Why presidents fail : and how they can succeed again / Elaine C. Kamarck.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Failure should not be an option in the presidency, but for too long it has been the norm.



From the botched attempt to rescue the U.S. diplomats held hostage by Iran in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter and the missed intelligence on Al Qaeda before 9-11 under George W. Bush to, most recently, the computer meltdown that marked the arrival of health care reform under Barack Obama, the American presidency has been a profile in failure. In Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again , Elaine Kamarck surveys these and other recent presidential failures to understand why Americans have lost faith in their leaders--and how they can get it back.



Kamarck argues that presidents today spend too much time talking and not enough time governing, and that they have allowed themselves to become more and more distant from the federal bureaucracy that is supposed to implement policy. After decades of "imperial" and "rhetorical" presidencies, we are in need of a "managerial" president. This White House insider and former Harvard academic explains the difficulties of governing in our modern political landscape, and offers examples and recommendations of how our next president can not only recreate faith in leadership but also run a competent, successful administration.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In the Broadway musical Hamilton, George Washington tells Alexander Hamilton, who is fulminating about Congress's failure to adopt his proposal for a national bank, "Winning was easy. Governing's harder." Kamarck (Brookings Institution) presents a handful of case studies of presidential governance failures that illustrate how recent presidents' distance from and inattention to the executive establishment have caused the loss of lives, the decline of presidential popularity, and the growth of Americans' distrust of government. Kamarck argues that the requirements of "the permanent campaign" have led presidents to court the public to the point that they now often treat "the government [they] lead [as] an afterthought--until it takes down [their] presidency." Kamarck is at times guilty of overstating her case (e.g., the erosion of public trust in government has been driven by a number of factors other than conspicuous management failures), and she fails to explain policy implementation struggles prior to the permanent campaign (e.g., the Social Security rollout was so rocky, the columnist Walter Lippmann blamed it for the 1937-38 recession). This small volume does, however, make a big point: presidents need to talk less and govern more. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; lower- and upper-division undergraduates. --Ronald P. Seyb, Skidmore College