The Rhetorical Presidency: New Edition
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The Rhetorical Presidency: New Edition
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691178172 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2017 |
| Series: | Princeton Classics , #31 |
| Edition description: | New |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: THE RHETORICAL PRESIDENCY
When President Carter gathered his advisers together at Camp David in the summer of 1979 for the so-called "domestic summit," he "channeled the discussions beyond the subjects of energy and economics to the larger question of the nature of the leadership he and his administration [were] providing." The president concluded that he had "fallen into the trap of being head of government," rather than the leader of the people he had promised to be. As he emerged from Camp David to give his highly publicized "crisis of confidence" speech, the Washington Post's front page banner headline proclaimed: CARTERSEEKING ORATORY TO MOVE AN ENTIRE NATION.
Carter's policies were opposed, and to some extent replaced, by his successor's. But his aspiration to leadership was not. President Reagan ended his first term heralded as a popular leader, a "great communicator," even by critics of his policies. Reagan has taken his case to the people at least once every week of his administration through radio and television addresses, continuing a populist campaign for conservative causes begun several decades before his election. Direct popular appeal has been the central element of a political strategy that has produced a stunning string of partisan successes, including budget cuts, tax reform, a large military build-up and accompanying social and diplomatic policies. Beneath the differing policies of Democrats and Republicans and varying abilities to secure partisan objectives lies a common understanding of the essence of the modern presidency — rhetorical leadership.
Since the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, popular or mass rhetoric has become a principal tool of presidential governance. Presidents regularly "go over the heads" of Congress to the people at large in support of legislation and other initiatives. More importantly, the doctrine that a president ought to be a popular leader has become an unquestioned premise of our political culture. Far from questioning popular leadership, intellectuals and columnists have embraced the concept and appear to be constantly calling for more or better leadership of popular opinion. Today it is taken for granted that presidents have a duty constantly to defend themselves publicly, to promote policy initiatives nationwide, and to inspirit the population. And for many, this presidential "function" is not one duty among many, but rather the heart of the presidency — its essential task.
The rhetorical presidency is not just a fact of institutional change, like the growth of the White House staff, or the changing career patterns of congressmen. It is a profound development in American politics. The promise of popular leadership is the core of dominant interpretations of our whole political order, because such leadership is offered as the antidote for "gridlock" in our pluralistic constitutional system, the cure for the sickness of "ungovernability." Bound up in the common opinion that presidents should be popular leaders is a larger understanding — of how our whole political system works, of the contemporary problems of governance that we face, and of how the polity ought to function.
The rhetorical presidency and the understanding of American politics that it signifies are twentieth-century inventions and discoveries. Our pre-twentieth-century polity proscribed the rhetorical presidency as ardently as we prescribe it. Consider the attitude toward popular rhetoric captured a century ago by a newspaperman who provided a verbatim account of one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches and of audience reaction to it:
And here, fellow citizens, I may remark that in every crowd through which I have passed of late some allusion has been made to the present distracted condition of the country. It is naturally expected that I should say something upon this subject, but to touch upon it at all would involve an elaborate discussion of a great many questions and circumstances, would require more time than I can at present command, and would perhaps, unnecessarily commit me upon matters which have not yet fully developed themselves. [Immense cheering, and cries of "good!" "that's right!"]
Lincoln refused to speak about an impending civil war and was applauded. It is hard to imagine a crowd cheering any instance of "stonewalling" today. Prior to this century, presidents preferred written communications between the branches of government to oral addresses to "the people." The relatively few popular speeches that were made differed in character from today's addresses. Most were patriotic orations for ceremonial occasions, some raised constitutional issues, and several spoke to the conduct of war. Very few were domestic "policy speeches" of the sort so common now, and attempts to move the nation by moral suasion in the absence of war were almost unknown. Like our present practice, the nineteenth-century proscription of popular rhetoric rested on a larger understanding of how the whole polity functioned and how it ought to function, including conceptions of statesmanship and of the constitutional order alternative to those dominant in twentieth-century political culture. The modern rhetorical presidency marks a change in the American meaning of governance.
