ABSTRACT
The first year of the Bill Clinton presidency was characterized by administration attempts to follow up on campaign promises and to develop detailed plans and implementation that would turn possibilities into reality. In this chapter, the authors consider the paradoxical relationship between President Clinton's cognitive strategies and how these are perceived and evaluated by observers in the media and in academe. Their own analysis of President Clinton's leadership is based on a relatively parsimonious and, to some extent, even simplistic model. The cognitive manager model proposes that the psychological resources that a good decision-maker will devote to solving a particular problem are commensurate with the importance of the problem. One implication of the cognitive manager model is that the good cognitive manager will use shortcuts to solve less important problems and will reserve high levels of cognitive effort for more important ones.
