Dueling Presidential Narratives: Presidential Signaling Strategies in the Clinton and Bush Administrations.

Previous work has shown a President's capacity to shape public policy through articulating political narratives (goals and values under a connected label) in domestic policy [Neustadt (1964)] and in foreign policy [Bose (1998)]. Recently released accounts of the Bush administration allow us, for the first time, to analyze the impact of his narrative.This paper, a part of a larger project, compares the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in the uses of presidential narratives to signal and shape administration policy. I argue that these presidents use two distinct narrative types. President Bush adopted a "bounded" narrative (The War on Terror) which has a clearly laid out logic and is proactive in intent, while his predecessor adopted an "unbounded" narrative (The Third Way and Middle class entitlement) which is malleable in logic and reactive in intent.I argue that President Bush's bounded narrative strategy allowed him to impose a political context on administrative decision-making and to operate from a position of strength. However, Bush's strategy limited his flexibility in presidential decision-making and allowed administration officials to use the narrative to influence their own power stakes. It also tied President Bush to potentially unpopular political positions. Conversely, President Clinton's unbounded narrative strategy, a comparatively weaker leadership position, allowed him more flexibility in constructing administration policy and greater capacity for blame avoidance. I conclude that these two divergent strategies each have strengths and weaknesses but that president's might do a better job of fitting their strategy to the political climate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]