The American president is not Aristotle's unmoved mover, but there have been episodes such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 in which it was up to the chief executive to take actions of incalculable importance. It should therefore be no surprise that there is intense interest in understanding the qualities that each new chief executive brings to his (or, at some point, her) responsibilities. In what follows, I attempt to provide insight into the qualities that Barack Obama brings to his presidency by reviewing his formative years, pre-presidential years, and presidency as of November 2010. I conclude by discussing his strengths and weaknesses in the realms of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence (Greenstein 2009a; Greenstein 2009b; see also Barnes 2010).

Stanley Kelley, Jr., a creative scholar and legendary teacher at Princeton University, died on January 17, 2010, at the age of 83.

Pendleton Herring, a pioneering student of American politics and influential foundation executive, died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on August 17, 2004, at the age of 100. He had two successive careers, first as a leading political scientist, then as head of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a capacity in which he played a major part in fostering the burgeoning of the social and behavioral sciences in the post-World War II years.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the American philosopher George Santayana famously asserted. By the same token, a president who is well furnished with institutional memory should be less likely to commit avoidable errors and more likely to get the most out of his (and, at some point, her) time in office. The reflections that follow on what George W. Bush might learn from his predecessors were completed three weeks before his inauguration as the forty-third president of the United States. They appear in print after the Bush presidency has passed its hundred-day mark. Although they cannot take account of Bush's initial presidential performance, they do draw on the extensive record of his life and prepresidential political career.

Some political leadership styles are of a piece. Jimmy Carter's is a case in point. Both in the comments he privately jotted on the margins of memos from his aides and in his public discourse, Carter exhibited a common concern for detail and insistence on the correctness of his own positions. Other styles are layered, as in that of Dwight Eisenhower, whose apoliltical public demeanor concealed an analytically detached political sophisticate who obtained results by indirection (Greenstein 1982).

The political style of President Bill Clinton is neither unitary nor layered. It alternates. The tempest over whether Clinton was involved in a dalliance with a White House intern is a reminder of his tendency to oscillate between an uninhibited, anything-goes approach to leadership and a more measured operating mode in which he sets attainable goals and proceeds skillfully in his efforts to realize them.

The pattern is recurrent. After his election as governor of Arkansas in 1978, Clinton instituted a substantial increase in automobile licensing fees, peopled his administration with bearded political activists, and otherwise failed to conform to the political mores of his state. As a result, he was voted out of office two years later. He then spent the next two years stumping the state and promising to remedy his ways. He was returned to office, serving from 1983 to 1993 and establishing a reputation as a pragmatic and effective state executive (Maraniss 1995).

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).

This analysis of open-ended interviews conducted in 1969–70 with small samples of English, French, and white and black American children focuses on orientations toward the heads of state of the three nations and the Prime Ministers of Britain and France. The English children exhibit remarkably positive views of the Queen. Many of them believe her to be the nation's effective leader rather than a figurehead. Any political animus they express is directed toward the Prime Minister. The French children tend to describe the President of the Republic positively when they express feelings toward him at all but expect him to behave harshly and arrogantly in actual situations. Their descriptions of political leaders exude authoritarian imagery and perceptions; they perceive the President of the Republic in an impersonal, undifferentiated manner, and are only barely aware of the Premier. The general descriptions of the President of the United States by white American children interviewed in 1969–70 are remarkably similar to the benevolent-leader perceptions of children in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, but the 1969–70 children exhibit much less idealized views of a president depicted as a law-breaker. A post-Watergate white American comparison group interviewed in June 1973 is generally aware of, but puzzled by, the Watergate events. At this early stage in the Watergate revelations, white children were only slightly less likely than the 1969–70 respondents to idealize the President, but were substantially more likely to perceive the president depicted as a law-breaker in terms implying that the President is “above the law.” The American black comparison group, which is too small and special in its geographical circumstances to offer more than suggestive findings, is the most negative of the four groups in general responses to the head of state, but is more like the white American group than like the English or French children in expectations about the actual behavior of the leader. Even though the black and white American children seem to be similar in their expectations about how certain political encounters would ensue, interpretations of encounters are strikingly different.

I report with regret that several of the tables in ‘The Queen and the Prime Minister [this Journal, IV (1974), 257–87], contained small mechanical errors, largely affecting percentage distribution by one or two per cent. Should anyone need a ‘laundered’ reprint of the article, please let me know. There is one error of substantive importance: in Table 6 (p, 282) the correct percentage of French and U.S. white children perceiving that a head of state stopped by a traffic policeman would be described as ‘above the law’ is 43 and 31 per cent respectively. English nationalists will be pleased to know that this revised statistic eliminates the ‘finding’that U.S. whites are less likely to evince this sentiment than are English children. The correct statistics will appear in my December 1975 American Political Science Review article ‘The Benevolent Leader Revisited’.