What are the larger views of the Presidency and the political system underlying the simple distaste for popular rhetoric in the nineteenth century and the common heralding of popular leadership today? Why did those perspectives change? How did they change? Do any elements of the old theory and structure of governance persist in the conduct of contemporary American politics? Most importantly, what have been the political consequences of the development of the modern rhetorical presidency? This book offers an account of this transformation of American politics, an interpretation of its meaning, and an argument for its significance.
Transformation or Development?
To be sure, students of American politics know that twentieth-century presidents speak to "the people" more than their nineteenth-century predecessors did. That is not news. But the extent and significance of the change has gone almost unnoticed. What I have called the rhetorical presidency is usually regarded as a logical development of the institution rather than a fundamental transformation of it. On this common and dominant view, the modern rhetorical presidency was writ small in the founder's original design. Like a child grown mature, the modern rhetorical presidency represents change, but change prefigured in the government's original form.
Political scientists have devoted considerable attention to other features of the modern executive that they regard as truly fundamental changes. These include the regular active initiation and supervision of a legislative program; the use of the veto to oppose legislation as a matter of partisan policy rather than of constitutional propriety; the development and "institutionalization" of a large White House staff; and the development and use of "unilateral" powers, such as executive agreements in place of treaties, or the withholding of documents from Congress under doctrines of "executive privilege." Most scholars trace these developments to Franklin Roosevelt's administration; some, lamenting the developments, trace the use of unilateral powers to Presidents Johnson and Nixon. All of these changes are viewed by many students of the presidency as constituting "metamorphoses" of the institution.
The changes that concern political scientists today are important developments, and there is much to learn from their accounts of them. But they do not constitute metamorphoses of the institution, whereas the rhetorical presidency does represent a true transformation of the presidency. All of the allegedly fundamental changes are constituent features of Alexander Hamilton's theory of governance, and many of them found practical expression as well in nineteenth-century administrations. In fact, our first president, George Washington — with Hamilton's guidance — fashioned a legislative program, used the veto for policy purposes, and exercised all of the unilateral powers that are allegedly new today. The growth and institutionalization of the White House staff finds no practical counterpart in the nineteenth century, but the view of an administrative state that legitimizes its existence can be found, again, in Hamilton. Here, indeed, is an example of the maturation of an institution, grown from an original structure that contained the political equivalent of a genetic code for subsequent development. Again, this is precisely the view that most presidential scholars wrongly hold about the development of the rhetorical presidency. But I shall show that the founding theory explicitly proscribed such development, and that nineteenth-century practice embodied that proscription.
All accounts of political change presuppose a systemic posture, a view of what constitutes the essential character of the polity. Without that presumption, one cannot distinguish the core elements of a political system from the peripheral aspects, nor can one distinguish enduring from transient qualities of the governing arrangements. While all accounts of political development and change presuppose a systemic posture, few contemporary studies begin from an explicit systemic perspective. One purpose of this book is to articulate a series of explicitly systemic perspectives with which to identify and assess change and development in the American presidency.
Institutional Partisanship
The most influential tradition of scholarship on the American presidency is unprepared for the task of assessing systemic change and its implications. Most students of the presidency view the political system from the perspective of the presidency. I call this stance "institutional partisanship," because it takes the side of the presidency in the executive's contests with other institutions. Perhaps due to the common division of fields by institution among those who study American politics, this problem of perspective is not confined to presidency scholars. Students of Congress or the judiciary often assume the centrality of their institution in the drama of American politics. The problem is especially acute for students of the presidency, however, because Richard Neustadt's book Presidential Power has been so influential.
