In this book, a distinguished group of presidential campaign staff, journalists, and political observers take us inside the 2016 race for the Republican and Democratic nominations and general election, guiding us through each candidate's campaign from the time each candidate announced his or her intention to seek the presidency through the primaries, conventions, and up to election day. Meeting under the auspices of the Harvard University's Institute of Politics, the candid discussion allows us to learn about the motivations of each candidate, strategies they deployed, and lessons they learned. In addition, representatives from the major SUPERPACS share their strategies and evaluate their impact in an election characterized by unprecedented campaign spending. Campaign for President: The Managers Look at 2016 is essential reading for anyone interested in the inner workings of national political campaigns.

The Bill of Rights was designed to protect the American public from encroachments of liberty by the federal government. During times of war, the president often spearheads efforts to limit rights in the name of national security. When these cases make their way through the federal courts system, it is expected that the judiciary would use rights-based language in their adjudication of cases dealing with such rights-based claims. Zones of Twilight shows that the courts actually use the separation of powers to decide these cases. In other words, the courts look to see if Congress has authorized the president to limit the liberties in question. More often than not, if Congress is on board, so are the federal courts. Although the common conception is that the courts give the president a blank check during war, it is in fact Congress that has received that blank check. Zones of Twilight looks at four reoccurring issues during times of war where the courts have had to decide cases where the executive has limited individual freedoms: military detentions, warrantless electronic surveillance, emergency economic powers, and free speech.

Can anybody tell us why profound poverty continues to plague our nation of barely 25 million people in this modern era of globalization in 2012? Why do you think the vast majority of our beloved people live on less than a dollar a day and struggle from cradle to grave living in near squalor, and eking out near subsistence existence? As yourself why is it that in the midst of this profound abject poverty less than ten percent of our fellow countrymen and women live in opulence and wallow in untold riches with their mansions encased with six-foot walls, seek medical attention in luxurious medical facilities abroad? Are the vast majority of our people in poverty ignorant and stupid, while the few wealthy ones are perceived as more intelligent and wiser than all of us?

This thoroughly researched study provides an invaluable account of Hong Kong's political evolution from its founding as a British colony to the present. Exploring the interplay between colonial, capitalist, communist, and democratic forces in shaping Hong Kong's political institutions and culture, Suzanne Pepper offers a fresh perspective on the territory's development and a gripping account of the transition from British to Chinese rule. The author carries her narrative forward through the lives of significant figures, capturing the personalities and issues central to understanding Hong Kong's political history. Bringing a balanced view to her often contentious subject, she places Hong Kong's current partisan debates between democrats and their opponents within the context of China's ongoing search for a viable political form. The book considers Beijing's increasing intervention in local affairs and focuses on the challenge for Hong Kong's democratic reformers in an environment where ultimate political power resides with the communist-led mainland government and its appointees.

The U.S. is heading toward major problems. If unaddressed, these problems will soon wreak havoc on the country's financial health, social fabric, standing in the global community, and even its vulnerability in an increasingly hostile world.

The troublesome and sad fact is that most of these problems and ensuing threats are due to gross mismanagement by U.S. leaders in the White House and Congress. The very people who have sworn to keep America financially sound, preeminent, democratic, and safe in a threatening world are leading the country and its citizens into troubling and dangerous times. Fiscal and financial mismanagement, poorly designed intelligence capabilities, a dysfunctional, money-based power structure, and poor, myopic leadership are coalescing to create turbulent times ahead.

Poor management by leaders on both sides of the political aisle is leading the country into trouble. This book explains why and shows what must be done to avoid certain disaster.

This thoroughly researched study provides an invaluable account of Hong Kong's political evolution from its founding as a British colony to the present. Exploring the interplay between colonial, capitalist, communist, and democratic forces in shaping Hong Kong's political institutions and culture, Suzanne Pepper offers a fresh perspective on the territory's development and a gripping account of the transition from British to Chinese rule. The author carries her narrative forward through the lives of significant figures, capturing the personalities and issues central to understanding Hong Kong's political history. Bringing a balanced view to her often contentious subject, she places Hong Kong's current partisan debates between democrats and their opponents within the context of China's ongoing search for a viable political form. The book considers Beijing's increasing intervention in local affairs and focuses on the challenge for Hong Kong's democratic reformers in an environment where ultimate political power resides with the communist-led mainland government and its appointees.

