September 2010 Volume 08 Issue 03

Editor's "Introduction and Comments": 

The American Political Science Association is a global organization, and currently counts among its almost 15,000 members nearly 3000 individuals who are citizens of nation-states other than the US. And only half of its 1600 institutional subscribers are North American. At the same time, the contemporary political science discipline that it represents, however cosmopolitan, is deeply rooted in the distinctive historical experiences of the United States. As Ira Katznelson andHelen V.Milner observed in their 2002 Centennial edition of Political Science: State of the Discipline, the professional association responsible for publishing the words you are now reading was born in the United States during the Progressive Era, as an effort to more scientifically and thus more usefully understand the evolving American state and its national citizenship: “American political science has specialized in developing particular kinds of social knowledge. The modifier American has to be taken seriously” (3–4).

Indeed, as Raymond Seidelman and James Farr pointed out in their widely-cited 1993 anthology Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States, the first American professor of political science, Francis Lieber, was preoccupied with the emerging American national identity during the time of the Civil War. And yet this progenitor of our American political science was himself a German émigré, steeped in European traditions of political thought and shaped by the experiences of Continental Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution.Talk about hybridity! Both the identity of our discipline and the identity of the state to which it is genealogically linked—revealingly bearing the pluralistic designation “the United States”— have always been in question, compounds made up of diverse and ever-changing elements.

What is “American politics”? What are its boundaries, and are they marked by the water’s edge (surely not)? What is American political science, and to what extent are its problems and concepts and methods encompassed by its “American” identity?We political scientists don’t ask these questions often enough. We are typically too busy doing the work of political science to engage in speculation of this kind. And yet the questions present themselves, and in certain situations and at certain moments they become unavoidable.

I raise them now because the current issue of Perspectives features a theme that brings them to the fore—the theme of the Obama Presidency. Not yet two years in office, President Barack Obama has become the topic of intense and often vitriolic controversy. The first African- American President in US history, his election seemed to symbolize an “audacity of hope” about the future. And yet within virtual days of taking office, amidst a serious financial crisis that clearly predated his election, President Obama—seemingly by virtue of his very existence— provoked the heightened agitation first of a “Birther”movement raising questions about his very identity as an authentic American citizen, and then a broader “Tea Party” movement that has regarded him as a veritable King George III visiting a “long train of abuses” upon the American people. The titles of a number of recently-published conservative books speak volumes: To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine by Newt Gingrich (Regnery 2010); Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda by Sean Hannity (Harper Collins 2010); The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists by Aaron Klein (WND Books 2010); Power Grab: How Obama’s Green PoliciesWill Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America by Christopher C. Horner (Regnery 2010); Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation by Jason Mattera (Thresholds Editions 2010); The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency by Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski (Lyons Press 2010); Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies by Michele Malkin (Regnery 2009); and Obama inWonderland: Inside Insane Hussein’s Looking Glass: A Silly Book for a SeriousTime by Joe Sansone (CreateSpace 2010).

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