In this book, Jeffrey Mehltretter Drury departs from the focal point of many previous scholarly efforts; while others have tried to assess and explain presidential leadership of public opinion, Drury’s study focuses on presidential attempts to lead by public opinion (p. 9). He stakes out his methodological and theoretical territory early in the introduction, asserting that representation “provides one plausible answer to what presidential rhetoric ‘does’” (p. 10)—but that empirically evaluating the intent of presidential rhetoric is not the tactic employed here. A motivating tension of Speaking with the People’s Voice is the fact that presidents use the idea of public support—democracy—in the service of presidential persuasion, a much less democratic end. In the conclusion, the author notes that “often … invoked public opinion contains a tyrannical edge” (p. 127).

In assessing the author’s framework for the analysis, I could not help but wish that he had engaged more with the literature on presidential mandates, including two seminal articles; “The Myth of the Presidential Mandate,” by Robert Dahl (Political Science Quarterly, 1990), and “Presidential Mandates in the Nineteenth Century: Conceptual Change and Institutional Development,” by Richard Ellis and Stephen Kirk (Studies in American Political Development, 1995) both of which deal with this tension.

The analysis splits presidential rhetoric invoking public opinion into three categories: bandwagon appeals, identity appeals, and contra populum appeals. This is an interesting and useful analytical framework. The distinction between bandwagon and identity appeals is as subtle as it is crucial, and a less finely honed schema for understanding presidential appeals might have elided these two concepts, missing out on the distinctions that they offer. Drury uses the identity appeals category to provocative effect, arguing that by applying the invoked public opinion lens to Jimmy Carter’s 1979 crisis-of-confidence speech, we can come to a completely different understanding of the (in)famous address. Carter, he claims, was not actually describing national malaise—a word never used in the speech—but, rather, delineating confidence as a crucial national value lacking in the contemporary audience. The book describes how “Carter situated national identity not in the ontological status of citizens but in the invoked public opinion of those citizens. Were those opinions to falter, he implied, the very idea of America might cease to exist” (p. 88). The analysis of this speech is just one instance of the new light that Drury’s framework sheds on some familiar rhetorical events.

The contra populum category confronts a concept that comes up less frequently in the literature on presidential constructions of the public. In this mode of rhetoric, presidents “argue against the public” (p. 97) in order to offer one of three kinds of corrections: factual, value, or policy—the latter about the future implications of a policy decision. To exemplify fact correctives, the author draws on Richard Nixon’s budget speeches and Bill Clinton’s comments about greenhouse gas emissions and environmental protection (pp. 99–100). Unsurprisingly, we learn that presidents generally do not “blame the people themselves for their faulty opinions” (p. 100). In the description of this style of rhetoric, however, it seems that Drury misses an opportunity to address its possible utility as a way of talking about political opponents. The partisan angles of the policies to which Nixon and Clinton refer are unmistakable, and yet they are absent from the analysis. In the policy correctives category, Drury once again offers a fresh perspective on familiar territory: George W. Bush’s 2005 justification of the war in Iraq as public support for the conflict declined. By using vague language to identify the dissenting public, Bush was able, the author argues, to sidestep some of the main risks of such a strategy. This strategy, in turn, allowed Bush to balance “appearance of respect for popular sovereignty” with expansive claims about the president’s “authority to direct the war effort” (p. 122). What is missing from this reading of Bush’s 2005 rhetoric about the war is the political context. Rhetorical choices that obfuscated the nature of opposition would not have softened Bush’s rebuke of his opponents. Rather, it would have fed into narratives about Bush as an unclear communicator resistant to information or facts, thus underscoring the basic conflicts surrounding his presidency.

Neglect of context is a key weakness that undercuts this otherwise insightful book. The case studies seem to keep coming back to Carter and Nixon, especially in the contra populum chapter. Is there a relationship between external context and the ways in which presidents use rhetoric to represent the public? Drury makes his position clear in terms of the limits of trying to assess presidential motivations. But at times the case studies and examples seem oddly removed from contextual factors like political time, partisan disagreement, or issue-based controversy. We get a few snippets of such context, such as the observation that bandwagon appeals tend to appear “in response to national unrest and in ceremonial speeches” (p. 39). On the same page, he acknowledges that public trust in government was an issue during the presidency of Gerald Ford. But similarly textured analysis of the political environment is largely missing from the Nixon, Ford, Clinton, and Bush cases.

Long-term context also plays a smaller role in the analysis than it should. For example, one of the examples of Ronald Reagan’s bandwagon appeals concerns a speech made in 1985 calling on citizens to support farmers. Drury depicts this as an instance of “citing a specialized public” that lent “momentum to the bandwagon” (p. 49). The larger context of Reagan’s rhetoric about which groups in American society deserve protection casts bandwagon appeals in a different light. Contrasting Reagan’s speeches casting “farmers as a public in their own right” with the same president’s rhetoric about less sympathetic groups, such as welfare recipients or residents of urban areas, might convey a very different sense of the role of “bandwagoning” in his speeches. Conceptions of the American people necessarily have racial implications.

In the contemporary era, such conceptions have partisan implications as well. Clinton’s depiction of public opinion about environmental issues plays directly into the partisan politics that would later develop around science and climate change. The cases are presented in a way that is cut off not only from the larger context of a president’s rhetorical project but also from the racially fraught history of popular sovereignty in the United States. The kinds of publics around whom presidents seek to make bandwagon appeals have political implications that speak directly to the representation question that Drury seeks to address.

Despite this omission, Speaking with the People’s Voice is an informative, thought-provoking book. I look forward to seeing a research agenda that refines and contextualizes some of the insights generated by this important work.