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There has been tremendous pressure on the Obama Administration to justify the actions taken with regards to the U.S. financial crisis which has managed to eliminate, overnight, over a quarter of the middle class wealth and leave one in six adults without a job or underemployed, while generating a bailout debt that was unimaginable in scale and scope only five years ago. In response to this public pressure, in mid-June 2009, the Obama Administration issued a white paper titled "Financial Regulatory Reform - A New Foundation: Rebuilding Financial Supervision and Regulation" (published by the U.S. Department of Treasury) covering a wide range of areas of financial regulation that proposed a new architecture for financial supervision. Although the White Paper touches upon many of the Administration's promised responses to the crisis with regards to new financial regulations and supervisory changes, it has been criticized as being too narrow in the scope and breath needed to manage the sheer size and scale of the impact of the U.S. financial crisis. This paper focuses on ten concerns and issues of note with the Obama Administration's actions and responses to date with regards to the U.S. financial/banking crisis and its 2009 White Paper on "Financial Regulatory Reform." They are as follows: (1) No Discussion and Minimal Attempt by the Administration to Relay Their Understanding of and Global Transmission of This Financial Crisis, (2) Proposed Financial Oversight Council, (3) Increased Powers for the Federal Reserve, (4) Most Recommendations Do Not Follow the Trend Toward Supervision Consolidation, (5) Macroeconomic vs. Microeconomic Supervision, (6) Government in the Financial Markets and Industry, (7) No Significant International Standard Setting or Coordination to Date, (8) Issue of Too Big to Fail Still at Large, (9) Obama Administration's PR Debacle, and (10) Something to Show after Spending $1.4 Trillion Plus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role that organized labor played in the landmark presidential election of 2008. In particular, it explores the work of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL–CIO), which ran its biggest ever election campaign in 2008, spending upwards of $250 million. While there is a vibrant emerging literature on the election, particularly from political scientists and former reporters, labor’s role in the story has been largely overlooked. Drawing on new parts of the AFL–CIO’s papers, as well as interviews with key staffers and federation leaders, this article highlights the important – and overlooked – role that labor played in putting Barack Obama into the White House. Especially important were its extensive efforts to educate – and pressure – white members, many of whom had backed other candidates during the Democratic primaries, to support Obama. Indeed, theWashington Postasserted that union members played a ‘pivotal role’ in Obama’s victory, especially in terms of delivering the white vote. It was a conclusion largely supported by exit polls, which showed that white union members were much more likely to support Obama than whites who were not in unions. The article highlights that despite the decline in union density – by this time only about 12% of American workers belonged to unions, compared to 35% in the 1950s – the labor movement retained considerable political influence, chiefly because of reforms carried out by AFL–CIO President John J. Sweeney. While Obama was unable to fulfill many of the expectations generated by his campaign, the story of labor and the 2008 election is an important one in its own right, showing that contemporary labor could still be a powerful and constructive force. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author reflects on the issues of terrorism that involves socio-political landscape under the leadership of U.S. President Barack Obama. The author said that the term Overseas Contingency Operation refers to military operations to fight against violence and terrorism. The author discusses also the country's biological, neurological and psychological strengths and weaknesses in society, country and culture.

The thesis of the present paper is that of putting forward an interpretation of the presence of the rhetoric component and of highlighting the theoretical values on politics that Barack Obama's political activity, as well as his speeches and autobiographic work, reveal. The subjacent implication of this approach is that there is an indissoluble unity among these three elements with a public character and that, at the same time, they project a unitary vision on politics. The paper is not an analysis either of the political activity or the speeches that Obama has made, but it seeks to highlight the overtones that are characteristic to his particular rhetoric and to single out some explicit axiological presuppositions of his political vision. Our assumption is that, once this vision on politics has been clarified, one can then distinguish the explicit motivations of his past, current and future political activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the benefits of electronic health records system in the U.S. The result of a study conducted by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine suggests that patients and hospitals benefit when health information technologies replace paper-based systems. Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) is supporting the health information technology (IT) provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan of 2009 to meet the goal of President Barack Obama concerning computerized records for all Americans by 2014. On the other hand, Sage Software has developed an Intergy version 5.5 integrated electronic health records and practice, which is designed to improve the health and well-being of physician practices and their patients.

