The study of presidential leadership often attends to changing institutional trends independent of the particular idiosyncrasies of any given president. Julia R. Azari’s Delivering the People’s Message investigates how presidential mandates parallel and, in some cases, propel these broader trends. More specifically, Azari provides an insightful illustration of how mandate rhetoric—or the use of “the election result, the promises of the campaign, or the wishes of the electorate to justify policy action” (p. 22)—reinforces the increasing power of the presidency over the past century, at the same time it reveals subtle shifts in the president’s relationship to party and ideology.

The book presumes that “mandates” are a product of rhetorical choice, rather than a natural and self-evident reality; when presidents claim a mandate, they rhetorically leverage their (re)election for strategic ends. This framework should feel familiar to those versed in landmark works on twentieth-century presidential leadership, such as The Rhetorical Presidency (Jeffrey Tulis, 1987), The Politics Presidents Make (Stephen Skowronek, 1993), and Going Public (Samuel Kernell, 1986). Indeed, Azari maps her study onto existing scholarship concerning changes to presidential leadership across both chronological (Tulis, Kernell) and political (Skowronek) time (p. 15). In her own words, presidential interpretations of mandates “are influenced by political context and by how presidents themselves understand the office and its role in the political system” (p. 8).

One of the strengths of the research is its methodology that couples quantitative data with case studies. This enables Azari to discuss broad trends while grounding them in the particulars of specific presidents. The book is organized in a clear fashion to address both parts of the analysis. Chapter 1 provides the broad snapshot of mandate rhetoric from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama. The data reveal four major mandate eras with distinct rhetorical characteristics: 1929–38, 1939–68, 1969–80, and 1980–present. Additionally, Azari discovered that mandate rhetoric decreased in frequency between the progressive and modern eras before rising again in the late modern and partisan eras. This recent “expansion of mandate rhetoric,” she contends, “can be attributed to the declining status of the presidency and the polarization of the party system” following Watergate (p. 28).

Chapters 2–5 are each dedicated to one of the four eras and expound on these statistical insights through a series of case studies: Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932 and 1936); Dwight Eisenhower (1952 and 1956) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1964); Richard Nixon (1968 and 1972) and Jimmy Carter (1976); and George W. Bush (2004) and Obama (2008). The case studies use presidents of differing parties, policies, and personalities to illustrate the continuity in that era’s mandate rhetoric. Azari’s careful attention to the rhetoric across eras reveals that mandate rhetoric has shifted along axes of representation style (delegate vs. trustee), represented (party vs. nation vs. ideology), scope (general vs. policy-specific mandate), and rhetorical audience (national speeches vs. congressional messages vs. messages to private audiences). These various features of the context and content facilitate a more robust account of presidential mandate rhetoric than focusing on any single facet in isolation.

Beyond the rhetoric itself, Azari uses press reactions and archival materials to document the popular reaction to the election and the president’s rhetorical strategy following it. Here, she walks a fine line between contextualizing the president’s mandate rhetoric and signifying its intent or effects; while she hedges these claims, noting explicitly that “we can only infer strategy and motivation” (p. 58), she still offers them as support for broader claims. For example, Azari uses internal memos to claim that “Eisenhower’s communications team continued to be mindful” of “whether to emphasize party or nation” (p. 91), and then implies these memos to reflect “his philosophy of the office” (p. 92). The memos are helpful to frame Eisenhower’s rhetoric but do not seem to be a direct reflection of his view, especially since he did not heed all of the advice.

Along these lines, the analysis might have more fully engaged the functions (rather than effects) of the president’s argumentative choices. This thread runs throughout the case study chapters but was especially noticeable in Chapter 3’s treatment of Johnson. Advancing a dichotomy between appeals to a mandate and appeals to unity and national values (pp. 102–4), Azari argues that Johnson rhetorically abandoned partisan politics for his more general “Great Society” agenda. In the author’s telling, this rhetorical choice set a political path, leading her to query: “Would a different mandate story have influenced the course and outcome of policy debate?” (p. 104). This was not merely a rhetorical question; Azari intimates that the rhetoric resulted in policies that, once implemented, “changed the political conversation and invited a conservative backlash about race, culture, and the role of government that still shapes politics nearly fifty years later” (p. 104). Despite the irony that a rhetorician (me) is accusing a political scientist (Azari) of overstating the importance of rhetoric, I might venture that a different narrative would not have changed the political outcomes. After all, Azari notes how Johnson’s team viewed rhetoric in instrumental terms—as something “that could help them achieve their goals” (p. 109)—rather than as a means of defining the policy agenda. In this regard, it seems likely that a mandate narrative would have served the same rhetorical function as Johnson’s appeal to unity: Join the bandwagon and support the president’s agenda. This is all to say that Azari treads on more precarious ground when discussing the relationship between presidential mandate rhetoric and political change, especially since it is largely divorced from the way in which each presidential administration viewed the role of rhetoric.

Even still, Delivering the People’s Message is a fresh take on Skowronek’s argument that presidential authority resides not just in getting things accomplished but in effectively controlling the definition of those accomplishments. Indeed, the book prompts readers to consider how a president’s mandate rhetoric defines his role in the political process. For instance, Azari observes that the use of campaign promises as a significant rhetorical trope in the late modern period not only was an attempt to achieve strategic political ends but also implicated the president’s status as representative by “automatically cast[ing] the president in the role of a delegate rather than trustee” (pp. 119–20). In my estimation, the highlight of the book comes in Chapter 5 and the conclusion, both of which address the partisan divide that plagues national politics. I found especially illuminating Azari’s discussion of the “mismatch” that occurred when Bush and Obama incorporated mandate logic into their war rhetoric (pp. 160–61).

Ultimately, Delivering the People’s Message illustrates how presidents define the terms of their election through mandate rhetoric that works alongside other partisan and ideological narratives. And it leaves the reader eager to see where future presidents will take their rhetorical leadership in an increasingly fractured and polarized America.