Restoration; Congress, Term Limits and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy

New York: The Free Press, 1992. First Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. Sigrid Estrada (Jacket Photograph). x, 260, [2] pages. Notes. Index. Signed by the author. George Frederick Will (born May 4, 1941) is an American conservative political commentator. Will writes regular columns for The Washington Post and provides commentary for NBC News and MSNBC. In 1986, The Wall Street Journal called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America", in a league with Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). His numerous awards include the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. Will has also written two bestselling books on baseball, three books on political philosophy, and has published eleven compilations of his columns for The Washington Post and Newsweek. From 2013 to 2017, Will was a contributor for Fox News. Prior to joining Fox News, Will was a news analyst for ABC News since the early 1980s and was a founding member on the panel of ABC's This Week with David Brinkley in 1981, now titled This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Will was a panelist on This Week until his departure from ABC News. On May 8, 2017, Will was announced as an MSNBC and NBC News political contributor. The author argues that term limits would restore the healthy distance between the electors and the elected that is necessary for genuine deliberation about the public interest. Derived from a Kirkus review: Will weighs in for term limits as the answer to congressional careerism and public disgust. The author holds up deliberative democracy as the ideal to which Congress must return. He details ridiculous pork-barrel projects sponsored by top senators, and points to ``the culture of spending'' as contributing to public outrage and congressional inefficiency. Will gives the issue historical perspective, decrying the present emphasis on executive power. He traces the rise of the ``rhetorical presidency'' from the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and points out how TV and the cold war contributed to our ``unhealthy obsession with the presidency.'' Will also notes that the careers of two of America's greatest congressional statesmen, Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, would not have been affected by term limits. Awash with lengthy digressions, but Will's argument is clear and persuasive nonetheless.