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A Review of “The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office”

I have a few reservations about the book, but they are not major enough to tarnish the very real merits of what Hatcher has accomplished. The text, though brief, is overly repetitive on a few points such as the central thesis. There is also too much defensiveness about the multiple methodologies chosen; they make sense without apology. A few concepts (“path dependence” comes to mind) are not explained well enough at first use, but are explained later on. Also, the DWNOMINATE scores, which are very familiar to scholars dealing with Congress, are not self-evidently interpretable the way she presents them and could be explained with an extra paragraph at first use. I wonder about the status of two other potential constraints not discussed: the relation of the majority leader to the minority leader and the relation to the House leadership. I am sure these are not as important as the four constraints on which she focused, but it would be useful to have a judgment on whether they deserve any consideration. Professor Hatcher has dealt straightforwardly and inventively with a somewhat slippery and previously ill-defined office. Her general framework of looking at the office as defined by a series of internal and external constraints holds up well. She has amassed and intelligently used much relevant data, and findings are presented clearly and persuasively.