Name the president.

He was enormously popular during his eight years in the White House. In contrast to Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter, he not only entered but also left office riding high in the polls. Yet when he stepped down the experts who make it their business to observe presidents closely did not join in the public adulation. The verdict of the Washington watchers was that he had been a passive participant in his own presidency, remaining disconnected from day-to-day politics and policy.

For the young this can have been only one president—Ronald Reagan. But those whose political memories reach back to the 1950s may recognize that he could also have been the only other two-term president in the post-New Deal era—Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The description of Ike as out of the loop in his own presidency was unquestioned at the time that Eisenhower left office. When Arthur Schlesinger asked a panel of distinguished students of the presidency to rank 31 American presidents in terms of greatness, they placed Eisenhower 21st—a tie with Chester A. Arthur (Schlesinger, 1962).

There are multiple housing and community development programs involved in scandal at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The New York Times reports that “H.U.D. officials have said that at least 28 of the department's 48 programs and activities have ‘significant problems’ attributable to fraud, mismanagement, and favoritism” (August 13, 1989).

Among the most significant (in both dollar volume and public visibility) are: Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation, Urban Development Action Grants, Title X Land Development Mortgage Insurance, Mortgage Coinsurance, sales of HUD-foreclosed properties, Retirement Service Centers, and the Secretary's Discretionary Fund. Dozens of former government officials, many from HUD, some presidential appointees and cabinet members, and Republican Party officials have profited through both consulting fees and by securing subsidies for their housing or development projects through these programs. There are now multiple congressional investigations, led by the House of Representatives Government Operations Sub-Committee on Employment and Housing (Rep. Tom Lantos, Chair) and the Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs (Rep. Henry Gonzales, Chair). The Times reports that the Department of Justice is pursuing 600 HUD-related cases (August 13, 1989).

For the fifth time in its last six tries, the Democratic Party has managed to parlay its massive lead in party identifiers into another presidential election debacle. One shameless Democratic apologist, groping for a face-saving excuse, has hit upon the bizarre idea that the Democrats lose presidential elections time after time because, being rational political calculators, they find it in their partisan self-interest to do so (Erikson, 1988). This tortured theory overlooks the obvious: Democrats are too stupid to calculate their self-interest.

Although this conclusion may seem unduly harsh, science has proven that Democrats are significantly dumber than Republicans, even when the differing social bases of the two parties are held constant (Sigelman, 1988). This intellectual deficit helps explain why, time and time again, the Democrats find themselves hopelessly out-organized, out-strategized, and out-maneuvered—in short, out-thought—by the wilier Republicans.

In July I was in the Soviet Union for two weeks as one of eight American political scientists who were guests of the Soviet Political Science Association. This meeting was a follow-up to one held two years earlier in which six Soviets had met with an American group in Williamsburg, Virginia. We learned a lot from our Soviet colleagues in that session, since two years into the Gorbachev glasnost era they felt free to argue strongly among themselves about the social and political roots of Stalinism, and to explain how Gorbachev was chosen by a Politburo still dominated formally by the Old Guard, people who would a few years later be referred to in discussions with Americans as “the previous regime.”

It is appropriate to speak of parliamentarianism in the Soviet Union. For, as I shall briefly try to show, what is evolving in Moscow is a Presidential-Congressional system, a government which if it can be institutionalized, constitutionalized, along the lines it is developing, will resemble the American. It is, of course, far away from that stage as yet.

From the Editors of Social Sciences: In early July 1989 Moscow hosted a Soviet-U.S. Symposium on “Political Reforms and Political Science” attended by the leading politologists of the two countries. On July 6, within the framework of that forum, U.S. politologists met with Vladimir Petrovsky, Deputy Foreign Minister of the USSR, who is a member of the Soviet Political Science Association Executive Council and member of the Editorial Council of Social Sciences. The following is a summary report of the discussion which, as our U.S. colleagues suggested, centered on the new political thinking. This topic was the starting point in the discussion attended by L. W. Pye, President of the American Political Science Association (head of the U.S. delegation), Catherine E. Rudder, Samuel P. Huntington, Kenneth N. Waltz, Richard F. Fenno, and Alexander Dallin. Also present were William Smirnov, Vice-President of the International and Soviet Political Science Associations; Ninel Maslova, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Social Sciences, and a number of officials from the USSR Ministry for Foreign Affairs.