The article focuses on the growing demand of lawmakers for greater public access to the literature. The demand is increasing in many fields like biomedicine. It is expected that the U.S. president Barack Obama will issue an executive order to make authors' or publishers' versions of research papers publicly available in the PubMed Central repository within 12 months of publication. It suggests that publishers should recognize that science's social contract is moving towards greater openness.

Though presidents often criticize organized interests, presidents also expend considerable effort engaging them. Using original elite interviews, a survey of lobbyists, and administrative data, I consider how this engagement manifests, why presidents engage interests, and with which interests presidents engage. Unlike in other institutions, presidents exercise substantial control over engagement with interests, and they engage to mobilize interests' institutional resources in service of their goals. To optimize mobilization, presidents focus engagement on well-resourced interests and interests who share presidents' preferences. Pairing over seven million White House visitor log entries from two administrations with lobbying and campaign finance records, I demonstrate that presidential engagement is informed by interests' electoral and policy resources and partisan alignment, though these characteristics' substantive effects are modest. My findings highlight coalition building with interests as an underappreciated source of presidential power and elucidate the degree to which presidents amplify the political voice of well-resourced and copartisan interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010 and 2011, highly visible national surveys documented frequent failure among the public, especially among Republicans, to acknowledge that Barack Obama was born in the United States. However, different questions yielded strikingly different results. The highest rate of partisan division was generated by a CBS/New York Times closed-ended question that included potentially leading introductory sentences. The smallest partisan gap in apparent misinformation was generated by an ABC News/Washington Post open-ended question that did not ask a follow-up that was needed to gauge public beliefs about whether Mr. Obama was born in the United States. This paper reviews the polls on birtherism and describes an experiment embedded in a nationally representative sample survey testing whether methodological features of these two questions might have distorted their results and caused the apparent discrepancy between them. A version of the closed-ended question including the leading introductory sentences yielded a much larger degree of apparent partisan division than did a version of the question without the introductory sentences. Following the open question with another question that clarified people’s beliefs (asking about whether Hawaii was part of the United States at the time of Barack Obama’s birth) did not alter the conclusions supported by that item about the accuracy of public understanding. This study therefore illustrates how different question wording caused different polls to produce notably different results and provides a caution about the use of potentially leading wording. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The struggle for the power to nominate candidates for office between party elites and rank-and-file partisans surfaced in the late 1700s. The battle endures today and superdelegates in the Democratic Party represent the contemporary political elites in the nomination process. Indeed, superdelegates played a decisive role in determining the outcome of the 2008 Democratic nomination campaign. In this paper, we examine the attitudes and decisions of superdelegates towards the candidates and their own role in the nomination process. We also examine the attitudes of rank-and-file Democrats towards the delegates and the nomination process. To study these two groups, we rely on survey data collected immediately following the 2008 primary season. Results from the surveys indicate that voters and superdelegates differ greatly in their perceptions of superdelegates, their roles and decisions, as well as the legitimacy of the nomination process in the Democratic Party. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper is focused on the postmodern theory and its relevance to contemporary societies with America as a reference point. The argument here is that there is conceptual mutuality between postmodern theory and Obama's victory as the 44th president of the United States of America. In this paper, the writer argues logically in favor of postmodern theory, that we are now in a postmodern world where stereotype perceptions against colour and gender are no longer necessary. Rather what counts most is the content of the character of an individual. The author relied extensively on secondary data and focused group discussion [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential Barack Obama''s South Carolina victory speech from the perspective of pragmemes. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to ) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama''s achievements), Obama uses the technique of ‘personification’ 1 [1] Personification is an ontological metaphor in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person. (The Economist, December 13th, 2007). When he voices an idea, he does not just expose it as if it came from himself, but gets another person (fictitious or, plausibly, real) to voice it. Since in an electoral speech, he cannot reasonably get people on stage to voice his ideas, he personifies ideas by narrating what people told him. His stories are his way of personifying his ideas. The discourse strategy he uses serves to reverse the direction of influence from the people in control to the people controlled (see ). In this paper, I also argue that Barack Obama''s speech contains echoes of Martin Luther King Jr''s ‘I have a dream speech’ and that its structure is best understood in the light of Afro-American sermons. I explain analogies and disanalogies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

