Title: Barber and his "Presidential Characters"

Essay by lobelle19College, UndergraduateA+, December 2004

download word file, 10 pages 2.0

Lobelle Grace Marfil

Introduction to American Presidency

The essays was about the four types of presedential characters acording the book of Barber the, "Paradox of American Presidency." This essay was written for my midterm exam. the Teacher did not ask for a work cited link since everything is in the book and it was not a project essay but an answer for one of my midterm questions.

Barber and his "Presidential Characters"

David Barber, in his book, the "Presidential Character," suggested that we must know a lot about the personality characteristic of our future president. To help us--- the citizens get trough with the confusion and get at some clear criteria for choosing presidents.

According to Barber, a president's performance depends on the president's character, worldview, and style. Style refers to the president's way of dealing with his main political task. World views refer to beliefs about social causality, human nature and moral conflicts of the time.

Barber's theory differentiate the character of president in two dimensions; first the active or passive full of energy or inactive. The second key dimension concern where the person is positive or negative, if, he feels good or bad about life, about the job of the presidency, and about himself. Barbers combines these dimensions and produced four fundamental types of character; active-positive, active negative, passive-positive and active negative. Barber defines active-positive type as healthy, full of energy and enthusiasm for the job. An active-negative type has a compulsive, aggressive quality that leads to rigid, inflexible behavior, with disastrous results. Passive-positive personality seeks love and affection by being agreeable and cooperative rather than assertive. The last one is the passive-negative personality, Barbers define it as president who had low self-esteem and a feeling of uselessness by performing dutiful service doing little and enjoying less,