ABSTRACT
Winston Churchill, the venerable British prime minister, once opined that "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." For modern American presidents there is more than a shred of truth in this proverb when it comes to leading Congress. "Presidents" Lyn Rags-dale (1996, 360-1), "must build new legislative coalitions among independent partisans for each bill on which they take a position, bill after bill." Sometimes they succeed, sometimes not. But one artifact of Congress is immutable: The legislative process and the "continuing agenda" (Jones 1994) on Capitol Hill carry on with or without the president's involvement and do not necessarily follow the plan of quadrennial presidential elections. If and how the president is able to insert himself into the legislative process tells us as much about his leadership, perhaps, as anything else.