With a growing national concern on rising health care cost and declining access to health care in the United States, a debate emerges whether or not a health care reform is needed to lower cost and improve health care coverage. The purpose of the paper is to apply Goldratt's Thinking Process to the issues or the undesirable effects associated with the health care reform as well as to identify the core problem in a CRT diagram (what to change), develop an objective to solve the core problem in an Evaporative Cloud (EC) diagram (what to change to), and create a solution through the injections in order to break the conflict that, when implemented, replaces the undesirable effects with desirable effects in a Future Reality Tree (FRT) diagram (how to cause the change). The paper also demonstrates that Goldratt's thinking process can be applied to any problem even one as complex as the health care reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no question that with Barack Obama the United States has a rock star as president who—behooving rock stars—is adored and admired the world over. His being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize nary a year after being elected president and barely ten months into his holding the office, testified to his global popularity rather than his actual accomplishments, which may well turn out to be unique and formidable. And it is equally evident that few—if any—American presidents were more reviled, disdained and distrusted all across the globe than George W. Bush, Obama's immediate predecessor. Indeed, the contrast between the hatred for the former and the admiration for the latter might lead to the impression that the negative attitudes towards America and Americans that was so prevalent during the Bush years have miraculously morphed into a lovefest towards the United States on the part of the global public. This paper—concentrating solely on the German case but representing a larger research project encompassing much of Western Europe—argues that love for Obama and disdain for America are not only perfectly compatible but that, in fact, the two are merely different empirical manifestations of a conceptually singular view of America. Far from being mutually exclusive, these two strains are highly congruent, indeed complementary and symbiotic with each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both candidates and voters have increased their use of the Internet for political campaigns. Candidates have adopted many internet tools, including social networking websites, for the purposes of communicating with constituents and voters, collecting donations, fostering community, and organizing events. On the other side, voters have adopted Internet tools such as blogs and social networking sites to relate to candidates, engage in political dialogue, pursue activist causes, and share information. In this paper we examine two years of posts on the Facebook walls of the three major contenders for the U.S. Presidency in 2008: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. We analyze participation patterns of usage along dimensions of breadth and frequency, and interpret them in terms of the concept of the "public sphere". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts both to rate the quality and breadth of presidential involvement in emergency management, as well as to examine the possible reasons for the differing quality. Using three major factors for evaluation, it is possible to review the presidential records from the second half of the twentieth century to today, and derive broad categorical assessments using a holistic methodology. While some presidents learned from major catastrophes (focusing events) that occurred just before or during their administrations, others were hard-pressed simply to recover from especially disruptive or new disasters and failed to improve the system as a result. During his campaign President Obama had indicated a preference to elevate FEMA again, but it remains to be seen if he will have time to deal with this issue in the first half of his administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a series of international tax reform proposals released by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama in May 2009. It is estimated that the proposals would generate 210 billion U.S. dollars in revenue over 10 years, but the Joint Committee on Taxation's estimates show that the proposals would raise only 159 billion U.S. dollars over 10 years. The proposals include a partial repeal of check-the-box, which could raise 86 billion U.S. dollars over 10 years, and deferral of foreign-related deductions.

