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CIAO DATE: 03/02
Volume 1, Number 14, October 1996
From the Editors
On November 5, 1996, millions of Americans will go to polling places throughout the country to vote for their choice for the next President of the United States. The time for Election Day, which is always the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, was designated by the U.S. Congress in 1845.
Selecting the nation's leader is one of the most important and complex processes in representative government in the United States, and Americans will consider many factors — domestic and international — as they decide who should be President for the next four years.
What concerns are important to voters and what criteria do they use in choosing the President? This issue of U.S. Foreign Policy Agenda takes a look at those questions and attempts to put into context the relationship between foreign policy and U.S. presidential campaigns. It offers an historical perspective of the impact of foreign policy in earlier elections as well as assessments of the role it is playing in the current campaign.
In the Focus Section an historian, tracing presidential elections since 1952, describes the durability of bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy. In separate interviews two foreign policy experts, who served as National Security Advisers to former Democratic and Republican Presidents, discuss key foreign policy concerns of their respective parties. Other articles explain the role of foreign policy advisers in the campaign, convention platforms as a means to define political parties' positions on foreign policy, and recent public opinion polls and how they reflect voters' concerns. Also included are foreign policy statements by the Democratic, Republican and Reform Party nominees for President.