scholarly journals President George W. Bush: “Pale Green” Responses to the Environment?

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 371-385
Author(s):  
Byron W. Daynes ◽  
Glen Sussman
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Careful Evaluation ◽  
White House ◽  
Environmental Domain ◽  
Campaign Rhetoric ◽  
Environmental Diplomacy ◽  
Environmental Legacy ◽  
Pale Green ◽  
Administrative Actions

George W. Bush suggested during the 2000 campaign for the presidency that he would be an eco-friendly president. During his eight years in the White House, did the president use the power and resources of his office to carry out his campaign rhetoric about protecting the environment? This study examines the Bush approach to environmentalism by focusing on four important perspectives— political communication, legislative leadership, administrative actions, and environmental diplomacy—in an effort to better understand Bush’s environmental record. After a careful evaluation of the Bush presidency and the environmental domain, we offer our judgment about the Bush environmental legacy.

Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House and the Bay of Pigs

1995 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Gleijeses
Keyword(s):  
State Department ◽  
The State ◽  
White House ◽  
Campaign Rhetoric ◽  
Bay Of Pigs ◽  
Comprehensive Study

AbstractA comprehensive study of the available documents about the Bay of Pigs, including many that have been declassified within the last eighteen months, and extensive interviews with the protagonists in the CIA, the White House and the State Department lead me to conclude that the disastrous operation was launched not simply because Kennedy was poorly served by his young staff and was the captive of his campaign rhetoric, nor simply because of the hubris of the CIA. Rather, the Bay of Pigs was approved because the CIA and the White House assumed they were speaking the same language when, in fact, they were speaking in utterly different tongues.

scholarly journals Continuity Trumps Change: The First Year of Trump’s Administrative Presidency

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-619
Author(s):  
Rachel Augustine Potter ◽  
Andrew Rudalevige ◽  
Sharece Thrower ◽  
Adam L. Warber
Keyword(s):  
Regulatory Policy ◽  
First Year ◽  
White House ◽  
Administrative Action ◽  
Campaign Rhetoric

ABSTRACTFrom campaign rhetoric to tweets, President Trump has positioned himself as “disrupter in chief,” often pointing to administrative action as the avenue by which he is leaving a lasting mark. However, research on the administrative presidency begins with the premise that all presidents face incentives to use administrative tools to gain substantive or political traction. If, as this article suggests, Trump’s institutional standing differs little from his recent predecessors, then how much of the Trump presidency represents a change from past norms and practices? How much represents continuity, or the perennial dynamics of a far-from-omnipotent executive in an ongoing world of “separate institutions sharing powers” (Neustadt 1990, 29)? To answer this, we tracked presidential directives and regulatory policy during Trump’s first year in office. We found evidence of continuity, indicating that in its use of administrative tactics to shape policy, the Trump White House largely falls in line with recent presidencies.

Generic Fragmentation in Modern Campaign Rhetoric: A Study of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Announcements

2020 ◽  
pp. 000276422097846
Author(s):  
Ryan Neville-Shepard
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political Candidates ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Campaign Rhetoric ◽  
Speech Genres

This essay suggests that campaign speech genres have transformed in the digital era due to what I call “generic fragmentation.” Speeches that are expected of political candidates have been replaced by discourse that is scattered over a variety of channels, while taking a form that is truncated, fragmented, and unlikely to satisfy generic conventions when analyzed individually. Illustrating this argument, this essay focuses on the campaign announcements from the 2020 U.S. presidential election to show how the classic announcement speech has transformed into the “long announcement,” spread out over a longer period of time and often in scattered fragments, thus challenging the ways such messages can be evaluated by political communication critics.

