This project examines how Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton discussed issues of poverty and welfare from Johnson’s declaration of War on Poverty in 1964 to Clinton’s signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. I argue that there are four critical tensions relevant to the debate concerning contemporary poverty in the United States—politics vs. policy, deserving vs. undeserving, help vs. hinder, and equality vs. freedom—and the key to improving the manner in which the nation confronts the problem of poverty requires understanding and negotiating these tensions. The analysis reveals that the five presidents had a mixed but overall rather poor record in confronting the four paradoxes. In general they tended either to avoid the tensions altogether, or fall to one or the other extreme. That being said, the analysis also reveals that there is considerable common ground concerning some critical issues between all the presidents, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, ideologically moderate or more partisan. Foremost among these are the beliefs that equal opportunity should be the overarching ideal, work should be rewarded well, and those that cannot help themselves should be supported as generously as possible by the government. I conclude that the 1996 law, while based in part on questionable assumptions concerning the condition of the poor, could lead to a significant re-framing of the debate away from the generally unpopular focus on welfare and welfare recipients and toward the working poor and the conditions and difficulties under which they labor, which could potentially lead to other positive transformations beneficial to the American poor.

This project examines how Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton discussed issues of poverty and welfare from Johnson’s declaration of War on Poverty in 1964 to Clinton’s signing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. I argue that there are four critical tensions relevant to the debate concerning contemporary poverty in the United States—politics vs. policy, deserving vs. undeserving, help vs. hinder, and equality vs. freedom—and the key to improving the manner in which the nation confronts the problem of poverty requires understanding and negotiating these tensions. The analysis reveals that the five presidents had a mixed but overall rather poor record in confronting the four paradoxes. In general they tended either to avoid the tensions altogether, or fall to one or the other extreme. That being said, the analysis also reveals that there is considerable common ground concerning some critical issues between all the presidents, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, ideologically moderate or more partisan. Foremost among these are the beliefs that equal opportunity should be the overarching ideal, work should be rewarded well, and those that cannot help themselves should be supported as generously as possible by the government. I conclude that the 1996 law, while based in part on questionable assumptions concerning the condition of the poor, could lead to a significant re-framing of the debate away from the generally unpopular focus on welfare and welfare recipients and toward the working poor and the conditions and difficulties under which they labor, which could potentially lead to other positive transformations beneficial to the American poor.

Presidential speech has defined some of the greatest moments in American history. However, over the last thirty years the public has grown frustrated with presidential oratory. This project identifies the strategies Reagan, Bush, and Clinton employed to tackle the public’s increasing disenchantment with presidential rhetoric. Using rhetorical analyses of speech drafts, content analyses of weekly radio addresses, and interviews with former presidential speechwriters, this project identified the proactive and reactive ways in which presidents and their speechwriters craft speeches to appeal to a disillusioned public. Results indicate that presidents can employ “executive rhetoric” to appeal to the presidential office and obscure the office-holder. By doing so, presidents can simultaneously preserve the value of speech, and restore—if not expand—presidential power. / text

This thesis analyses the policy debate surrounding National Missile Defense in the US during the 1990s from the framework of strategic intelligence failure. It focuses on the Congressional reaction to the release of the national intelligence estimate "NIE 95-19: Emerging Missile Threats to North America During the Next 15 Years" and the establishment of a new interpretation of foreign ballistic missile threats to the continental US. The role that partisan politics plays in the oversight of the US intelligence community is a vital and inescapable one. Yet little academic investigation has been devoted to understanding the political nature of intelligence oversight and its potentially catastrophic impact on intelligence product. Instead most of the scholarly literature treats intelligence and its oversight as apolitical, objective processes and intelligence failures as 'sins' produced by human error or organisational dysfunction with little analysis of the essentially subjective nature of political debate. The debate between the Clinton Administration and the Republican Congress can be understood as a conflict between two competing policy frames, each giving their holders a subjective assessment of what threats the US faced from ballistic missiles. Both parties sought to use their competing power over the intelligence community to produce community support for their paradigm and undermine support for that of their rival. The production and release of NIE 95-19 highlighted these competing claims. The unambiguous nature of the NIE's threat projections caused Congress to wield its oversight powers in an ultimately successful attempt to overturn the findings of the NIE. This represented an unprecedented level of Congressional involvement in strategic intelligence interpretation. Most importantly however it highlights the inherent dichotomy produced by current conceptions of strategic intelligence failure. In building a system of oversight that protected US strategic intelligence from certain apparent sources of failure the ability for Congress to actively meddle in the production of strategic intelligence and arguably undermine the value of long-term projections such as the NIE were massively increased.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 48 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 46-48).

xiii, 170 p. Two print copies of this thesis are available through the UO Libraries under the call numbers: KNIGHT PN4874.I7 T4 and SCA Archiv Theses T2908 / Adviser: Roy R. Halverson

Thesis (D.W.S.)--Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-136).

Thesis (D.W.S.)--Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-136).

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In an American democracy, created by the people and for the people, contemporary political women remain a marginalized voice in policy making and governance. My dissertation celebrates personal politics, and posits a landscape for thinking about democracy and advocacy in terms of political feminism. Specifically, I am concerned with how theorizing feminist interventions in the rhetorical canon operationalize material advancements for women in the political public sphere. To that end, this dissertation will introduce two systemic obstacles for political women, including, first, an ideological problem, where the political infrastructure and the press apparatus exacerbate a patriarchal gendered game; and second, an epistemological problem, where gendered language and gendered journalism are used to discipline political women. In the search for how political women can challenge and thwart political hegemony, I build from feminist rhetorical theory, political theory, and public sphere theory to offer rhetorical care as a vehicle for feminist political advocacy in the American political public sphere. Operationalizing feminist care through the case study chapters of Hillary Clinton and Wendy Davis, respectively, I argue that both political women successfully shifted gendered narratives for women in political leadership. / text