Presidential debates as focal points for campaign arguments

Abstract

This critical analysis of the 1988 Bush‐Dukakis presidential campaign is based on the premise that political debates can provide a framework for examining the arguments and issues within a political campaign that help shape potential voters’ perceptions about each candidate's character and fitness for office. The arguments presented within the debates are examined to determine the dominant themes each candidate developed as a way of describing himself and his opponent. Analysis of news reports of subsequent campaign speeches and polling information suggests which themes were accepted by the majority of voters.     

'His Finest Hour?' George Bush and the Diplomacy of German Unification

This article examines the diplomatic record of the Bush administration with particular reference to its role in German unification. Based upon memoir material and new sources made available since 1989, it argues that the administration in general - and George Bush in particular - played an indispensable role during these critical years. First, Bush's unequivocal support for unification drove the process forward and reinforced Germany's commitment to NATO. By reassuring countries like France, the US also managed to compel reluctant Europeans to accept unification. Finally, by working closely with Gorbachev and Shevarnadze, Washington was also able to persuade the USSR to accept what many had once thought quite unacceptable to the Russians: a united Germany within NATO. Given the part that the President played in all this, the authors suggest that the generally accepted view of Bush as a politician without purpose or plan has to be questioned. The 'statesman without a vision' who emerges from this reading of events is seen as having been a more forceful and effective diplomatic leader than some of his critics have been prepared to concede.     

Origins of Regime Change: “Ideapolitik” on the Long Road to Baghdad, 1993–2000

How was the ouster of Saddam Hussein defined as the solution to America's Iraq problem? Current scholarship on the U.S. invasion of Iraq tends to focus on the post-9/11 road to war, promoting models of policy capture, intelligence manipulation, threat-inflation, or rhetorical coercion of Bush administration opponents. In this essay, I trace the “Ideapolitik” of regime change in the 1990s and show that Bush's post-9/11 rhetoric was firmly embedded in a preexisting foreign policy consensus defining Saddam Hussein as the “problem” and his overthrow as its “solution.” Drawing upon recent research in international relations and public policy, I show how the idea of regime change prevailed in redefining American strategy for Iraq. While the September 11, 2001 attacks had important effects on the Bush administration's willingness to use force, the basic idea that ousting Saddam Hussein would solve the Iraq problem was already embedded in elite discourse. Saddam Hussein's ouster was not simply the result of idiosyncratic or nefarious decision-making processes within the Bush administration, but was instead the realization of a social choice made by U.S. foreign policy elites well before George W. Bush came to power.     

Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony,Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq

As the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq mount, scholars have sought to explain how the United States came to launch this war in the first place. Many have focused on the “inflation” of the Iraq threat, and indeed the Bush administration did frame the national dialogue on Iraq. We maintain, however, that the failure of most leading Democrats to challenge the administration's case for war in 2002–2003 cannot be explained fully by the bully pulpit, Democrats' reputation for dovishness, or administration misrepresentations. Rather, we argue that leading Democrats were relatively silent in the run-up to war because they had been “rhetorically coerced”, unable to advance a politically sustainable set of arguments with which to oppose the war. The effective fixing of the meaning of the September 11 attacks in terms of the “War on Terror” substantially circumscribed political debate, and we explain why this discourse became dominant. The Bush administration then capitalized on the existing portrait of Saddam Hussein to bind Iraq tightly into the War on Terror and thereby silence leading Democrats and legitimate the war. The story of the road to war in Iraq is not only one of neoconservative hubris and manipulated intelligence. It is also the story of how political actors strove effectively after 9/11 to shape the nation's discourse of foreign affairs and of how the resulting dominant narratives structured foreign policy debate. Behind the seemingly natural War on Terror lurk political processes of meaning-making that narrowed the space for contestation over Iraq.     

Another Weber: state,associations and domination in international relations

While there has arguably been a partial reception of Weber in international relations (IR), we argue here that his ideas have either been misunderstood or neglected. In order to highlight the most valuable Weberian insights, we focus on two topics of crucial importance to IR. First, in our view, Weber's crucial contribution to the study of states is not his alleged emphasis on the monopoly of violence but his concern with the problem of legitimacy, which is the key to understanding why individuals actually orient an action according to their beliefs in the idea of a state. Second, Weber conducted seminal historical investigations on religion, the rationalization of economic ethics, and organizations that show that the diffusion of isomorphism has little to do with supposedly uninterested and persuasive scientific and professional associations. Instead, more attention should be paid to rational domination and less to reified concepts such as John Meyer's ‘rationalized otherhood’. These arguments are also examined empirically.     