The Contingent Effects of Sexism in Primary Elections

2021 ◽  
pp. 106591292110431
Author(s):  
Danny Hayes ◽  
Jennifer L. Lawless
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Attitudes Toward Women ◽  
Primary Elections ◽  
Gender Attitudes ◽  
Female Candidate ◽  
Communication Framework ◽  
Female Candidates ◽  
Campaign Rhetoric ◽  
Sexist Attitudes ◽  
Male Candidate

Although the landscape for female candidates in U.S. politics has improved, research continues to find that many voters possess sexist attitudes. We rely on a standard political communication framework to help reconcile sexism in the electorate with increasingly favorable outcomes for women in primary elections. Based on two national survey experiments, we first demonstrate that in the absence of gendered campaign rhetoric, sexism is a weak predictor of support for female candidates on both sides of the political aisle. We then show, however, that when a male candidate attempts to activate sexism among voters by attacking a female opponent, gender attitudes become more salient—but not to the woman’s disadvantage. In a Democratic primary, gendered attacks backfire and lead to a significant boost in support for the female candidate. On the Republican side, a male candidate does not face the same backlash, but the attacks do very little to depress his female opponent’s support. While the persistence of hostile attitudes toward women has slowed the march toward gender equality in society, our experimental results suggest that sexism exerts only contingent effects in primary elections and not systematically to female candidates’ detriment.

US Supreme Court ruling will not deter White House

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Power Plants ◽  
Court Ruling ◽  
Supreme Court Ruling ◽  
Executive Orders ◽  
Content Type ◽  
White House ◽  
Us States ◽  
Environmental Initiatives ◽  
Us Supreme Court ◽  
Environmental Legacy

Significance About half of all US states joined power-generation and mining interests in challenging EPA procedures. The Court held that the agency, when it is determining whether or not to regulate, must conduct a review of the costs of regulation at the outset, rather than at a later stage of the process. As Congress is unable to pass legislation, the courts are the main check on President Barack Obama's plan to use executive orders and regulation to pursue an environmental legacy. Impacts Plants that had received temporary waivers will likely nonetheless implement their pre-existing compliance plans. States will continue to litigate to try to derail pending and expected climate change and other environmental initiatives. Coal will become an export commodity, as US power plants move away from it.

Battlefield Casualties and Ballot-Box Defeat: Did the Bush–Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-252
Author(s):  
Douglas L. Kriner ◽  
Francis X. Shen
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
White House ◽  
Campaign Rhetoric ◽  
2016 Election ◽  
Meaningful Relationships ◽  
The Military

ABSTRACTIn the 2016 election, foreign policy may have played a critically important role in swinging an important constituency to Donald Trump: voters in high-casualty communities that had abandoned Republican candidates in the mid-2000s. Trump’s iconoclastic campaign rhetoric promised a foreign policy that would simultaneously be more muscular and restrained. He promised to rebuild and refocus the military while avoiding the “stupid wars” and costly entanglements of his predecessors. At both the state and county levels, we find significant and substantively meaningful relationships between local casualty rates and support for Trump. Trump made significant electoral gains among constituencies that were exhausted and politically alienated by 18 years of fighting. Trump’s foreign policy shows a president beset by competing militaristic and isolationist impulses. Our results suggest that giving into the former may come at a significant electoral cost.

The “Big Two” in Political Communication

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Bertolotti ◽  
Patrizia Catellani ◽  
Karen M. Douglas ◽  
Robbie M. Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Political Sophistication

In two experimental studies (conducted in Britain and Italy), participants read about a politician answering to leadership- versus morality-related allegations using either downward counterfactuals (“things could have been worse, if ...”) or upward counterfactuals (“things could have been better, if ...”). Downward messages increased the perception of the politician’s leadership, while both downward and upward messages increased morality perception. Political sophistication moderated the effect of message direction, with downward messages increasing perceived morality in low sophisticates and upward messages increasing perceived morality in high sophisticates. In the latter group, the acknowledgment of an intent to take responsibility mediated morality judgment. Results were consistent across different countries, highlighting previously unexplored effects of communication on the perception of the “Big Two” dimensions.

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