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

but more problematic is his claim that this power is no more or less than the “power to persuade.”

Is Presidential Power Only the “Power to Persuade”?

An elaborate body of literature on the presidency has grown up since Neustadt’s book appeared in 1960, and there has also been significant attention by scholars to the book itself.⁹ Now that Presidential Power is fifty years old, a range of admirers and critics have focused their attention on the book’s central claim—that the presidency is a weak office and that its power is but the “power to persuade”—as well as on Neustadt’s evidence and other aspects of his argument. The analysis of Presidential Power has been challenged on a variety of fronts—it is overstated, it is time-bound to the late 1950s, it focuses too much on personal power, it is Machiavellian in its outlook—but certain problems in Neustadt’s presentation are most relevant to our consideration of presidents acting in adverse circumstances.

Most fundamentally, power as persuasion leaves us unable to explain how presidents operate in those tough times that many chief executives have had to confront—and which several have managed to overcome. If presidential power is nothing more or less than bargaining and persuasion, then how can that view account for presidents reviving their fortunes in the face of political adversity? How can it account for the fact that presidents have engaged in actions other than persuasion to shape policy and have been effective and successful in doing so? Consider, for example, Franklin Roosevelt (who used the veto extensively, issued many executive orders, and undertook other unilateral actions), the “hero” of Neustadt’s book because of his success at persuasion. If Neustadt’s idea of presidential power as coterminous with persuasion offers little help for understanding the complete record of presidential action, then his analysis is a problematic one. Indeed, we can identify four problems inherent in Neustadt’s definition of presidential power as only the “power to persuade.”