A Bear in the Woods? Threat Framing and the Marketplace of Values

To many scholars, the Bush administration's ability to convince a majority of the public to favor war with Iraq represents a dangerous failure of the marketplace of ideas. A healthy marketplace, they argue, would have produced a more robust debate over the administration's justifications for war, revealing their weakness. In this paper I argue that these scholars have based their arguments on a poorly specified model of the marketplace of ideas and that Iraq does not represent a failure of the marketplace. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the strength of the marketplace lies not in its ability to move the nation toward truth via debate and deliberation, but in its tendency to divide the public into countervailing factions based on competing sets of values and competing frames of the issues at hand. I develop this argument first by elaborating a model of the “marketplace of values” and redefining threat inflation as a process of efforts to frame security issues for the public. I test my model first against public opinion data regarding American threat perceptions and then use it to explain the Bush administration's successes and failures in building and maintaining public support for the war in Iraq.     

Values and Persuasion During the First Bush-Gore Presidential Debate

Appealing to values is an effective form of argumentation. In our analysis of the Bush-Gore debate, we found that values are fundamental in framing issues; their effectiveness is contingent on the issue context and the predisposition of the audience.­ Thus, merely constructing an appeal to values does not guarantee persuasiveness, as the appeal must be concrete in nature when attempting to move an audience to action. Such an appeal goes beyond creating a link between the value appeal and the issue, as the value appeal and the issue position must resonate with a defined audience. Our results indicate that most undecided voters who made up their minds as a result of the debate chose Gore, while a few chose Bush and some remained undecided. Those who chose Gore were clearly more egalitarian in their orientation than undecided voters who chose Bush or could not decide. Bush's use of individualism did not seem to persuade undecided voters, nor did it seem to have a detrimental impact on support for Gore. For the most part, Bush's support remained constant before and after the debate, at least among this particular audience.     

Book Review

During George Bush's presidency the Cold War drew to a close and his administration triumphed in the Gulf War. Some viewed these events as a harbinger of a new world order. Basking in the success of the Gulf War, Bush's approval ratings soared, and prominent Democrats reconsidered challenging him in 1992. Foreign policy themes might have seemed a natural emphasis in campaign rhetoric. Yet, on the eve of the election, Bush abandoned efforts to rally the public with such appeals.

This article identifies primary metaphorical themes employed by Bush to define foreign policy reality. Bush's rhetoric was fundamentally ordered by the orientational metaphor of war. Other themes reinforced central premises of the war metaphor and reflected enduring premises of American exceptional ism. However, critical constraints blunted Bush's rhetorical intentions, and perhaps nullified constraints presidents traditionally have harnessed to define rhetorical situations to fit a preferred world view.

A disjuncture between rhetorical expectations and intentions beset the administration as the 1992 election approached. The electorate turned an anxious gaze to domestic politics and the condition of the economy. Furthermore, the war metaphor met a public demonstrably leery of U.S. meddling in the internal politics of other countries. Preference for the war metaphor, finally, represented a significant challenge to the political identity of Bush and the Republican Party.     

Dangerous Revisionism: On the Founders, ‘Neocons’ and the Importance of History

Debates regarding the Bush Administration's grand strategy began long before the forty-third president left office. A group of distinguished historians and political scientists have argued over the course of the last few years that the Administration's grand strategy did not represent a major break with historical precedent, as is sometimes argued, but continued the evangelical support for liberty that has always made the United States a “dangerous nation” to tyrants. Along the way, this revisionism creates straw men, and co-opts or redefines terms that are central to the traditional understanding of U.S. foreign policy. It also seems to misunderstand grand strategy itself, focusing almost entirely on continuity of ends while ignoring the rather glaring discontinuities in the ways that generations of U.S. presidents have chosen to pursue them. Overall, the revisionist project fails in both of its tasks, which are: To make the case that the Bush administration took actions of which the Founding Fathers would have understood and approved; and by implication, to justify the unnecessary, tragic war in Iraq.     

