporters, political pundits, and even academics seems unprecedented. It is the argument of "The Making of the Postmodern Presidency" that something more fundamental is occurring other than personal mendacity, character failures, or political errors; that, in fact, the model we have used to explain presidential behavior no longer works.The dominant paradigm used to assess presidential behavior-the modern presidency-is no longer an adequate explanatory model. Nonetheless, those who study the presidency continue to use it to explain behavior. This book claims that the more relevant paradigm that should be used today is the postmodern presidency model. This book traces the origins and development of the postmodern presidency.The heart of the book is composed of an examination of the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to show how each has contributed to the evolution and formation of the postmodern presidency. A penultimate chapter analyzes the 2008 presidential election through the lens of postmodernism. The book concludes with speculation on the challenges that face the Obama presidency in light of the postmodern presidency and American democracy.

A fascinating survey that shows how America's media and politics have influenced each other over the last 200 years. Where mass media and politics intersect is a distinctly American brand of political communication. Media and Politics in America: A Reference Handbook examines the major events, people, controversies, and resources of political communication from the Revolutionary War to the election of 2000. It follows the adoption of the First Amendment, the emergence of the penny press, women's suffrage, the selection of presidential candidates, the advent of radio and television, and the influence of the Internet. Readers will find government documents, Supreme Court cases, campaign statistics, media trends, and public opinion polls. The chapter on resources and the directory of organizations are extensive.

When Barack Obama entered the White House, he faced numerous urgent issues. Despite the citizens' demand for strong presidential leadership, President Obama, following a long-standing precedent for the development and implementation of major policies, appointed administrators--so-called policy czars--charged with directing the response to the nation's most pressing crises. Combining public administration and political science approaches to the study of the American presidency and institutional politics, Justin S. Vaughn and José D. Villalobos argue that the creation of policy czars is a strategy for combating partisan polarization and navigating the federal government's complexity. They present a series of in-depth analyses of the appointment, role, and power of various czars: the energy czar in the mid-1970s, the drug czar in the late 1980s, the AIDS czar in the 1990s, George W. Bush's trio of national security czars after 9/11, and Obama's controversial czars for key domestic issues. Laying aside inflammatory political rhetoric, Vaughn and Villalobos offer a sober, empirical analysis of what precisely constitutes a czar, why Obama and his predecessors used czars, and what role they have played in the modern presidency.