The national security concerns following the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 have played a key role in our foreign policy issues. Americans are struggling to have confidence in intelligence agencies, the governmental system, and the president of the United States to reduce (or eliminate, if possible) terrorism (home grown as well as of foreign origin). The Middle East (e.g., Iran, Israel, and Syria), China, Africa, and North Korea continue to pose challenges to our foreign policy. Another issue that gained attention recently is the president's executive order to prevent deportation of nearly 800,000 illegal immigrant children. This paper delves into various foreign policy issues, their affects on the 2012 presidential election and beyond, and a few lessons learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse the use of the first person plural, second person and third person references in Obama's and Bush's victory speeches. The contrasting circumstances surrounding the election of both presidents were imprinted on discourse through different patterns of personal references (Martin,1992) and transitivity structures (Halliday,2004[1985]). By analysing them this paper will illustrate the social function of individuals in the speeches, as well as the way in which the systematic use of both linguistic devices contributed ultimately to define the role of the speakers as presidents of the United States. Whereas Obama's victory speech centred on the audience and allowed them to feel protagonists, Bush's anti-triumphant speech ignored them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February of 2009 and 2010, President Obama made what some in the media and gaming industries construed as negative public statements regarding trips to Las Vegas. Some claimed these statements could easily be interpreted as a suggestion that companies and individuals avoid casino areas, thus doing additional harm to their surrounding economies during already tough times. In this paper, we use event study methodology to examine stock market reactions ofU.S. casino-related businesses to the president's statements. We find that President Obama's statements were followed by significant negative abnormal returns in the segment of companies targeted more towards conventions, trade shows, and tourism, and by significant positive abnormal returns for companies with more of a local/regional focus. Our findings suggest that the president's statements did not adversely affect all casino-related businesses, but they also were not benign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an interpretation of the fundamental, under-theorized role played by general election in the preservation-through-restoration of the democratic form of society. A review of the classic approaches to the question of separation and division of powers as a foundation of modern democracy is presented. The said discontinuity established by the election of Barack Obama as president of the U.S. is explored. It emphasizes the need for retroactive justice for human rights violations in the context of the dynamic of renewal and restoration required by democratic regimes to remain responsive.

A worldwide consensus would suggest that the legacy of the first and second Bush administrations was imperial in a way unprecedented in US history. The new presidency of Barack Obama, now, seems to promise to undo this legacy of empire, which had manifestly resulted in the lowest popularity ratings for an American president in history. Obama's electoralcampaign discourse and first presidential appearances on the world stage have, in fact, reinforced his image as "America's first cosmopolitan president." This positive emphasis on cosmopolitanism should be highlighted as one of the rare moments in US history given the rather unenthusiastic reception of the term in American political culture, which highly contests its glorification by European political theorists. This paper strives to reassess the discussions of American Empire in the light of the cosmopolitan touch on the horizon, from the hands of Barack Obama. In doing that it aims to provide an overview of the critical literature on the imperial attributes of the US, put forward a generic definition of empire in the light of imperial adaptation studies as well as to measure the possible impact of a cosmopolitan discourse on ending the regional and global apprehensions of an imperial US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that the strategic planning process of the Long War on Terror has been conducted in a manner that did not pay sufficient attention to the tenets of classical strategic theory. The article shows that the strategy encapsulated in the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism and the Pentagon's initial responses to the challenges of irregular warfare departed from important principles associated with Clausewitz and other strategic theorists, undermining the prospects for successful counterterrorism. The reasons are partly the fault of the Bush administration, and partly a consequence of the American strategic culture and the preferred model of American civil-military relations. By turning back to strategic fundamentals, important improvements in strategic performance have been accomplished since 2006. The Obama administration can build upon the later successes of its predecessor in Iraq and in reshaping the US armed forces. In addition, the new president can refine and improve the Bush administration's counterterrorism strategy particularly by clarifying short- and long-term political goals. In order for this to happen, the new administration must do a better job of incorporating into its strategic planning main ideas from Clausewitzian strategic thought, such as the necessity for clearly defined political objectives in war and understanding strategy as first and foremost a process of employing military and non-military means in such a way as to achieve those political objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The presidential approval rate among a president's copartisans has received a great deal of attention and is an important quantity for understanding accountability of the executive branch. We show that the reported composition of the president's party is endogenous to presidential popularity, with the party growing and becoming more ideologically moderate as presidential popularity increases. As a result, observed partisan approval rates may be biased because of compositional change in respondents who self-identify with the president's party. We derive bounds on the compositionally corrected partisan approval rate under a theoretically motivated monotonicity condition. We examine how the bounds have evolved during the Obama and Trump presidencies. The proportion of survey respondents who identify with the Republican party has decreased rapidly from the preelection benchmark during the Trump presidency and, as a result, the lower bound on Trump's partisan approval rate is much lower than at a comparable point in the Obama presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intellectuals as presidents are few-seven in all-and mostly far between: the two Adamses, Jefferson, and Madison early on; the first Roosevelt and Wilson early in the last century; and Obama most recently. The early cluster springs in part from social recruitment and education then prevailing. The later pair also came at a time of elevated public discourse. The latest seems to be a product of sheer chance. The intellectualism of the latter three was self-conscious and mostly constructive to their presidencies. The prospects for future intellectuals as presidents are not bright. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the initiation of College Promise programs in U.S. for ensuring the affordability of higher education. Topics discussed include promises regarding higher education that have been made and kept and those which have been broken. It highlights the emphasis given by U.S. president Barack Obama for investments in higher education. Topics including the development of the College Promise Campaign and its proceedings are discussed.