Bush: The Sequel

This article examines the likely foreign policy initiatives of the U.S. under the leadership of George W. Bush. The new president has outlined a fairly thorough critique of America's international behavior in the 1990s. Because a leader's public statements arguably serve to persuade various audiences and to build support for policy change, the article takes Bush's words quite seriously—along with those spoken or written by his closest foreign affairs advisors. Bush intends to abandon the so-called Clinton Doctrine and deploy national missile defenses. He is critical of American policies toward China and Russia, but has not presented bold new initiatives toward those powers. Under the rubric of "compassionate conservatism," Bush may alter U.S. relations toward the Global South in some interesting ways. The president and his advisors often purport to be realists, but the article demonstrates that their own words belie this claim as they often justify policies based on ideals rather than the pursuit of power.     

Cause,effect, and consistency: A response to Kenneth Waltz

In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, we argued that the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel is due largely to the influence of a domestic interest group—comprised of Jews as well as non-Jews—and that this unusual situation is harmful to both the United States and Israel. Jerome Slater's thoughtful review endorses many of our central arguments, but it also highlights several points of disagreement. He argues that we overlooked important alternative sources, defined the lobby too broadly, and exaggerated its influence on Congress and especially the Executive Branch. Although Slater is even more critical of U.S. Middle East policy than we are, he argues that the special relationship is due to strong cultural and religious affinities and broad public support in American society, and not to the influence of the lobby. In fact, the alternative sources cited by Slater do not undermine our basic claims; a broad conception of the lobby makes more sense than his narrower definition; and there is little disagreement between us about the lobby's influence on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Most importantly, public opinion in the United States does not explain why the United States gives Israel such extensive and nearly unconditional backing. Although most Americans have a favorable image of Israel, surveys show that they also favor a more even-handed Middle East policy and a more normal relationship with Israel. Thus, the special relationship is due primarily to the lobby's influence, and not to the American people's enduring identification with the Jewish state.     

Going Public as Political Strategy: The Bush Administration,an Echoing Press,and Passage of the Patriot Act

Research suggests that political elites excel at controlling political and media information environments, particularly in times of national crisis, such as the events and aftermath of September 11. This study examines the creation and passage of the Patriot Act, which was proposed by the Bush administration following the terrorist attacks and quickly passed with strong support by the U.S. Congress. We argue that (a) the public communications of the Bush administration, particularly those by George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, and (b) news coverage about the legislation were instrumental in this outcome. Public communications by Bush and Ashcroft and news coverage about the Act were content analyzed to identify the timing of the messages and the themes and perspectives emphasized, and congressional debates and activities were examined for insight into their relation with administration and press discourse. Findings suggest that Bush and Ashcroft's communications, in combination with a press that largely echoed the administration's messages, created an environment in which Congress faced significant pressure to pass the legislation with remarkable speed.     

Why has the United States not bombed Iran? The domestic politics of America's response to Iran's nuclear programme

Why has the United States (US), under both the Bush and Obama administrations, refrained from attacking Iran even though US officials have depicted the Iranian threat in all but apocalyptic terms and even though a loud chorus in Washington has been persistently calling for a preventive strike against Iran? I present an analysis—informed by Graham Allison's famous bureaucratic politics model—of the main political and bureaucratic forces in Washington acting to promote or impede a preventive attack on Iran's nuclear sites. I argue that America's abstention from attacking Iran should be understood not as a coherent national response to Iran's nuclear programme but rather as (in Allison's terms) an ‘intra-national political outcome’ resulting from the ‘pulling’ of ‘Iran Threat’ interests—primarily Vice President Cheney's camp in the Bush White House, members of Congress, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—and the countervailing ‘hauling’ of the Pentagon, the military's top brass, the intelligence community and the Department of State. The main reason why neither the Bush nor the Obama administration has opted for a military strike is that the ‘haulers’, who were led by a formidable bureaucratic-political player, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have had the upper hand over the hawkish ‘pullers’.     

George H.W. Bush: Conservative Realist as President

This article explores George H.W. Bush's foreign policy in order to examine what it can tell us about the successes and weaknesses of conservative internationalism as a world view and as an analytic construct for scholars of international relations. First, to what extent, if any, did the Bush administration's foreign policy reflect the course and logic of conservative internationalism? Second, what can the Bush administration's foreign policy tell us about the utility of conservative internationalism as a foreign policy approach relative to alternative approaches?     

