An Introduction to the Policy Process or Theodore Rex

An Introduction to the Policy Process: Theories, Concepts, and Models of Public Policy Making

Author: Thomas A Birkland

An Introduction to the Policy Process is intended for students in either academic or professional programs. The author's direct writing style and extensive use of examples will also appeal to practitioners. The book offers an extensive overview of the best current thinking on the policy process, with an emphasis on accessibility and synthesis rather than novelty or abstraction.

Booknews

This introduction to public policy offers an overview of the current thinking on the topic, with an emphasis on accessibility and synthesis rather than novelty or abstraction. The various models for forming policy are outlined, with consideration to the actors and their roles, types of policy, policy design and tools, and implementation. The making of policy is also placed in its historical and structural context. A glossary, an annotated bibliography, and an introduction to Web-based research are included. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Preface to the second edition : the policy process after September 11 : change amid stability
1	The study and practice of public policy	3
2	The historical and structural context of public policy making	25
3	Official actors and their roles in public policy	52
4	Unofficial actors and their roles in public policy	52
5	Agenda setting, power, and interest groups	108
6	Policies and policy types	138
7	Policy design and policy tools	157
8	Policy implementation and policy failure	181
9	Putting it all together : models of the policy process	200
App	Public policy research on the Web	233

Books about: Pro JavaScript Techniques or The New Language of Business

Theodore Rex

Author: Edmund Morris

Theodore Rex is the story—never fully told before—of Theodore Roosevelt’s two world-changing terms as President of the United States. A hundred years before the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, “TR” succeeded to power in the aftermath of an act of terrorism. Youngest of all our chief executives, he rallied a stricken nation with his superhuman energy, charm, and political skills. He proceeded to combat the problems of race and labor relations and trust control while making the Panama Canal possible and winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But his most historic achievement remains his creation of a national conservation policy, and his monument millions of acres of protected parks and forest. Theodore Rex ends with TR leaving office, still only fifty years old, his future reputation secure as one of our greatest presidents.

New York Times - Richard Brookhiser

In the second installment of his megabiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris writes with a breezy verve that perfectly suits his subject.

Washington Post Book World - Michael Lind

Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex is every bit as much a masterpiece of biographical writing as his first installment, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.

Book Magazine

Theodore Roosevelt is one of America's best-remembered presidents—but why? Though his seven-and-a-half-year term of office was far from uneventful, most of his specific achievements have faded from our collective memory.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War; he appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to the Supreme Court; he was the first president to invite a black man to dinner at the White House. Without him, the Panama Canal might not have been dug or the Grand Canyon turned into a national park. If you knew any of these things, you are way ahead of the game. Yet "TR" (as he was known in his day) has somehow remained an American icon, one sufficiently evocative that political commentator David Brooks, seeking to put into historical context the speech given by George W. Bush to Congress after the World Trade Center disaster, chose to quote from Roosevelt's 1899 speech "The Strenuous Life": "We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them!"

Edmund Morris won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, but a funny thing happened on the way to that fine book's long-awaited sequel. He was chosen as Ronald Reagan's authorized biographer and granted fly-on-the-wall access to the White House, out of which he spun a partly fictionalized account of Reagan's life and times that threw readers and reviewers for a loop. For all its peculiarities, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan was a much better book than is generally realized, but those unable to accept its novelistic license will be comforted to learn that Theodore Rex isnothing more—or less—than a solid, straightforward biography, exhaustively researched and excitingly written.

To be sure, it is hard to write boringly about Roosevelt, one of the few American presidents who could fairly be described as eccentric to the point of strangeness. His pince-nez glasses, ginger-colored mustache and muzzlelike face were a cartoonist's wildest dream, and he acted as oddly as he looked, tearing around Washington with an enthusiasm neatly summed up by Cecil Spring Rice, one of his oldest friends: "You must always remember that the President is about six." To H.G. Wells, Roosevelt seemed "to be echoing with all the thought of his time, he has receptivity to the point of genius." Mark Twain, on the other hand, was struck by his mercurial energy: "He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch.... Each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion." For those who continued to cling to the sedate manners of an earlier day, that energy seemed almost diabolical. "The devil is whirling me round," complained the aristocratic Henry Adams, "in the shape of a grinning fiend with tusks and eye-glasses."

Yet Roosevelt's temperamental extremism, as Morris rightly observes, was placed in the service of the political instincts of a natural compromiser: "As always in situations involving extremes, Roosevelt's instinct was to seek out the center." Born into upper-middle-class comfort, he entered politics out of a sense of noblesse oblige, then discovered that he had a knack for its cut and thrust. Unpersuaded by the sink-or-swim gospel of laissez-faire economics, he concluded that big government (big, at least, by the modest standards of 1901) could make America a better place in which to live, and he set out to drag the wealth-worshipping old guard of the Republican Party into the twentieth century. Though he loved to talk tough, politics taught him to take what he could get and brag about it, and he happily settled for such incremental measures as the Pure Food Act of 1906 instead of insisting on radical reforms that could never have gotten through Congress.

