In his influential 1968 biography, Arthur Larson suggested that President Eisenhower's beliefs and commitments underwent a far-reaching transformation as his experience at managing the economy matured. The “modern Republican” of the 1952 campaign had, by 1958, abandoned the aspiration toward an enlightened but restrained liberalism, and set his course by the sort of inflexible conservative policies associated with the Republican Old Guard:

Race, in particular the peculiarly American embrace of political race-consciousness, is often portrayed as an important source of limitations on American political development. Although the color line has undergirded some of the most notorious instances of state repression in American history—the pre-civil rights South most notably, but also race-based immigration and citizenship restrictions and the FBI's COINTELPRO operations of the cold war era, to name a few—race is most commonly associated with state weakness through its effects on such processes as regional differentiation, class formation, and welfare state building.V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.: From “Solo” to Memphis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981); Richard Franklin Bensel, Sectionalism and American Political Development: 1880–1980 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Ira Katznelson, City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Robert C. Lieberman, Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). These accounts fit nicely into conventional approaches to American political development, which similarly emphasize the peculiar weakness and fragmentation of the American state.Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); James A. Morone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

The American Cancer Society puts it bluntly: “We're fat and it's killing us.” Obesity is rising at epidemic rates and, according to a first-ever Surgeon General's report on obesity (issued in 2001), it may soon surpass tobacco as the chief cause of preventable death in the United States. Obesity has been directly linked to heart disease, diabetes, stroke, infertility, and cancer. Each year, obesity costs the nation an estimated $120 billion in medical care and takes some 280,000 lives. Body weight is rising fastest among young Americans—the most dramatic stories feature heart attacks among obese six year-olds.David Satcher, “Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity” (Rockville, MD: Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), xiii, 8; Kelly Brownell, “Public Policy and the Prevention of Obesity,” in Eating Disorders and Obesity: A Comprehensive Handbook, ed. Christopher G. Fairburn and Kelly D. Brownell (New York: Guilford, 2002); Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 241–43.

Upon his inauguration in 1861, Abraham Lincoln faced the greatest threat to the survival of the nation that has confronted any incoming president. His victory had been made possible by the splintering of the opposition in a four-way race; the total popular vote for his foes substantially exceeded his own.James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 232 As he assumed office, he was confronted with the secession of several states and the possibility that others would soon follow, and southern forces had seized U.S. arsenals and laid siege to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Within weeks, his decision to send relief to the fort had provoked the first shots of the war and additional states joined the Confederacy. Lincoln and his fellow Republican leaders now confronted the daunting task of restoring the Union.

A recognized strength of modern constitutional democracies is their ability to insure legitimate political succession through the use of elections.For a review of the contribution of democratic theory to the succession problem, see: Peter Calvert, “The Theory of Political Succession” in The Process of Political Succession, ed. Peter Calvert (London: Macmillan, 1987), 245–66. We do not challenge this assessment; rather, we suggest that the process of producing a legitimate leader is a complex social construction with numerous variations. The pathway to political legitimacy can be conceived thus as a passage through a series of “gateways” and “rituals” that, when successfully confronted, confer political authority. The public, the press, and political elites participate in the process of conferring legitimacy on the “winner.” The 2000 presidential election is a prime illustration of this process because its contested nature clarifies and highlights gateways that have been less visible in other elections. We present an analysis of the social construction of legitimacy in the post-election and early weeks of George W. Bush's presidency, including examples of strategies designed to negotiate successful passage through these rituals. Finally, we note the capacity of these rituals to produce legitimate successions even when irregular events pose a challenge to democratic theory.