A Religious Response Veiled in a Presidential Address: A Theological Study of Bush's Speech on 20 september 2001

Abstract

The speech met the moment. The moment was like none experienced before. The speech transformed a presidency and rallied a nation. But what was this pivotal response to a critical moment in American history? Was it a call to a just and holy war? Is God really on the president's ‘side’? This article analyzes the speech delivered by President George W. Bush on 20 September 2001, to a joint session of Congress and to a troubled nation. It was a speech that depended on intimations of righteous indignation, a clear demarcation of good and evil, and a God who is not neutral. The article looks at the religious themes overtly and subtly stated in this speech, to discern what was actually a religious response to a global crisis that took the form of a presidential address.     

Presidential Oral History: The Clinton Presidential History Project

Most conventional oral history takes a bottom-up approach tothe past, focusing on settings where there is little in theway of a functional written record. This essay discusses thevalue of oral history in the opposite case of the American presidency.The written archive and journalistic record on each presidentis immense. Yet oral history is a valuable resource in thiselite environment, too. There are routine silences in even thebest of presidential papers, which oral history interviews canhelp fill. Moreover, the White House has become a workplacewhere recorded details can be hazardous to one's political health.Accordingly, few presidential aides today keep diaries or notesof key meetings—impoverishing the archive future historianswill use to study the presidency of our times. Oral historythus fortifies a weakening documentary record. This essay exploresthese broad issues and how they are being dealt with in theconduct of the William J. Clinton Presidential History Project.     

Presidential Position-Taking,Presidential Success,and Interest Group Activity

Do lobby groups help the American president achieve policy objectives? Existing research seldom evaluates interest groups and the president in conjunction, and as a result we have little systematic knowledge about how groups respond to presidential actions or whether they assist in realizing the president’s policy agenda. Building on existing data obtained through interviews with 776 lobbyists, combined with variables we generate describing issue salience, congressional attention, the political context, and policy adoption, we show that interest groups adjusted their lobbying activity to better reflect the president’s voiced preferences. Despite this strategy, we find that lobby groups had no significant marginal effect on policy adoption when controlling for the overwhelming influence of the president. The strong association between policy adoption and position-taking by the president withstands the inclusion of five alternative variables found in previous studies to condition the influence of the president over policy adoption.     

Cross‐Disciplinarity in Australian Geography Presidential Address to the Institute of Australian Geographers’ Conference,Melbourne, July 20071

The disciplinary space that geographers conceive to be theirs has all been previously possessed, or latterly colonised, by other disciplines. Geographers defend their existence on the basis of their oft‐asserted, but never tested, cross‐disciplinarity. The journals in which refereed papers were published by members of the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) and the papers in Australian Geographical Studies were analysed for the period 1998–2002 to test the hypothesis of cross‐disciplinarity in both subject and method. IAG members do strongly tend to publish in more than one disciplinary area, and a large proportion of papers in Australian Geographical Studies are integrative across subdisciplines in geography, with many using more than one methodological approach. However, transgression of the physical geography/human geography divide was sufficiently uncommon to create a statistical break between sets of subdisciplines. Based on the data used in the present paper, Australian geographers can make a case for being members of a vital, integrative discipline, likely to make substantial advances in the hybrid spaces.     

编辑人语

<民俗研究>创刊于1985年,至2008年底共出齐88期,屈指算来,岁月荏苒已是二十三载.二十三年,<民俗研究>从落草到青壮,从蕴蓄走向升华;二十三年,我们与作者如琢如磨,相携成长,勇担中国民俗学学术发展之任.本刊自诞生直至今日,前任主编叶涛教授一直参与其中,含辛茹苦,胼手胝足,值其功成身藏之际,编辑部全体同仁向他表示由衷敬意.     

Interest Groups and Presidential Transitions

The study of interest group behavior has focused on many tactical decisions, but not on the decision to participate in presidential transitions. This is a limitation because transitions are associated with policy change and are the first opportunity to influence a new president. This article develops a theory of interest group participation in presidential transitions through an original survey administered during the 2008–2009 Obama transition. The findings suggest that groups participate based on their relationship with the outgoing administration and an evaluation of whether the transition will to lead policy change that advances or harms their interests.     

Inaugural Address at Durham

Abstract

The documented gift of Kilpeck church to St Peter's Abbey (now the Cathedral), Gloucester, is taken as the starting-point for the examination of sculptural and architectural links between Gloucester and Gloucestershire churches, on the one hand, and Kilpeck and Herefordshire churches, on the other. Technical aspects of the so-called Dymock School of Sculpture emphasise its importance in the formation of the Herefordshire School. Aspects of Roman and Anglo-Saxon heritage are also considered.     

Legislative Coalitions and Presidential Signing Statements

We examine how the congressional coalition in favor of a law affects the probability of the president appending a positive or negative signing statement to it. Our results show that coalitions matter—presidents consider the power and status of a law's sponsor and the composition of its cosponsorship coalition when deciding whether to offer praise or raise concerns. Moreover, the factors driving praise and criticism differ from one another in important ways. These analyses demonstrate the value of assessing the valence of a signing statement rather than just its presence, and of extending the focus of research on signing statements beyond aggregate factors to investigate how the context surrounding a particular law shapes the president's reaction to it.     

Presidential Influence Over the Systemic Agenda

One of the most widely accepted sources of presidential power is agenda setting. Being able to affect the media's agenda on key issues–influencing the systemic agenda and expanding the scope of conflict–has enormous consequences for the president's ability to govern effectively. Yet the literature to date has not conclusively determined the extent to which presidents consistently set agendas, especially over the media, because it has not explicitly considered variation in agenda setting influence by policy type. For these reasons, we test whether presidential public statements have increased the media's attention to three policy areas. Using Vector Autoregression (VAR) analysis, we demonstrate that presidents have some influence over the systemic agenda, at least in the short term, with policy type being an important predictor of presidential influence. Understanding when and why presidents may or may not be successful agenda setters is crucial to explaining the varying legislative impacts of presidential speech making.