Was Theodore Roosevelt the inventor of moderate Republicanism? That is the clear implication of Theodore Rex, but Morris never makes the point explicitly, and this is one of the book's few weaknesses (along with a too-fancy prologue in which we see America in 1901 through the eyes of the newly inaugurated Roosevelt). Morris is so interested in showing us Roosevelt as he looked to his contemporaries that he fails to supply enough of the clarifying perspective of hindsight. Presumably his just-the-facts-ma'am approach is to some extent a response to the furious criticisms of Dutch, but some will doubtless feel that Theodore Rex errs in the opposite direction.

Even so, this is a marvelously rich and readable book, a bit too long but not grossly so, and you will put it down knowing why Roosevelt has held on to his secure place in America's fast-shrinking historical imagination. For Morris, Roosevelt's singular achievement—no less enduring than the five national parks for whose creation he was chiefly responsible—was to have "left behind a folk consensus that he had been the most powerfully positive American leader since Abraham Lincoln." As legacies go, that beats Camelot, Vietnam, Watergate and Monica Lewinsky.
—Terry Teachout

Publishers Weekly

The second entry in Morris's projected three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt focuses on the presidential years 1901 through early 1909. Impeccably researched and beautifully composed, Morris's book provides what is arguably the best consideration of Roosevelt's presidency ever penned. Making good use of TR's private and presidential papers as well as the archives of such protégés as John Hay, William Howard Taft, Owen Wister and John Burroughs Morris marshals a rich array of carefully chosen and beautifully rendered vignettes to create a dazzling portrait of the man (the youngest ever to hold the office of president). Morris proves the perfect guide through TR's eight breathless, fertile years in the White House: years during which the doting father and prolific author conserved millions of Western acres, swung his "big stick" at trusts and monopolies, advanced progressive agendas on race and labor relations, fostered a revolution in Panama (where he sought to build his canal), won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War and pushed through the Pure Food and Drug Act. John Burroughs once wrote that the hypercreative TR "was a many sided man, and every side was like an electric battery." In the end, Morris succeeds brilliantly at capturing all of TR's many energized sides, producing a book that is every bit as complex, engaging and invigorating as the vibrant president it depicts. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

When Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded the assassinated William McKinley, his conservative critics feared a precipitous presidency. But as shown by Morris's second volume on the "Bully" president, what emerged instead was a balanced leader who deserves being ranked among America's top five chief executives. There was universal praise for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the first volume of Morris's TR biography, which claimed both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1980. After his controversial Dutch: A Biography of Ronald Reagan, Morris returns to TR and his traditional acclaimed method, which is stylistically eloquent and historically balanced. Morris shows how Roosevelt adapted Abraham Lincoln's wartime presidency as his own model for transforming America's domestic and international agendas. His two major miscalculations were his premature announcement declining a second complete term and the handling of the Brownsville Affair, when he gave dishonorable discharges to all 167 men from three black companies stationed near Brownsville, TX, when they refused to identify 12 members who had retaliated against discriminatory practices in the town. Morris excels at placing TR in the context of his time, showing how he outmaneuvered powerful but ossified opponents from the Gilded Age and trumped isolationists by averting war, in the process winning the first Nobel Peace Prize. He also set the standard for the Hyde Park Roosevelts, whose emulation of his "accidental" presidency a generation later was perhaps his ultimate contribution to democracy. Essential for all libraries.-William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In a sequel to the Pulitzer-winning biography of Teddy Roosevelt's earlier years (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt), Morris celebrates his tenure in the Oval Office, lauding him as the most popular and energetic chief executive of the early modern era. Morris views Roosevelt as the next great president to succeed Lincoln. While his predecessor, William McKinley, represented dour 19th-century values, Roosevelt was more akin to the industrialization that was turning the US into a global power. He was a dynamic reformer who acted first and asked questions later. The author runs through the many irons Roosevelt always had in the fire, using each to show how his personal magnetism, political canniness, intelligence, and force of will earned him a bevy of successes and almost no significant defeats. On the domestic front, Teddy mastered the art of the end run around his political enemies, disarming orthodox Republicans by arguing that they support his trust-busting initiatives or else face the chaos of labor uprisings and quieting labor by throwing them bones designed to least infuriate management. In foreign relations, his personal magnetism and Navy-enlarging policies earned him, and the country, the respect of the great powers. He fended off German encroachments on Venezuela, ensured that the Panama Canal became a reality, and negotiated peace between Russia and Japan. Morris also devotes much attention to Roosevelt's physical exploits, which later influenced his conservation efforts. He was constantly climbing in Rock Creek Park, swimming nude in the Potomac, and boxing or practicing martial arts with members of his cabinet. To blow off steam he hunted, often in the South, where hewas seen as too friendly toward African-Americans. Because Democrats receive little attention here, one wonders how Morris might have rendered their criticisms. A boosterish rendering of a potent head of state.