Barack Obama is arguably one of the finest orators in American history to occupy the oval office. Many scholars, commentators, and White House advisors believe that his ability to give a persuasive speech is central to his ability to lead. By now, this conception of presidential leadership has a long pedigree. Woodrow Wilson (when he was a political scientist) was the first to make the case that the president's ability to forge a bond with the people though his rhetoric was the foundation of presidential leadership. Richard Neustadt later reduced this idea to the slogan: “presidential power is the power to persuade” (Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, rev. ed., 1991). More recently, the “rhetorical presidency” thesis claims that if the president “goes public” with arguments that are sound and well delivered, he can galvanize the nation to follow the course he has charted (Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency, 1987; Samuel S. Kernel, Going Public: New Strategies in Presidential Leadership, 1986). Public speaking and communication skills are thus central to the modern presidency.
Two recent books call this view into question. In The Strategic President, George C. Edwards forcefully argues that “presidential power is not the power to persuade” (p. x). In The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin T. Lim passionately makes a case that presidents no longer make public arguments but rely on sound bites, partisan slogans, and emotional platitudes in their public pronouncements. Both authors claim that presidents have great difficulty mobilizing the public, enlisting Congress, and transforming their views into public policy. Thus, they encourage us to rethink contemporary conceptions of presidential leadership.
Edwards argues that “[p]residents, even skilled presidents, rarely are able to lead the public and thus reshape the contours of the political landscape to pave the way for change” (p. 59). To make his case, Edwards analyzes the efforts of three presidents who, he claims, were in the best position to move public opinion—Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan—and two cases—George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush—who were in office in less favorable circumstances. None of these presidents, across a range of issues, was able to employ persuasive rhetoric to go over the head of Congress and reconfigure the political terrain in ways favorable to their policy preferences. Presidents cannot really move public opinion, according to the author, because the people's policy preferences are roughly stable over time and competing voices on the airwaves drown out the president's message. Therefore, presidents should abandon “[s]trategies for governing premised on substantially increasing public support for policy proposals [because they] are prone to failure” (p. 60).
Nor are presidents able, according to Edwards, to work behind closed doors to change the positions of many members of Congress. Tracing the tactics of Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Reagan in their dealings with Congress, he concludes that even in the highly productive legislative periods in which these presidents governed, they did very little to shape congressional outcomes. Congress was prepared to act and it did so largely independently. The author concludes that the best a president can do when it comes to lobbying members of Congress is “change a few votes at the end of [the] coalition building [process]” (p. 143).
On the basis of his findings, Edwards advances a far less “heroic” conception of presidential leadership than the rhetorical presidency model. He argues that presidents are “facilitators” who “understand opportunities for change in their environments and fashion strategies and tactics to exploit them” (p. 12). It is only by exploiting possibilities in a given situation that presidents can bring about change. Edwards stresses that these exercises in facilitation will only have modest effects on public opinion or the shape of legislative coalitions. It is only at the margins that presidents can be consequential. This modest view of presidential leadership will, he claims, give us “renewed appreciation for compromise and democratic constraints” (p. 188) and reduce the burdens on an office weighed down by exaggerated expectations.
Edwards's book leaves the distinct impression that presidents are not especially powerful actors in our political system and that they are highly dependent on conditions not of their own making. As Lincoln famously put it: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Up to a point, this is unobjectionable. Nonetheless, a fuller portrait of presidential power would have to include “unilateral actions” though executive orders, along with discretionary decisions about how or how much to enforce the laws and respond to crises. While the president may have less of a role in the legislative process than is often thought, a full account of the office's power might escape the facilitator category.
In his book, Lim assesses the quality of what presidents say when they seek to persuade the public, rather than the frequency that they try to do so. His central claim is that there has been a “dumbing down”—what he calls anti-intellectualism—of presidential speech. “What bothers us,” he writes, “is not the fact the presidents talk a lot, but that they say very little even when they talk a lot” (p. 9). In his view, the problem is not the rhetorical presidency per se but that presidents no longer make rational arguments in public forums. The result is a “substantively impoverished public sphere” (p. 12) that poses a “threat to American democracy” (p. 122).
By counting words and measuring the length of sentences and speeches, Lim presents a large amount of quantitative evidence that presidential rhetoric has been transformed in the sense of being “syntactically truncated and semantically shortened” (p. 19). The central cause of this decline, in his analysis, is the way the speechwriter's job has been institutionalized. He documents this change on the basis of large number of interviews with former presidential wordsmiths. Today, speechwriters no longer work in the White House, are not policy advisors with specialized knowledge, and have very limited access to the president. The result is an emphasis on style over substance and a reliance on “inspirational platitudes and partisan punch lines” (p. 57).
In addition to documenting a linguistic trend and analyzing the changing role of the speechwriter, Lim also makes a strong normative argument. He is deeply concerned about the civic health of American democracy and claims that it has been undermined by presidents abdicating their pedagogical function. He holds that presidents are in the best position to help “Americans [become] politically educated so that they develop the intellectual and moral capacities that are necessary for competent citizenship” (p. 113). His solution is to call on presidents to try harder to forge better citizens through better rhetoric, maybe even by going so far as to write some of their own speeches. He fervently believes that if presidents would just give it a shot, we could have a more serious civic conversation, and that such a conversation would improve the character of American democracy.
Before solutions can be offered up, however, the causes of the dumbing-down phenomenon need fuller treatment. While the changing nature of speechwriters and their institutional position is no doubt part of the explanation, a number of other important factors remain unexplored. Part of the simplification of language may result merely from the fact that language changes. No one today writes long sentences like those found in The Federalist. Few people speak with the formality that they used in the nineteenth century. Lim is well aware of this, but it is unclear how much of the changes that he documents are the result of it. One might also ask whether the changes in presidential rhetoric are a result of changing communications technologies, especially television.
The lack of clarity about what is driving presidential anti-intellectualism causes some confusion about when this change began. The quantitative data do not seem to provide a clear breakpoint. The book's subtitle suggests that presidential rhetoric began to decline after George Washington. In Chapter 1, Lim says that the decline is derivative of the rhetorical presidency that began with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (p. 10). Later into the book, he states that “insofar as there was a precise birth date of the anti-intellectual presidency, it was 1969” (p. 81) when Richard Nixon reconfigured the speechwriters' office. In sum, although it seems unclear exactly when the anti-intellectual turn occurred, it appears to have happened sometime in the twentieth century, and it is our recent presidents who have been the anti-intellectual ones.
Reading these two books, one is hard-pressed to see how they can both be right. If Edwards is correct that presidential power is not the power to persuade, then Lim's call for better presidential rhetoric is moot. More substantive speeches will not move the public because it is not listening, has already made up its mind, or cannot hear the message amidst the media cacophony. On the other hand, if Lim is right that presidential rhetoric has declined and could be improved, then presidents might be able to encourage a more robust public debate with better arguments. The fundamental difference between these two authors is that Edwards rejects the leadership model of the rhetorical presidency, while Lim holds that it is unobjectionable and even potentially beneficial if properly employed. Wherever one comes down on the rhetorical presidency, both of these books have the merit of provoking new thinking about presidential governing strategies and the value of “going public.” Scholars of the presidency will thus find much of interest in both works.
