Modern presidents regularly appeal over the heads of Congress to the people at large to generate support for public policies.
The Rhetorical Presidency
makes the case that this development, born at the outset of the twentieth century, is the product of conscious political choices that fundamentally transformed the presidency and the meaning of American governance. Now with a new foreword by Russell Muirhead and a new afterword by the author, this landmark work probes political pathologies and analyzes the dilemmas of presidential statecraft. Extending a tradition of American political writing that begins with
The Federalist
and continues with Woodrow Wilson’s
Congressional Government
,
remains a pivotal work in its field.