In The Particularistic President we challenge the dominant paradigm asserting presidential universalism. Instead, we argue that presidents possess strong electoral and partisan incentives to pursue policies that prioritize the needs of some Americans over those of others. In this article, we review our larger argument and expand upon our analyses of two policy areas where presidents have unilateral authority over distributive outcomes: natural disaster declarations and military base closures. In the former, we find strong evidence that President Barack Obama favored both swing and core states in the 2012 election year. In the latter, we find evidence of both electoral and partisan particularism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On February 9, 2014, the New York Times editorial board described the Obama administration as 'one of the least merciful ... in modern history.' Over the past year and a half, President Barack Obama has shown renewed interest in clemency. However, as of July 13, 2015, real reform remains elusive: Obama has granted less than 1% of pardon and commutation requests. Is anything likely to change in the remaining months of the Obama administration? In this article, I look for hints of Obama's plans by considering his clemency record in detail, paying particular attention to the types of offenses that have been deemed worthy of clemency and those that have not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies find that voters regularly punish presidents for seemingly unrelated events, despite a clear understanding of how these issues become tied to the president. We contend that the media plays an important role in creating this link. Testing this, we examined how the 2010 BP oil spill shaped evaluations of President Barack Obama, paying particular attention to news coverage to isolate the event's applicability to the president. We estimate the causal effect of these different frames by matching respondents from a prespill control group to two separate treatment phases, finding that presidential confidence decreases once the media begins attributing political blame, but not before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important vein of presidency scholarship has focused on the president's instruments of unilateral action through systemic considerations of executive orders, proclamations, and most recently, signing statements. This article considers an additional tool: presidential memoranda. I argue these memoranda contain important policy content advancing the president's agenda, and--like executive orders--they often indicate unilateral action. Memoranda use has surged as the issuance of executive orders has decreased, indicating that unilateralism is not declining, but rather, the means of such action may be shifting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reprint of the article "Myths of the Financial Crisis" by Keith Hennessey and Edward Paul Lazear, which appeared in a 2013 issue of the journal "Politico." The authors shared how federal government responded during the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S. under the leadership of President George W. Bush. They also emphasized the role of President Barack Obama in dealing with the recession and recovery that followed.