Parliamentary Democracy provides a comparative study of the parliamentary regimes since 1789. The book covers the road to parliamentarization of former constitutional monarchies and the creation of parliamentary regimes by exercising the constitution-making power of the people. What has been called democratization in most of the 'transitology' literature was until 1918 mostly only 'parliamentarization'. Democratization of the regimes frequently caused a certain destabilization of the parliamentary regimes by new parties and extremist movement entering the political arena. This is the first book to cover the entire range of parliamentary systems, including the semi-presidential systems.

America has the reputation of being one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world, yet within its borders social problems persist and negatively impact Americans. Though profound changes are taking place in the social, economic, and cultural contexts of America, they are precipitated by the urge for equal opportunity and social justice. Socio-Economic and Education Factors Impacting American Political Systems: Emerging Research and Opportunities provides emerging research on the most current issues facing the American public and political system. While highlighting the changes America is making in the social, economic, and cultural regions of society, readers will learn how these changes are coming to shape their lives in the country. This book is an important resource for undergraduate and graduate students and professionals seeking current research on how social, economic, and educational issues impact the American political system and policies.

Translated by John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan. With an Introduction by Stephen Watt. The ideas of Plato (c429-347BC) have influenced Western philosophers for over two thousand years. Such is his importance that the twentieth-century philosopher A.N. Whitehead described all subsequent developments within the subject as foot-notes to Plato's work. Beyond philosophy, he has exerted a major influence on the development of Western literature, politics and theology. The Republic deals with the great range of Plato's thought, but is particularly concerned with what makes a well-balanced society and individual. It combines argument and myth to advocate a life organized by reason rather than dominated by desires and appetites. Regarded by some as the foundation document of totalitarianism, by others as a call to develop the full potential of humanity, the Republic remains a challenging and intensely exciting work.

At the pivotal moment in the history of the United States of America, ratification of the Constitution was championed by James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton in a series of newspaper articles known as the Federalist Papers. In answer to these arguments and as a way of pointing up flaws and weaknesses in the Constitution itself, a number of political thinkers (who mostly used pseudonyms) argued against ratification through articles and speeches which have collectively come to be known as the 'Antifederalist Papers.' This edited collection of readings from Antifederalist thought was first published in 1985. Here presented with a completely revised and updated interpretive essay from the editors and expanded to cover the period of the founding from 1776-91, this book is the most complete one-volume collection of its kind.

The study of institutions, a core concept in comparative politics, has produced many rich and influential theories on the economic and political effects of institutions, yet it has been less successful at theorizing their origins. In Fixing Democracy, Javier Corrales develops a theory of institutional origins that concentrates on constitutions and levels of power within them. He reviews numerous Latin American constituent assemblies and constitutional amendments to explore why some democracies expand rather than restrict presidential powers and why this heightened presidentialism discourages democracy. His signal theoretical contribution is his elaboration on power asymmetries. Corrales determines that conditions of reduced power asymmetry make constituent assemblies more likely to curtail presidential powers, while weaker opposition and heightened power asymmetry is an indicator that presidential powers will expand. The bargain-based theory that he uses focuses on power distribution and provides a more accurate variable in predicting actual constitutional outcomes than other approaches based on functionalism or ideology. While the empirical focus is Latin America, Fixing Democracy contributes a broadly applicable theory to the scholarship both institutions and democracy.

Sarah Palin is in touch with the average Americans. That is because of what she is. The people that surround Palin are common sense Americans who just want the government on their side and not riding on their backs or telling them what is best for them. Palin tweets to reach out to the common American.

This book is written in simple language to help educate some of the voters about what is going on now and what can be done to make our country a much better place. We need to return to "America the Beautiful"

Compared to our last 4 presidents, a President Palin would be a breath of fresh air, a true conservative, American citizen and stateswoman like our founding fathers intended and if you listen to her, you will fi nd her right on the mark. Plus, she's got the guts to go up against the crooked people who are trying to bring this nation to its knees. What more could we ask for?

