ABSTRACT
The Founding Fathers may have expected the legislature to be the primary driving force in US politics. They made the legislature the subject of the US Constitutions first Article, relegating the presidency to Article II. The members of the US Constitutional Convention debated long and hard about the form that the nation's executive should take. The presidency and vice-presidency are the only offices in America to be elected nationally. The diplomatic centrality of the president appears quite clear in the Constitution. The presidential centrality explored in this chapter suggests that attention will inevitably concentrate on the occupant of the White House, but the opening decade of the new century has been a period when the examination has seemed even more acute than usual. The centrality of the presidency has emerged in a number of parallel and mutually supporting ways. Presidential scholars have sought to explain the operation of presidential authority in terms of context, governmental structure and personal skills.