This investigation explores the relationships among information subsidies, news media coverage, and policymaking activities regarding healthcare reform during the first year of the Obama presidential administration. Specifically, a comparison of information subsidies (from the president, federal government offices, Congress, and healthcare-related stakeholder groups), news media content, and policymaking activity was completed from March 2009 to December 2009. Significant correlations were found for the salience of issues and stakeholder groups among information subsidies, news media coverage, and policymaking activity. Robust linkages were also found concerning issue attribute salience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presidents yearn for greatness to cement their 'standing in history.' But their efforts are vulnerable to constitutional and political constraints. The gap between presidential hope and the limits on their power is vividly displayed by their record of 'going public.' This article illustrates the costs of presidential promotions through a case study of President Barack Obama's public campaign on behalf of health reform, which provoked countermobilization, encouraged media coverage of the opposition, and widened the public's exposure to potent messages that undercut White House communications. The article concludes by suggesting partial steps to moderate expectations and work within institutional boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barack Obama campaigned for president of the United States on a promise of fidelity to the Constitution and stated that he would not issue any signing statements to revise legislative intent. His vision of the presidency stood in marked contrast to President George W. Bush's actions and seemed to suggest a reversal of the trend toward increased executive powers. We will analyze how and why President Obama has largely continued the unilateral presidential action of his predecessor, despite earlier promises to the contrary, outline why signing statements are not useful governing tools, and offer a solution to abuses of constitutional signing statements that impact appropriations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond the formal powers and duties laid down in the Constitution, the presidency is a cultural institution meant to represent-in a very literal sense-the American people. Presidents act as identificatory figures-symbolizing what their supporters hold sacred about the nation. Presidents' own bodies come to matter particularly at political moments when a new or counter-interpretation of national identity challenges prevailing assumptions. Supporters often interpret their national identity in the figure of the president. As a black candidate in a historically white-ruled nation, Barack Obama's narration of his background as representatively American has been a critical task both as candidate and as president. Both Obama's biography and his visual presence have come to play a part in how political issues, from health care to foreign policy, get framed by both supporters and opponents. But does race stand alone in this dynamic of life story and looks? I analyze the challenges faced and opportunities afforded the Obama presidency by comparing him to earlier presidents who were politically associated with moments of broad change in American politics: Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all of whom depended heavily on biography and physical embodiment to authorize their vision of national identity. Presidential embodiment ultimately diminishes democratic politics because of the strong fixation on a singular political institution it produces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the re-election of the U.S. President Barack Obama and its association to the research policy of the country. The author mentions that the re-election of President Obama can be considered as a victory for science and reason. Moreover, the author states that the failure to act on the issue of global warming is the great disappointment during the first term of President Obama.

This study aims to investigate discourses of the charisma of Barack Obama in articles in a leading Finnish newspaper during the first 6 months of his presidency. The results show that the media created a very enthusiastic atmosphere around Obama. His charisma was built up mostly around his person, with the emphasis on an exceptional personality, life story and behaviour. In addition, the various crises that arose were used to reinforce the picture of Obama as charismatic. The findings undermine the idea of a single form of charismatic leadership and provide empirical support for the framework put forward by Steyrer (Organizational Studies 19(5), 807-828, 1998), that various types of charismatic leadership exist: In this study paternalistic, heroic, missionary and majestic are identified. The study contributes to Steyrer's framework by showing that certain types of charisma occur in different social contexts. The results also suggest that ethics is constructed as a crucial part of charismatic leadership, but the construction of Obama's charisma in contrast to others raises ethical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The active role of the Federal Reserve ( Fed) in responding to the financial crisis has provoked questions not only about its policies' economic wisdom but also about the political significance of the Fed's exercise of expanded power. This article places the Fed's actions into perspective, framing three counterfactuals that yield different vantage points on the key question: Have the Fed's actions in the financial crisis and beyond amounted to a 'power play' intended to marginalize elected authorities in the management of the national economy? I begin with an overview of the relationship over the postwar period between the Fed and the presidency, and then employ this historical baseline