The bush administration's security strategy: Implications for transatlantic relations

There are signs of growing transatlantic estrangement over multiple international issues. An important catalyst for this estrangement is the National Security Strategy (NSS) that the Bush administration promulgated in September 2002, a document that is a detailed imperial blueprint. Despite its pretensions, however, it is not a global strategy, but instead appears to apply primarily to the 'Islamic Arc'--the territory from North Africa to the border of India. The administration's security strategy has important implications for the transatlantic relationship, since the United States is encouraging NATO to become a junior partner for missions throughout the Islamic Arc. Given the growing divergence in US and European interests and policy perspectives, the role that the Bush administration envisages for NATO is probably not sustainable. The 'West' was an artificial geostrategic concept that needed an extraordinarily threatening common adversary (the Soviet Union) to give it substance. The US and its allies will continue to drift apart strategically, and the Bush administration's security strategy may actually hasten that process. It is uncertain, however, whether the European Union will achieve the cohesion necessary to counterbalance US power. The main task facing statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic is to learn how to disagree about specific policies without becoming disagreeable.     

The Foreign Policy Legacy of Barack Obama

Barack Obama finishes his second term with a mixed but positive foreign policy legacy. America’s global standing is much improved from the waning days of the George W. Bush administration eight years ago. Obama’s most notable achievements were the international agreement slowing Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons capability and diplomatic normalisation with Cuba. On the other side of the ledger were his failure to extricate America from military overextension in the greater Mideast and from the global policing mindset that produced that overextension. Also marring his record was his incoherent response to Syria’s deadly civil war and Libya’s collapse into anarchy following the 2011 international intervention.     

The Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War: Neoconservatives Versus Realists

The aim of this article is to contribute to our understanding of both the debate over the war in Iraq and its implications for the future of U.S. foreign policy by examining the relationship between neoconservatism and realism. The article begins by establishing the connection between the tenets of neoconservatism and the arguments for war against Iraq. The primary focus is on the neoconservative Bush Doctrine that served as the primary justification for the Iraq War. Next, we turn to the arguments that realists put forth in their attempt to steer America away from the road to war. The realists, however, proved to be unsuccessful in their attempt to prevent war and in the final section we address the central question of the article; why did realism fail in the debate over Iraq?     

Brockdorff-Rantzau and the Struggle for a Just Peace

Weimar Germany’s first foreign minister, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, presented the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 with a pamphlet of detailed German counterproposals to the peace terms. In a concise cover letter, which was translated into English by the author of the article, the experienced diplomat Brockdorff-Rantzau put forward his most convincing arguments for a fair settlement at Versailles. Though the counterproposals were ultimately rejected, this rare document represents one of the only direct attempts at negotiation that took place between Germany and the Allied powers. This article analyzes Brockdorff-Rantzau’s style of negotiation in order to discern whether the German government’s hopes for a balanced settlement were based on naiveté or cynicism. By outlining three coherent themes in his writings—anger/defensiveness, compromise, and the rule of law—this paper argues that Brockdorff-Rantzau’s words are indicative of a more cynical motivation behind his seemingly perspicuous arguments.     

Ukraine's relations with the West since the Orange Revolution

Abstract

This article argues that many of Ukraine's problems are long-standing and remain unresolved because government policies are virtual (i.e. do not conform to official documents or statements) thereby reducing the effectiveness of the West's (here understood primarily as NATO and the EU) engagement with Ukraine and the ability of Kyiv to pursue its declared foreign policy objectives. The article discusses Ukraine's relations with the West through cycles of Disinterest, Partnership and Disillusionment. Under Presidents Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma three cycles equated to Kravchuk's presidency (Disinterest, 1991–94), Kuchma's first term (Partnership, 1994–99) and second term (Disillusionment, 2000–04). Three cycles partially repeated itself during Viktor Yushchenko's presidency with Partnership (2005–06) after the Orange Revolution followed by Disillusionment (2007–09), often described as ‘Ukraine fatigue’. US Disinterest in Ukraine from 2009 is an outgrowth of the Barrack Obama administrations ‘re-set’ policies with Russia resembling the ‘Russia-first’ policies of the early 1990s George W. Bush administration. US Disinterest covers the late Yushchenko era and continued into the Yanukovych presidency. The West held out a hope of Partnership for Viktor Yanukovych following his February 2010 election after taking at face value his claim of becoming a more democratic leader, compared with during the 2004 elections, coupled with an expectation he would bring political stability to Ukraine. Partnership quickly evaporated into Disillusionment the following year.