Dead Center: Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Dead Center: Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation Book

When Bill Clinton first ran for president in 1992, write James MacGregor Burns and Georgia J. Sorenson, "he had professed a strong hope to be a transformational leader who would shape large and lasting changes in American society." In Dead Center, published in the final months of Clinton's second term, they take stock of his emerging legacy. The result is not flattering. Clinton won't be regarded as a "great" president in the tradition of Washington and Lincoln, they argue, or even a "near-great" one, because he pursued a centrist agenda in office. "A contradiction lay at the heart of Clinton's leadership: if he truly aspired to presidential greatness, the strategy he had chosen ensured that he would never achieve it." Pragmatism ("which today means only expedient, narrow, and short-term self-interest") may have kept Clinton in the Oval Office, they go on to say, but it hardly defines a true leader. "The test is 'what immediately works?'--with no consideration of broader, long-term aspects," explain the authors. They don't suggest Clinton has been a lousy president, but that he falls far short of the mark he set for himself early on. He knew how to win, but not how to lead. --John J. Miller Read More

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  • Product Description

    "The urgent question of our time is whether we can make change our friend and not our enemy....To renew America, we must be bold...must revitalize our democracy....Together with our friends and allies, we will work to shape change, lest it engulf us."

    With those inaugural words, William Jefferson Clinton began his first term as President of the United States. Now, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a former White House aide provide the first penetrating, thoughtful evaluation of President Clinton's leadership.

    Before he was voted into office, Bill Clinton told the authors in an interview that he wanted to be a transforming leader, a president who would fashion real and lasting change in peoples' lives, in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But how has this president, who has sought to lead from the center with his vice president, Al Gore, and the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, measured up against his own stated goals and the aspirations and performances of other presidents since World War II? From the health care debacle and the 1994 midterm elections that swept the Republicans to a majority in both houses of Congress to the effect of scandal and impeachment on his ability to govern, Dead Center examines the leadership style of Bill Clinton and offers a forceful challenge to the strategy of centrism.

    There is no more respected presidential historian than James MacGregor Burns, author of several acclaimed books on leadership and the Pulitzer Prize-winning study of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Georgia J. Sorenson adds her own insights as a political scientist and presidential scholar. Their combined efforts have resulted in an incisive, informative, authoritative work and an absorbing read.

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