Public support is vital to the governing strategies of modern presidents. Although presidents, White House staff, and presidency scholars take this for granted during the “permanent campaign,” little is known about how administrations react to and interpret information about the public's support for the president. Michael J. Towle asks, How do presidential administrations interpret their wealth of public-opinion polling data? He observes that interpretation of these data by the Truman, Johnson, and Carter administrations varies by the president's own public standing: The more the president's public support declines, the more “out of touch” he becomes with the public.

Towle begins by grounding his study in the presidency–public opinion literature and suggests two alternative frameworks for interpreting presidential responsiveness to public opinion. The first, offered by John Geer, holds that presidents are responsive to public opinion, especially on salient issues. Alternatively, Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro argue that recent presidential administrations do not “pander” to the public to gain or maintain its support. Towle frames his analysis of administration reaction to public opinion from a psychological perspective. Presidents tend to congratulate themselves when they are popular, but resort to rationalization and exhibit cognitive dissonance and selective perception when their approval ratings fall or are low.

Organizationally, the chapters examine administration interpretation of public opinion according to the level of the president's approval ratings: high, moderate, and low levels of approval. During periods of high public approval, such as presidential honeymoon periods, presidents are most cognizant of the public's agenda and responsive to public opinion, consistent with Geer's assessment of the presidential-public relationship. Administrations react to high public support with self-congratulatory praise, reveling in their ability to connect with the American people, while simultaneously fearful of losing support.

Inevitably, the honeymoon ends and presidents experience a decline toward a moderate level of public support. Administrations interpret this descent optimistically, noting that better communication by the president or a change in his style will place him back in the public's good graces, something that political scientists know is quite difficult, as public approval is more a function of contextual events than presidential will. To relieve cognitive dissonance between presidential performance and the public's perception of it, moreover, administrations recall more popular times; they are not more attentive to the public's concerns, however, as Jacobs and Shapiro predict.

During low levels of public support, presidencies interpret bad news selectively and dismiss clear indications of failing support; they react by blaming opponents or the press, even patronizing the public. When presidents are unpopular, Towle maintains, they are simply unable to respond to public opinion, as they selectively perceive public support and further consolidate their base of support. Staff attention to and discussion of public opinion polls also increase during these times. Ironically, the more “out of touch” presidents become with public opinion—the more the public disapproves of presidents—the more obsessed they become with it.

Conventional wisdom and logic suggest that presidents should be more responsive to public opinion as the public disapproves of the president's job performance. Towle concludes that they instead grow “out of touch” in response to declining public support. This is a function, in part, of difficulty in interpreting polls, which only provide “a superficial glimpse” into public opinion (p. 115). Having access to data alone does not mean that an administration can use it to understand the public, better especially when the president is unpopular. This is an astounding conclusion in light of the many resources modern presidential administrations devote to tracking and interpreting public opinion.

As much as Towle describes in detail the White House interpretation of the president's public standing by means of countless memos and letters, his arguments do not hold at times. He claims that “with public support falling further, [presidents] shrank the scope of their concern to consolidating and protecting their base coalition” (p. 113). Nevertheless, his own archival work reveals that this was a central strategy of Carter's “permanent campaign,” independent of his actual standing in the polls; the Carter administration began thinking about consolidating its base prior to inauguration (pp. 29 and 107).

The author also fails to address alternative rival hypotheses. Referring again to the Carter administration, Towle claims that it was the president's declining popular support that made him less responsive to public concerns. It seems more likely that President Carter's need to consult policy experts about international crises, not his declining approval ratings, precluded him from responding to a public uneducated about the Iranian hostage crisis or Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Even though the author suggests several avenues for future research in his concluding chapter, he does not consider what may be a potential flaw in the study's generalizability to other presidential administrations: What happens when the president's approval ratings actually recover, such as Reagan after 1983 and Clinton after 1995? Perhaps the optimism that seems so flawed as public support dropped for Truman, Johnson, and Carter would seem genius for Reagan and Clinton because events conspired to benefit, not harm, these presidents further. Furthermore, White House polling expertise may have improved since 1980, providing recent presidents with a more nuanced understanding of public opinion, thereby shifting the patterns Towle describes for the Truman, Johnson, and Carter administrations. These are but a few examples in which the author's arguments or conclusions do not adhere tightly to his rich body of data. Indeed, the book may have been stronger if it sought description alone and saved explanation for a different study, one that pays more attention to theoretical development and hypothesis testing.

That said, Out of Touch tells a compelling story of three administrations' interpretations of the president's public standing, one that should be accessible to novices and experts of presidential politics and public opinion alike. Towle's competent use of archival data from these presidencies not only help him generate relatively sound inferences about White House interpretation and reaction to primarily public polling data, but also do so with a richness typically available only to archival researchers. He raises numerous questions about the relationship of the presidency, public opinion polls, and the American public and offers some stunning conclusions about them. Just as the book adequately answers its core question, ultimately it also raises many more.