Perspectives on the Obama Presidency

The journal Perspectives on Politics has published a special issue on the Obama Presidency:

According to Editor in Chief Jeffrey C. Isaac: “The November 2010 midterm elections will be widely considered a gauge of President Obama’s political standing, and it seems appropriate for a flagship journal of the American Political Science Association to focus attention on the controversies surrounding the Obama Presidency, which occupy the attention of the US, as well as a world whose fate is bound up with that of the US.”
Jennifer Hochschild’s and Vesla Weaver‘s “There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama: The Policy and Politics of American Multiculturalism,” analyzes the relationships between identity classifications and civic status in the US, linking the symbolism of Obama’s election to changes in Americans’ self-understanding of race.
Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin’s “How ACORN Was Framed: Political Controversy and Media Agenda-Setting,” looks at the ways in which conservative media outlets represented the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now [ACORN] as a symbol of left-wing corruption and “socialist” power-grabbing, destroying the organization and tarnishing the reputation of activist community organizing (and, indirectly, of the President, who had himself worked for ACORN).
A series of essays also address the Obama Administration’s handling of the financial crisis. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond S. King write on “Varieties of Obamism”; Suzanne Mettler and Daniel Carpenter each write on bureaucratic politics and obstacles to policy reform; Dorian T. Warren analyzes the American labor movement in the age of Obama; and Jacob S. Hacker, a participant in health policy debates, discusses “The Road to Somewhere: Why Health Reform Happened, Or Why Political Scientists Who Write about Public Policy Shouldn’t Assume They Know How to Shape It.”

You can read the whole issue for free on the Cambridge Journals website.