The President and presidentialism

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 105, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-17

  Nelson, Dana D ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33845460134     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-105-1-1     Document Type: Review

References (46)

1. As Molly Ivins and Lou DuBose summarize, "There has been a huge shift in the tax burden from corporations to ordinary citizens. Three times as much money now comes into the federal treasury from working people's payroll taxes as from corporate tax payments." Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America (New York: Random House, 2003), 283
2. Kevin Phillips, American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (New York: Viking, 2004), 125. See also 41-43
3. Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth about Corporate Cons, Globalization, and High-Finance Fraudsters (New York: Plume, 2003)
4. Michael Moore, Dude, Where's My Country (New York: Warner Books, 2003)
5. Mark Crispin Miller, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (New York: Norton, 2001)
6. Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Family Dynasty (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999; afterword, 2001)
7. Gail Sheehy, "The Accidental Candidate," Vanity Fair, October 2000
8. Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (New York: Dutton, 2003)
9. David Corn, The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (New York: Crown, 2003)
10. See Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983)
11. and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999)
12. Frank Bruni, Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush (New York: Perennial, 2003), 87-88
13. Paul Brace and Barbara Hinckley, Follow the Leader: Opinion Polls and the Modern Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 134
14. "It appeals to citizens on the grounds of what their leader does as a person - probably because citizens lack the attention span to follow the things he does as head of state." Christopher Caldwell, "The Triumph of Gesture Politics," New York Times Magazine, January 23, 2005, 12
15. Here the Left might usefully heed the analysis of sociolinguist Michael Silverstein. He argues that the "conceptual elite" misunderstand the reach of the so-called Dubya-speak: "Talking politics is publicly experienced nowadays through a very different, this-world rhetorical sensibility. It rests upon a different set of intertextual connections, to what I would term corporatized language." Silverstein describes this language as one that aspires not to make claims on truth or falsehood but to "socially locat[e] speakers and addressees." See his Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to "W" (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 71, 116, 121
16. Miller, The Bush Dyslexicon, 71
17. Quoted in Ron Suskind, "Without a Doubt," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004, 44-51, 64, 102, 106
18. See chapter 1 and the afterword of my National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) for a more detailed version of this argument
19. Richard Goldstein, "Neo-Macho Man: Pop Culture and Post-9/11 Politics," The Nation, March 24, 2003
20. The landing was described by CNN as "picture perfect." See www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/01/bush.carrier.landing/ (accessed January 29, 2005)
21. See Goldstein, "Bush's Basket," Village Voice, May 21-27, 2003. You can see the famous shot online at www.villagevoice.com/news/0321,goldstein, 44234,1.html (accessed March 10, 2005)
22. See also Elisabeth Bumiller, "Glimpses of a Leader, Through Chosen Eyes Only," New York Times, July 13, 2003, 12, which details the working philosophy of Eric Draper, chief White House photographer. Notes Bumiller: "All recent presidents have had official photographers and all have distributed White House photographs that they hoped put the president and his administration in the best light. But photographers, picture editors, and even administration officials say that no other administration has moved as forcefully as the Bush White House to limit the access of outside news photographers to the president." Indeed, the iconic photo of our manly and possibly enhanced president striding across the deck of the USS Lincoln was supplied by the White House
23. Frank Rich, "How Kerry Became a Girlie-Man," New York Times, September 5, 2004
24. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996). See especially chap. 8, "The Masculine Mystique."
25. See his Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
26. John M. Berecz, Character in Chief: George W. Bush (Atlanta: Humanics Trade Group, 2000), 73
27. Quoted in Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 145-46
28. Robert C. Byrd, Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency (New York: Norton, 2004), 169. Byrd elaborates: "At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the fifty-five statesmen who hammered out our nation's organic charter provided that the president be 'Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States' but that the Congress 'shall have the power to declare war.'... There are no fewer than seven clauses within Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution that directly vest war powers in Congress" (168)
29. Seymour M. Hersh, "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret," New Yorker, January 24 and 31, 2005, 45
30. For additional analysis of Bush rendition policies, see Jane Mayer, "Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America's 'Extraordinary Rendition' Program," New Yorker, February 14 and 21, 2005
31. See Lakoff, Moral Politics, especially chaps. 20-22
32. "Nonideological Reasons for Being a Liberal," "Raising Real Children," and "The Human Mind," 335-78
33. See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 244-47
34. Jean Lipman-Blumin, The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians - and How We Can Survive Them (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19-20
35. As she puts this in a different article, "We can and must return to the political and ethical importance of practices of individual conduct because our everyday conduct may be the missing link and source of dis junction between our professed convictions and our actual political prospects." See Melissa Orlie, "The Desire for Freedom and the Consumption of Politics," Philosophy and Social Criticism 28.4 (2002): 397
36. Wendy Brown, "Moralism and Antipolitics," in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 376
37. On this subject see Jeffrey Goldfarb, Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
38. Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), x
39. Here again, Orlie offers a nice summary of the promise and costs of such impulses: "Practices of commodity consumption reveal a persistent desire for freedom and a capacity for the deliberate exercise of power in conditions that would otherwise appear to extinguish them. But the promise and power of such free desire are squandered when the consumption of democracy is confused with the practice of democracy." "Desire for Freedom and the Consumption of Politics," 399
40. Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life (New York: Free Press, 1995)
41. Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)
42. The cover of the January 14, 2001, New York Times Magazine, featuring a photograph of George W. Bush, read, "America, Inc.: The M.B.A. President."
43. Philip Roth, "The Story Behind 'The Plot Against America,'" New York Times Magazine, September 19, 2004
44. This is an argument luminously if polemically summarized by C. Douglass Lummis in his Radical Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)
45. Brace and Hinckley, Follow the Leader, 6
46. Barbara Hinckley, The Symbolic Presidency: How Presidents Portray Themselves (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2