In the quarter century that has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, fanciful establishment intellectuals have advanced the idea that an "end of history" has somehow arrived. The model of "democratic capitalism" is said to be the final stage in the development of political economy. It is often suggested that it is simply a matter of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up, and at that point the Western model will have achieved a final and eternal triumph. In this work, the anarchist philosopher Keith Preston expresses skepticism of these presumptions. Expounding upon the critique of modernity advanced by Friedrich Nietzsche well over a century ago, Preston argues that the historical cycle associated with the rise of modernity is winding down. The forces of globalism, liberalism, capitalism, democracy, and Americanization are closer to achieving universal hegemony than ever before. Yet Preston subjects all of these to relentless criticism, and challenges virtually every presumption of the present era's dominant ideological model. Drawing upon a wide range of ideological currents and intellectual influences, Preston observes how the hegemony of what he calls the "Anglo-American-Zionist-Wahhabist" axis is being challenged within the realm of international relations by both emerging blocks of rival states and insurgent non-state actors. Citing thinkers as diverse as Ernst Junger and Emma Goldman, Max Stirner and Alain de Benoist, Hans Hermann Hoppe and Kevin Carson, Preston offers an alternative vision of what the future of postmodern civilization might bring.

Presented here for the first time in one volume are the three founding documents of the United States and another that altered and divided the Union for a brief moment in history. Declaration of Independence: Adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, this may be the most famous angry letter in history. Written by Thomas Jefferson and addressed to King George III of England, it lays out the grievances of the king's 13 colonies in North America, and announces that those colonies were now free of English rule. By 1783, after a long, bloody, and expensive war, that freedom became a reality. Articles of Confederation: Soon after independence from England was declared, the Second Continental Congress instituted this first organizing document of the new United States, which was ratified in March 1781. A compromise between those delegates who wanted a strong central government and those who demanded that the states be sovereign, its shortcomings became obvious during the war--such as the fact that the central government had no power to collect taxes or even to enforce requests for funds from the states, which led to a perpetually underfunded revolution against England. United States Constitution: This document replaced the Articles of Confederation on June 21, 1788. One of the most influential works of political philosophy and practicality ever written, it is the oldest national constitution still in use today, and continues to inspire freedom-loving peoples around the world. Its three-pronged system of government--balancing power among legislative, judicial, and executive branches--was groundbreaking. But it failed to address one issue, slavery, that would come to a head a century later. Constitution of the Confederate States: This 1861 document organized the new nation created by the seceding slave states. While quite similar in many ways to the U.S. Constitution, it includes more references to God and religion and more emphasis on state sovereignty, offers specific clauses that seek to limit the influence of big business on politics, and codifies the right to own "negro slaves."Together, these four documents offer a firsthand perspective on the political history of the United States.

How important is presidential personality and leadership style in foreign policy decisions? To answer this question, Thomas Preston takes readers inside the Bush administration's decision-making process and use of intelligence to better understand how administration officials justified the Iraq War-and how they sought to avoid blame for the consequences of their actions. Based on extensive interviews with key Bush and Johnson administration officials, Preston offers students of American foreign policy, presidential decision making, the dynamics of blame avoidance, and future practitioners with an in depth examination of how presidential personality and leadership style impacted Bush's central foreign policy failure. In addition, Preston looks critically at the oft-cited comparisons of Iraq to Lyndon Johnson's leadership during the Vietnam War, exploring where the analogy fits and a number of important differences. He shows how both presidents' styles exacerbated their managerial weaknesses in these cases and the limits of blame avoidance strategies. Importantly, the book provides a cautionary tale for future leaders to consider more carefully the long-term consequences of satisfying their short term policy desires by lifting the lid to any new Pandora's trap.

Baumann examines the recurring efforts to establish fraternal relations in modern societies by political, and in particular, radical means. He proceeds by examining a series of related examples, beginning with a brief discussion of the metaphor for fraternity itself, and then he turns to a consideration of the historical development of the quest for fraternity.

