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To summarize, Building the Local Economy: Cases in Economic Development will interest students, local officials, or anyone who seeks detailed descriptions of economic development initiatives from across the country. The individual chapters report interesting studies about the diverse organizational forms and strategies employed to advance local economic development. Readers interested in larger lessons about the causes and consequences of cooperation and competition in local economic development will be disappointed by the lack of integration across cases and the omission of a conclusion discussing the collective lessons of all 15 cases. To understand the value and limits of cooperation for local economic development, future volumes should develop a more rigorous comparative case framework.

Martha Joynt Kumar is a professor of political science at Towson University. Her book, Managing the President’s Message: The White House Communications Operation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), examines the media and communications operations of the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In March 2008, Professor Kumar was interviewed in the White House Press Briefing Room by Kevin R. Kosar on behalf of Public Administration Review. As this interview went to press, the American Political Science Association’s Presidency Research Group announced that it had awarded Managing the President’s Message the Richard E. Neustadt Award for best book on the U.S. presidency published in 2007.

The George W. Bush administration’s doctrines of preemption and democratization through military action have been much debated. Discussants have included former members of the military, students of international relations and diplomacy, philosophers, and legal theorists, to name a few. Not surprisingly, the focus of these expostulations has been on the utility of hard and soft power, the international ripple effects of military action and state toppling, and the legal and moral propriety of preemption. For the most part, public administrators have little participated in these debates. This is regrettable, for the central question nestled within any debate over public policy is the question of plausibility. Can this policy be executed successfully? The governance challenges in postconflict states are profound. Who should rule? How should the state be reconstructed? What administrative structures should be erected? Who should staff government offices and bureaucracies, and what principles should guide them? If preemption and democratization are to succeed, then these questions must be answered. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. His book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006) is an examination of the Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq from April 2003 through June 2004. Mr. Chandrasekaran has served as the journalist in residence for the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies and as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. In March 2007, Mr. Chandrasekaran was interviewed by Kevin Kosar on behalf of the Public Administration Review.

The Executive Branch and Propaganda During the administration of President George W. Bush, a number of executive agencies have expended public funds to promote the president and his policies. In some cases, the efforts would appear to be merely wasteful of public funds. For example, the White House has expended public funds to create and maintain Barney.gov, a child-friendly Web site that celebrates the president's Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley (Froomkin 2004). In many instances, though, executive agencies have employed propaganda to promote the president's policies (propaganda, as I define it, is "government communications that selectively employ facts to persuade members of the public of a particular viewpoint.") To cite just a few examples: in June 2003, the Department of Education hired Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator and syndicated columnist, to trumpet the positive aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act (P.L. 107-110) on his television program. (1) In April 2004, the Internal Revenue Service issued press releases to remind taxpayers of the looming income tax filing deadline. The missives also told readers that "America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the president's policies are doing, or it can raise taxes on American families and small businesses, hurting economic recovery and future job creation" (Aversa 2005). In 2005, the Social Security Administration (SSA) drew up a "strategic communications plan" to promote through speeches, public events, mass media, and other means the president's contention that Social Security faces a funding crisis and the benefits program needs to be partially privatized (Pear 2005). Going public, President Bush himself undertook a "60 stops in 60 days" tour of the United States at which he and a number of government officials exhorted Social Security reform. (2) Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a "Broadcast Media and Technology Center" that produces news-like segments that it distributes to local television stations advocating the administration's policies (Barstow and Stein 2005). (3) These are but a few recent examples of executive branch propaganda. (4) Of course, the administration of George W. Bush is not the only one that has engaged in public relations activities that provoke criticism. Presidents have employed propaganda for at least a century (McCamy 1939). During the presidency of William J. Clinton, the Department of Health and Human Services produced videos promoting the administration's legislation to reform Medicare (Kosar 2004a, 5). And, lest it be forgotten, President Woodrow Wilson through executive order set up the Committee on Public Information, which produced propaganda and enlisted both journalists and filmmakers to promote the United States' efforts in World War I and quash bad news reports thereon (Creel 1920). There is nothing inherently inappropriate in an agency expending appropriated funds to communicate with the public. (5) As one of the Hoover Commission task forces wrote a half-century ago: Apart from his responsibility as spokesman, the department head has another obligation in a democracy: to keep the public informed about the activities of his agency. How far to go and what media to use in this effort present touchy issues of personal and administrative integrity. But of the basic obligation there can be little doubt. (Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government 1949, 57) Even government communications which attempt to persuade members of the public to behave differently may not necessarily be inappropriate. For example, few would likely criticize government-sponsored advertising that encourages citizens to wear their seatbelts while driving motor vehicles or that urges hikers and campers to avoid setting forest fires. However, executive agency communications with the public that promote a president or his policies are a matter for concern for a number of reasons. …

Clifford Winston's slim volume opens with a delicious quotation by Bertolt Brecht: "The Aim of Science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error." In Government Failure versus Market Failure, Winston endeavors to "focus [policy makers'] attention on how current policy, in broad terms, can be improved" (4) and to encourage them not to repeat past errors. In particular, he is interested in federal policies that are supposed to ameliorate market failures. These polices include antitrust and regulatory policies, information and externality policies, and the public (government) production of public goods.