The Opposition Presidency: Leadership and the Constraints of History.

Price, Kevin S.

By David A.Crockett. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. 286 pp.

In The Opposition Presidency, David A. Crockett encourages us to think hard about the meaning of presidential success. Insisting that we should not expect the same kind of leadership from all presidents, Crockett draws attention to the partisan-political context in which our chief executives come to office. By describing and interpreting the experiences of twelve "opposition presidents," Crockett generates new insight into the problems and possibilities of national leadership. As a complement (and compliment) to Stephen Skowronek's The Politics Presidents Make, Crockett's account illuminates the mix of constraint and opportunity inherent in the American presidency.

Crockett's opposition presidents--the first Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, Fillmore, the first Johnson, Cleveland (whom Crockett counts twice), Wilson, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and Clinton--assumed the presidency in the face of a relatively resilient partisan opposition. For Crockett, "a president is an opposition leader if he is elected from a political party that does not command the power to define the terms of political debate" (p. 22). Ultimately, an opposition president succeeds to the extent that he departs from the White House "on his own terms" (p. 51). How might he do so? Crockett describes three methods of conducting the opposition presidency.

First, an opposition leader can mount a "frontal assault" on the governing party. The problem with this approach is that the opposition president does not enjoy what Skowronek calls the "warrants" necessary to repudiate the governing party's basic commitments. Second, an opposition leader can work to undermine the governing regime indirectly, tweaking it on the margins but leaving its core premises more or less unchallenged. Third, an opposition leader can opt for what Crockett calls "steady administration of the laws," which he tends to conflate with "moderation." It is important to note that the kind of clerkship implicit in the notion of "steady administration" is in no meaningful sense equivalent to ideological moderation. After all, as several of Crockett's case studies indicate, the steady administration of a given status quo can animate serious polarization, as true believers in each partisan camp respond with distilled versions of their respective orthodoxies.

The book is both a positive account of the opposition presidency as it has played out and a normative account of the opposition presidency as it should be played. My sense is that the first objective is more fully realized than the second. A third possibility--a consequentialist account of what these presidencies did to the American political system--manifests itself unevenly, in part because the analytical approach here is almost entirely narrative. Crockett introduces a few descriptive statistics in his treatment of opposition party performance in congressional elections, but his treatment of the topic is largely superficial and does not systematically illuminate the ways in which presidential leadership affects other elements of the party system.

The Opposition Presidency is a complement to The Politics Presidents Make because it fills that book's most obvious void--the "preemptive" category, on which Skowronek's second-edition "Afterword" elaborated in the process of interpreting the Clinton presidency. Crockett's work is a compliment to The Politics Presidents Make because it is so clearly derivative of the latter work's central premises. Where Crockett sees "redefiners," Skowronek sees "reconstructive" presidents; where Crockett sees opposition leaders working "across the grain of history," Skowronek sees preemptive presidents confronting "resilient regimes." Theoretically and analytically, these are distinctions without differences.

In reproducing Skowronek's central claims concerning opposition (or preemptive) leadership, The Opposition Presidency illuminates an undeniably interesting set of presidencies. Even as he puts political-historical context front and center, however, Crockett ultimately returns to a highly personalized argument in which the success or failure of a given opposition presidency is determined by the incumbent's characterological inclinations. "Response to a constrained situation by an opposition president is a test of character," Crockett writes in a representative passage, "and Nixon failed that test" (p.162). No serious observer of presidential politics would suggest that presidential character does not matter, but Crockett's repeated invocation of personal idiosyncrasy obscures the categorically distinctive constraints under which opposition presidents operate and the distinctive responses their heretical projects elicit from other actors in the party system.

For students of presidential history, The Opposition Presidency is an eminently enjoyable read. Crockett describes a clear framework, draws careful case studies, and sustains a cogent argument. Ultimately, the book is more an extension than a revision of The Politics Presidents Make; when evaluated on those terms, The Opposition Presidency deserves a prominent place on our bookshelves and syllabi.

--Kevin S. Price

University of Washington