in analyzing three key episodes: the response to the crisis as it emerged during the final years of the Bush administration, the surprising decision by the Obama administration to continue the policy trajectory set by the actions of the Fed and his Republican predecessor, and the stabilization policies implemented by the Fed since the onset of the financial crisis. I find no strong evidence that the Fed's actions exceeded the rubric expected on the basis of its evolving responsibility to meet emergencies in a financial marketplace where the pace of innovation is high and in the context of political party polarization that has stalemated fiscal policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our charge in this article is that it is becoming almost impossible to speak about race after Obama’s election victory because for many Canadians and Americans, the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the first African American President of the United States ushered the US into a post-racial era. This thinking not only obfuscates any discussion about race and racism but also ignores the historical and contemporary evidence of racism in the United States. For those of us living in Canada, we cannot help but examine the post-racial rhetoric and its implications for antiracism education in Canada and the United States. The article asks these questions: if race is analytically reductive and has no intellectual validity, then what is the social significance of race in the era ushered in by Obama’s election victory. How do we address the limits and possibilities of defining race as an ascribed status linked with physical characteristics of skin colour and pigmentation while engaging race and social difference in a power and conflict analysis? How do we contextualize concepts such as ‘race,’ ‘racism,’ and ‘post-raciality’ to the broader process of institutional and structural transformation in the era ushered in by Obama’s election victory? Our article invites complex and multiple discussions on these questions and their implication for antiracism education in Canada and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although scholars have described how legislative efforts to spur bipartisanship fare, we have little knowledge about how bipartisanship can affect political opinions with their rhetoric or the most impactful message for opponents to respond. Using President Obama’s bipartisan speech to the GOP House Issues Conference in 2010, we look at the effect of the one-sided message on President Obama’s favorability rating. We then pair this message with three competing messages of varying partisanship to determine the degree of change (if any). The results show that the President’s one-sided message is effective, but if met with a competitive bipartisan message from the opposition party, approval of the President by all partisan groups increases even more. However, if the President’s bipartisan message frame is met using a partisan message from the opposition party, the President’s approval declines among all partisans, and approval of the Republicans in Congress increases but only for Republican identifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the elements of the partisan presidency of U.S. President Barack Obama. He notes the powerful U.S. presidency of the 20th and 21st centuries seen by political scientists as the enemy of strong parties. He traces the history of the modern presidency and the rise of the partisan presidency in the country. He describes modern presidents as those that led an executive branch where party politics played a diminishing role. He also discusses the effort of Obama to end an era of partisan division.

This article is an examination of the candidate preferences of 2008 superdelegates and of their role in determining the eventual Democratic nominee. Multivariate analysis suggests that female superdelegates were less likely to support Obama than were men; African-Americans, in contrast, were more likely to support his candidacy. A higher percentage of the popular vote received by Obama in the primary or caucus also influenced superdelegates to support him. The effect of contributions from Obama to superdelegates appeared to boost his support, but Clinton contributions had little impact. Also examined is the effect that superdelegates had on the nomination outcome. Analysis suggests that the impact of unpledged superdelegates on the 2008 Democratic nomination was significant. A substantial number of superdelegates continue to follow their own preferences, especially in states where Clinton was victorious, and this asymmetry made a difference in the nomination outcome. The race for the nomination could have been quite different without the presence of these unpledged superdelegates, or under alternative rules for delegation selection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the prospect of nuclear terrorism. U.S. President Barack Obama announced on the eve of the Nuclear Security Summit in April 2010 that the prospect of nuclear terrorism was the single biggest threat to the U.S. security. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet said that the main threat of weapon of mass destruction (WMD) was the nuclear one. A study conducted by the RAND Corp. found that a nuclear device would kill 60,000 persons instantly or soon thereafter.

The article discusses the strategic war on terror of the U.S. It is said that the Democrats may have ensured the defeat of the U.S. war on terror as president Barack Obama set a date certain for U.S. withdrawal. Obama is said to surrender the nation's interrogation techniques and demoralize intelligence and field personnel of the U.S. military. Foreign terrorist enemies are said to be manipulating the U.S. administration by doing violence so that the government gets cold feet and falter. However, a majority of the U.S. public now opposes continued war against the 9/11 perpetrators.

