On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, providing every American with the opportunity to have guaranteed health care coverage. The Affordable Care Act—frequently referred to as Obamacare—is almost synonymous with Obama’s presidential legacy and reflects a series of key decisions that he made beginning before he took office. As Meena Bose shows, it was Obama’s particular brand of pragmatic politics that ultimately shaped the ...

We are in the midst of a Dwight Eisenhower revival. Today pundits often look to Eisenhower as a model of how a president can govern across party lines and protect American interests globally without resorting too quickly to the use of force. Yet this mix of nostalgia and frustration with the current polarized state of American politics may mislead us. Eisenhower’s presidency has much to teach us today about how a president might avert crises and showdowns at home or abroad. But he governed...

A deep look into the agency that implements the president's marching orders to the rest of the executive branchThe Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is one of the federal government's most important and powerful agencies—but it's also one of the least-known among the general public. This book describes why the office is so important and why both scholars and citizens should know more about what it does.The predecessor to the modern OMB was founded in 1921, as the Bureau o...