Neustadt views "the Presidency from over the President's shoulder, looking out and down with the perspective of his place." The central theme of his work is "personal power and its politics: what it is, how to get it, how to keep it, how to lose it." Neustadt's book has been studied by presidents as well as scholars. Because of its exceptional influence, a number of critics of the "imperial" presidencies of Johnson and Nixon laid some blame on Neustadt himself for giving intellectual support to dangerous arrogations of power in the White House. Yet it is striking how so many critics of Neustadt's theory continue to accept his fundamentally presidential perspective. For many critics of Neustadt, the most troublesome aspect of presidential arrogation of power was that it had made it harder for presidents to accomplish their objectives! It is as if Presidents Nixon and Johnson, together with Richard Neustadt, had betrayed their institution and its future occupants.
Institutional partisanship is one of two intellectual legacies of Neustadt's Presidential Power. The other influential inheritance is Neustadt's claim that successful exercises of presidential power are the products of skillful bargains with other politicians in the Washington community. Bargaining is central to a successful presidency because formal authority promises presidents power that it cannot provide. The notion that presidents can secure compliance with their wishes by simply demanding it is misplaced, according to Neustadt, because presidential commands are never self-executing. Their efficacy depends upon artful wielding of informal power through bargaining — by showing other politicians that they will be helped, or at least not hurt, by doing what the president wants.
It is striking that presidential appeals to the public are not a component of political strategy as originally developed by Neustadt. Samuel Kernell wonders why a book that purported to be a strategic manual for presidents failed to entertain the possibility of direct and dramatic applications of popular pressure. He suggests the answer to this question to be the deep incompatibility of popular rhetoric and bargaining as political tactics. "Going public" subverts the logic of bargaining as a political strategy, and, according to Kernell, it undermines the pluralist premises upon which that strategy is built.
Practiced in a dedicated way [going public] can threaten to displace bargaining ... it fails to extend benefits for compliance, but freely imposes costs for noncompliance. ... Going public is more akin to force than to bargaining ... it makes subsequent compromise with other politicians difficult.
Kernell's insight and the criticism that it generates are helpful. The rise of the rhetorical presidency reveals important inadequacies in previous strategic analyses. But an improved rendering of Neustadt's theory can survive this sort of attack upon its original formulation. This is because Neustadt's second legacy — the president as bargainer — is subservient to the first — the scholar as institutional partisan. The skillful use of popular rhetoric can be integrated into a bargaining perspective if one explores the conditions under which such appeals strengthen, weaken, or substitute for traditional exchange relations. Indeed, this is what Kernell does. More significantly, Neustadt is doing it himself. He has altered his strategic account in subsequent editions of his book in order to accommodate public appeals. The strategic use of the "bully pulpit" is a prominent theme of Neustadt's recent writing, in which he urges presidents to "keep trying to play in Peoria."
Despite informed criticism, Richard Neustadt's study continues to set the categories of understanding for students of the presidency because institutional partisanship is so important, yet so little noticed. The touchstone of almost all analyses of the presidency today is presidential "effectiveness," understood as the long-term ability to accomplish whatever objectives presidents might have.
By contrast, in this book I place instances of presidential rhetoric within a larger context of changing conceptions of the political order. Presidential strategy is subordinated to a concern for illuminating some of the multiple and contradictory requisites of republican governance. Without preventing discussion of the strategic utility of rhetorical appeals for presidents' objectives, I explore the effect presidents' rhetorical practices have upon other aspects of the political system, such as the process of congressional deliberation. A systemic perspective also permits one to probe the various ways our political system should foster or constrain leadership. Most importantly, to look at American politics from the perspective of the polity rather than the presidency allows one to see the dilemmas that attend the constitution of executive power in a republican regime. From this perspective, the development of the rhetorical presidency does not appear to be an unqualified blessing as most scholars, citizens, and politicians assume, but rather a political development whose enormous political promise has been accompanied by considerable systemic costs.
