A nation must think before it acts.
Election Day 2016: The Race for the Presidency
November 8 will bring an end to the longest and strangest presidential election campaign in recent memory. Although one major party followed a traditional path, nominating an experienced, well-known official who had been runner-up to the current incumbent, the other nominated a prominent celebrity with no previous political experience, embracing him precisely because he had no connection with the party’s traditional power centers. The ensuing campaign has stretched over nearly two years, and has been notable both for the rhetorical unpredictability of Donald Trump and for Hillary Clinton’s struggle to overcome lingering suspicions about her character and previous behavior to make history. Even as the final result nears, the longer-term impact of this campaign remains an open question that will occupy both political parties and the nation at large for some time to come.
What made this campaign different from those that have come before? How do we explain the Donald Trump Phenomenon? What is the future of the two-party system? What impact will this campaign have on the ability of the next president to govern?
Join us for this month’s Geopolitics with Granieri, where Ron will explore these questions and yours with one of the nation’s most renowned experts on campaigns and rhetoric, David Eisenhower of Penn’s Annenberg School of Communications.
David Eisenhower is Senior Fellow of FPRI and co-chairman of FPRI’s Butcher History Institute. A graduate of Amherst College and George Washington University Law School, he is presently a Public Policy Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communication and the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches communications and the presidency and the Cold War. As the Director of the Institute for Public Service at the Annenberg School, he oversees COMPS (Communication in Public Service) undergraduate students’ course work and internship. Every four years Eisenhower also teaches the “Conventions” class, whereby a group of undergraduate students attend the Democratic and Republican national political conventions, getting a first-hand and close-up look at the selection of presidential candidates.
A member of the editorial board for the Presidential Studies Quarterly, Eisenhower served in the U.S. Navy and is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Eisenhower at War, 1943-1945 as well as Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969, with Julie Nixon Eisenhower.