Obama’s Fractured Legacy
The Politics and Policies of an Embattled Presidency
Publication | Table des matières | Critiques
Résumé
12 newly commissioned chapters critically assess the legacy of Obama’s presidency in Trump’s America
- Designed at the end of Obama’s second term (unlike most books published on the Obama presidency), thus drawing on a complete range of insights on the former president’s time in the office
- Features leading experts on the American presidency and on major issues in the US today, covering both European and American perspectives on the topic
- Tackles both institutional and political dynamics
- Rests on a dialogue across politics and history that allows for deep assessment of the achievements of Obama’s presidency while simultaneously placing the successes and failures in historical perspective
- Contributors include Steven Skowronek, Andrew Rudalevige and Sidney Milkis
Featuring a range of experts on the American presidency, this book offers both European and American perspectives on both the successes and failures of President Obama’s tenure in the White House.
Focusing primarily on domestic policy, these essays explain why Obama’s widely anticipated moment of change did not fully materialise. The Obama presidency navigated partisan and institutional obstacles, but quickly lost its 2008 momentum. These developments illustrate the weakening of the institutional Presidency in a larger context of polarised politics. Many of the fault lines of American society were thus left largely unaddressed, paving the way for the Trump campaign in 2016.
François Vergniolle de Chantal is Professor of American Politics and Government at Université de Paris.
He is the author an editor of several books on the US presidency in both French and English. He is the author of L’impossible présidence impériale: Le contrôle législatif aux États-Unis (CNRS Éditions Paris, 2016). His research focuses on US political institutions, American Congress, and ideologies and political thought.
Table des matières
Introduction: Obama and the Exhaustion of Progressive Presidentialism
François Vergniolle de Chantal and Jean-Christian Vinel
Part I: Institutions
1. Reflections on Obama’s Leadership and the Prospects for Political Change in 21st Century America
Steven Skowronek
2. The Obama Administrative Presidency. Finding New Meanings in Old Laws
Andrew Rudalevige
3. Congressional Gridlock Reconsidered. The Emergence of a ‘Conducive Coalition’?
Alix Meyer
4. Obama’s Legacy for Federalism
Thad Kousser
Part II: Policies
5. Obama and the Never-ending Struggle for Immigration Reform
Isabelle Vagnoux
6. War and Peace in Cyberspace
Frédérick Douzet and Aude Géry
7. Barack Obama’s Urban Policy
Thomas Sugrue
8. From Clinton to Obama. The Politics and Political Economy of Health Insurance Reform
Nelson Lichtenstein
Part III: Movement Politics
9. Criticize and Thrive. The American Left in the Obama Years
Michael Kazin
10. Black Lives Matter: Mobilizing Against Structural Racism in the Age of Obama
Audrey Célestine and Nicolas Martin Breteau
11. The Obama Administration’s Labor and Employment Legacy
David Bensman and Donna Kesselman
12. A 21st Century New ‘New Deal’? Historical Perspectives for the Hopes and Reality of Obama’s Presidency
Elizabeth T. Shermer
13. Coda – Obama’s Fractured Legacy
Sidney Milkis
Bibliography, Index
Critiques
- “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
– Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK - “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
– Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course