Reason and Rhetoric as Cause
The rhetorical presidency may have been generally ignored as an object of concern not only because it has become so familiar and comfortably democratic, but also because it is hard to believe that mere rhetoric could be of consequence to the development of American political institutions. Would it not be wiser, one might wonder, to regard rhetoric as, at best, a symptom of some phenomenon more worthy of our attention? Perhaps our presidents operate differently today than they did a century ago because the country is very different. For example, political parties have disintegrated, and television, unknown to the founders, has simultaneously opened up opportunities for and brought burdens to the modern presidency. Twentieth-century rhetoric may simply reflect these sorts of political developments.
This kind of objection to a focus upon the rhetorical presidency is misplaced, but it contains a kernel of truth. Political rhetoric is reflective of something more fundamental. But that more fundamental phenomenon is intimately bound up with rhetoric itself; it is the idea or set of ideas that legitimizes political practice. I examine the full array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical practices as reflections and elaborations of underlying doctrines of governance. These doctrines or systemic understandings are the primary object of inquiry, and presidential rhetoric is their most visible practical manifestation. I will devote considerable attention to description of nineteenth- and twentieth-century rhetorical practices because those practices reveal the fact and consequence of basic change in the understanding of the place of the presidency in the political order.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Foreword Russell Muirhead xi
1 Introduction: The Rhetorical Presidency 3
2 The Old Way: Founding and Forms 25
Constitutional Principles 27
Official Rhetoric 45
3 The Old Way: Developed and Expressed 61
"Unofficial" Presidential Rhetoric 62
The Great Exception: Andrew Johnson 87
4 The Middle Way: Statesmanship as Moderation 95
Theodore Roosevelt and the Hepburn Act 97
Conditions of Success 101
The Old Way Revised 110
5 The New Way: Leadership as Interpretation 117
Reinterpreting the Constitutional Principles: Woodrow Wilson's Statecraft 118
New Standards, New Forms 132
Comparing Rhetoric: Old and New 137
6 Limits of Leadership 145
The Problem of Credibility: Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations Campaign 147
The Breakdown of Deliberation: Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty 161
7 Dilemmas of Governance 173
Crisis Politics and Normal Politics 174
Campaigns, Wordsmiths, Media 181
Ronald Reagan, The Great Communicator 189
The Rhetorical Prerogative 202
Afterword 205
Index 239
What People are Saying About This
This is a brilliant book. The author does not overlap with the existing literature as much as offer an entirely new way of thinking about the phenomenon he describes. The book should draw respectful attention in a variety of disciplines—history, philosophy, and communications, as well as political science. . . . I could go on and on; there is no end to my appreciation for this work.
— Michael Nelson, Vanderbilt University
This book is full of good writing, sound judgment, and the exactly appropriate rhetoric for an analysis of the rhetorical presidency. Everyone is aware of references to the presidency as a bully pulpit and to presidents as great (or poor) communicators. But it takes a book like Tulis's to put all this together as an essential, perhaps the essential, political dimension of the presidency.
— Theodore J. Lowi, Cornell University
"This is a brilliant book. The author does not overlap with the existing literature as much as offer an entirely new way of thinking about the phenomenon he describes. The book should draw respectful attention in a variety of disciplines—history, philosophy, and communications, as well as political science. . . . I could go on and on; there is no end to my appreciation for this work."—Michael Nelson, Vanderbilt University"This book is full of good writing, sound judgment, and the exactly appropriate rhetoric for an analysis of the rhetorical presidency. Everyone is aware of references to the presidency as a bully pulpit and to presidents as great (or poor) communicators. But it takes a book like Tulis's to put all this together as an essential, perhaps the essential, political dimension of the presidency."—Theodore J. Lowi, Cornell UniversityPraise for the previous edition: Making an image for presidents today is a sham rhetoric that must be judged within the history of presidential rhetoric since the Founding. In this brilliant and original work, Jeffrey Tulis finds a new aspect of the presidency and rediscovers a forgotten topic in political science."—Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University