Skidmore, David. (2011) The Obama Presidency and US Foreign Policy: Where's the Multilateralism? doi: 10.1111/j.1528-3585.2011.00454.x © 2011 International Studies Association Expectations that the presidential transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama would produce a multilateralist turn in American foreign policy have thus far proven misplaced. This is largely because the strategic environment of the post-Cold War era places structural constraints on the ability of any US president, of whatever ideological leanings, to pursue a consistently multilateralist foreign policy. Internationally, the absence of a shared great power threat has undermined the institutional bargain between the United States and allied states, thus rendering the terms of multilateral cooperation more difficult to agree upon. At home, the end of the Cold War has undermined presidential authority and empowered veto players whose interests are threatened by multilateral commitments. Nevertheless, structure is not destiny. Understanding the sources of political constraint can suggest strategies for overcoming or bypassing such obstacles to multilateral engagement in US foreign policy. A president who wishes to exercise multilateral leadership abroad must seek to renegotiate the terms of US engagement with international institutions while fashioning a compelling rationale that mobilizes public support at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As America's first black president, Barack Obama's race became a symbolic indicator both abroad and at home. While looked upon as a sign of progress and celebrated overseas, Obama was deemed too foreign, especially by his political opposition here at home. This article chronicles how both points-of-view came into being and argues that despite both side assuming his policies would be different from his predecessor, Obama's policies rather, are a continuance thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama's weekly radio addresses to the nation during his first two years in office were scored using thematic content analysis (TCA). TCA is a method for deriving quantitative data from qualitative materials through the use of detailed scoring manuals applied to oral or written texts by trained, reliable scorers. We scored the addresses for integrative complexity (IC), motive imagery (MI), and universal values. Obama's mean IC was second highest among recent presidents. His IC fluctuated in response to situational parameters, rising when he was negotiating and maneuvering his policies through Congress, falling when stress was high and a problem seemed amenable to a simple solution. His MI showed Achievement as his predominant motive. Achievement, Security, and Power were highest in his value hierarchy, which remained stable throughout the period; surprisingly, his ranking of Self-Direction was much lower than a previously published pan-cultural average. Last, we identified six clusters, time periods when his IC and Power imagery moved in opposite directions. The implications of this pattern for cooperative versus adversarial approaches in problem solving are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"In politics, people never try to bind themselves, only to bind others."1 A prevailing view in the legal and political science literature assumes that power holders seek to expand or contract their constitutional authority based on incentives that are intrinsic to the logic of the institutional offices they occupy. For instance, it is generally assumed that Presidents are empire builders who will almost always prefer maximum flexibility in shaping their policy objectives, whereas members of Congress may sometimes shirk their institutional prerogatives because of electoral incentives or collective action problems. A similar institutional logic underpins the view that federal courts will often seek to expand their interpretive authority in constitutional controversies at the expense of the political branches. In this Essay, I sketch out the possibility that power holders may often seek to expand or contract the scope of presidential authority based on whether it advances partisan rather than institutional objectives. More specifically, when the constitutional allocation of presidential authority is unbundled along discrete issue dimensions, partisan power holders may have an incentive to stake out a vision of presidential authority that increases the chance of carrying out their favored issues and that makes it more difficult to carry out issues that favor the political opposition. And as the parties' electoral bases and elites become more polarized in terms of ideology and presidential voting patterns, such partisan divisions regarding the allocation of presidential authority are likely to become more pronounced. This Essay illustrates this dynamic by examining the conflicting positions on presidential power adopted by the administrations of President Barack Obama and his predecessors on issues like human rights, war powers, and executive branch oversight of the administrative state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the author's views on hospice and health care reform which focuses on the end of life care for the elderly in the U.S. It mentions the topics discussed within the issue including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the U.S. President Barack Obama, and cost of hospice care for patients who are nearing the end of life. The article also mentions that Medicare plays a significant role in financing hospice care which is also part of the palliative care. It also states the three Medicare coverage requirements to qualify for the Medicare hospice care including the patient's eligibility for Medicare benefits, the patient must be terminally ill, and signing a statement recognizing certain Medicare services.

The article analyzes whether the victory of Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential elections in the U.S. signifies a departure from the racial discrimination in the U.S. As reported, although the election of Obama does signifies that some societal changes have taken place, profound disparities still exists. As reported, one of the examples of the disparities is that, African American account for 55% of the total number of federal prisoners, while Blacks account for 13% of total U.S. population.