Tough Times for the President: Political Adversity and the Sour ...

*Scandal—Scandal weakens the president and serves as a distraction for the White House, the media, and all other actors in the political system; a presidential scandal is defined as an incident in which the media, the White House, and other political institutions focus on charges involving (1) sexual misbehavior by the president or another member of the administration; (2) financial misconduct by the president or others associated with the president; or (3) abuse of power by the president in a non-financial way for political ends.³⁴

Those periods in which a president faces several factors that indicate political weakness and/or pressure are those we label as times of political adversity or tough times for the president. It is in these times that the presidency is stripped of those props—strong support in Congress, high public approval, and so forth—that are associated with strong leadership, broad persuasive influence, and other attributes of presidential greatness. Tough times are situations in which political and even institutional survival is the challenge confronting the president, and how chief executives have responded to this challenge illuminates much about the nature of the office and its powers.

Central Questions

We are concerned with not just the conditions of political adversity but how presidents respond to them. Even a cursory review of the historical record suggests that most presidents do not just wring their hands when times are tough. There is the rare case of James Buchanan, who faced the crisis of secession with a kind of fatalism and inaction, but one sees little of this in the history of the office. More typical are cases such as that of Harry Truman, who took on the “do nothing” 80th Congress in his 1948 reelection campaign, or Bill Clinton, who stared down the 104th Congress in a government shutdown and demonized Newt Gingrich in the process.