He first examines the quest for fraternity among the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Baumann then turns to the "sans-culottes" before and during the period of the French Revolution. The third analysis is philosophical, rather than historical, and treats Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to understand radically and thus justify the relation of fraternity to terror. His conclusion sums up the argument about the necessary self-contradiction and failure of the pursuit of political fraternity and points to the long-discarded concept of aesthetic education developed as an alternative to the political pursuit of fraternity by the poet and philospher Friedrich Schiller.

Contemporary scholarly and popular debate over the legacy of racial integration in the United States rests between two positions that are typically seen as irreconcilable. On one side are those who argue that we must pursue racial integration because it is an essential component of racial justice. On the other are those who question the ideal of integration and suggest that its pursuit may damage the very population it was originally intended to liberate. In An Impossible Dream? Sharon A. Stanley shows that much of this apparent disagreement stems from different understandings of the very meaning of integration. In response, she offers a new model of racial integration in the United States that takes seriously the concerns of longstanding skeptics, including black power activists and black nationalists. Stanley reformulates integration to de-emphasize spatial mixing for its own sake and calls instead for an internal, psychic transformation on the part of white Americans and a radical redistribution of power. The goal of her vision is not simply to mix black and white bodies in the same spaces and institutions, but to dismantle white supremacy and create a genuine multiracial democracy. At the same time, however, she argues that achieving this model of integration in the contemporary United States would be extraordinarily challenging, due to the poisonous legacy of Jim Crow and the hidden, self-reinforcing nature of white privilege today. Pursuing integration against a background of persistent racial injustice might well exacerbate black suffering without any guarantee of achieving racial justice or a worthwhile form of integration. Given this challenge, pessimism toward integration is a defensible position. But while the future of integration remains uncertain, its pursuit can neither be prescribed as a moral obligation nor rejected as intrinsically indefensible. In An Impossible Dream? Stanley dissects this vexing moral and political quandary.

"The Federalist Papers" includes all 85 articles that advocated to have the United States constitution ratified. The driving forces of the constitution (and authors of the papers) were James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. These papers mark a moment in history when debates raged, passions ran wild, and the United States constitution was eventually ratified by the entire union.

The Bill of Rights-the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution-are widely misunderstood by many Americans. This book explores the widely held myths about the Bill of Rights, how these myths originated, why they have persisted, and the implications for contemporary politics and policy. Interestingly, most Americans today-even professional political commentators-misinterpret or misunderstand what the Bill of Rights' intended meaning and purposes were. Culturally ingrained myths about the Bill of Rights have helped to define what it means to be an "American" but also limited the range of political debate and justified unfair and unequal treatment of minorities. This book addresses the top ten myths regarding the Bill of Rights from the standpoint of public understanding (and misunderstanding) from a non-partisan, objective point of view, provoking independent thought and enabling readers to reach their own educated conclusions and opinions. Written by two experts in the fields of political science, public policy, media law, and civil liberties, the work explores the key role of modern news and entertainment media in contributing to public misunderstanding of individual rights and liberties. The authors also apply and interpret data from public opinion surveys to further examine public beliefs about the Bill of Rights and closely connect the analysis of misperceptions to existing political beliefs. Carefully separates out widely held contemporary beliefs about the Bill of Rights and connects them to debates over meaning, enabling readers to see how the meaning of rights is historically and contextually determined Explores the Bill of Rights in the context of myths that define the American political culture Provides an even-handed but incisive analysis of individual myths, pointing out where both the left and the right often misinterpret the true meaning of the Bill of Rights Places the debates regarding rights in contemporary politics and modern society by considering the complex challenge of protecting individual freedoms in the context of a digital age, international terrorism, and ongoing threats to national security

This book considers the status of constitutional literacy in the United States along with ways to assess and improve it. The author argues that pervasive constitutional illiteracy is a problem for both law enforcement agencies and for ordinary citizens. Based on the author's decades of teaching in law enforcement agencies around the country, this book argues for the moral and pragmatic value of constitutional literacy and its application in twenty-first century society.