Showing papers in "Presidential Studies Quarterly in 2003"

National Security versus Civil Liberties

Abstract: Soon after the George W. Bush administration began crafting its response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, voices could be heard questioning the impact of its antiterrorism measures on civil liberty. The Patriot Act would give the FBI "a blank warrant," warned the Village Voice (Hentoff 2001). When names of the detained were not released, one editorial asked "Why Not Disclose?" (Editorial 2001). The debate has not died down. In fact, according to the Washington Post, it has crystallized around opposing views of the nature of threat and the best way to confront it (Lane 2002a). Almost two years after the attacks, The New York Times discussed calculating the benefits and costs of the limits on liberty (Andrews 2003), and the The Economist (2003) posed "A question of freedom." In the intervening months, publications ranging from The Christian Science Monitor (Kiefer 2002) to the Sunday newspaper insert Parade Magazine (Klein 2002) have covered the debate summarized as national security versus civil liberties. The debate has special saliency during wartime, because the suggestion that there is another side than the government's implies dissension and even subversion. This was the point raised by Attorney General John Ashcroft in Senate hearings in December 2001: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists--for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve..." (U.S. Senate 2001, 316). This grim warning is particularly disturbing in the context of a war against terrorism, because the war has no clear end or scope; it is not waged against a nation-state or even an ideology, but against age-old methods of violence and terror; it is bound neither by time, geography, nor specific adversaries. President Bush has noted the difference as well, commenting that, "We're at war in a different kind of war" (CNN 2003). Defining the attacks as an act of war--instead of a domestic crime or a crime against humanity--has implications for the presidency as well as for the nation, opening up some policy avenues and foreclosing others. One important outcome has been the centralization of power within the Oval Office; presidents historically have been able to exercise greater authority in international than domestic matters, and in wartime than peacetime. In the current crisis environment, this administration has asserted unilateral authority in multiple arenas, including the claim that the other branches lack competence to review its "core executive" actions. At such moments of crisis, members of Congress and the judiciary are expected to defer to the president's definition of the national interest, and most have (Baker 2002). Another product of wartime is that civil liberties are generally categorized as luxury items, like silk stockings during World War II, that divert valuable resources from the war effort. Historically, once war is over, those luxuries are again embraced. The White House, Congress, and the courts then reassert civil liberty values, perhaps even chiding themselves for their earlier restrictions. But a war on terrorism, bringing a securitization of domestic life, creates a different metaphor. Liberties are not luxuries to be sacrificed in the short term until we can afford them again. Liberties are gaping holes in the security fabric; they must be sealed off permanently if the nation is to be safe. The demands of a war on terrorism also undercut the likelihood that liberties can be reasserted, because a war without a clear end will never produce the peace of mind necessary to reflect on what we have lost. "Firmly rooted in the Constitution." The administration characterizes its antiterrorism measures as fully consistent with civil liberties and denies that any of its actions constitute restrictions. A commitment to civil liberties extends up to the president, according to Ashcroft: "President Bush insists that our responses to evil respect the Constitution and value the freedoms of justice the Constitution guaranteed" (CNN 2003). …

The Impact of Attitudes toward Foreign Policy Goals on Public Preferences among Presidential Candidates: A Study of Issue Publics and the Attentive Public in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract: At each moment in history, every democratic government finds itself facing many national problems in need of solution, and as a result, a primary mission of government is formulating, proposing, evaluating, ratifying, and implementing policies to address numerous issues. Throughout the history of the United States, much of government's attention has been devoted to such domestic issues as unemployment, crime, education, social welfare, health care, environmental pollution, energy provision, and more. Such problems pose immediate and obvious threats to American citizens, apparent in many people's daily lives. At the same time, however, the U.S. government has always spent a great deal of effort dealing with issues of international relations: managing cooperation with allies; providing financial aid to countries in need; managing trade relations; building, equipping, and maintaining the U.S. military; combating terrorism, and at times, going to war. This process of formulating policies and implementing them is importantly shaped by a nation's populace, via many routes. Citizens can and do make their policy attitudes known to government officials via opinion polls, by giving money to lobbying organizations, and by attending rallies. Individuals can also communicate their views on policy issues directly to elected representatives by sending letters or making telephone calls. And citizens can use their policy attitudes when deciding which candidates for public office to support, thus enhancing the likelihood that the elected officials will share voters' own views. In order for the members of the general public to take any of these steps, they must have formed attitudes on policy issues. They must think about and understand an issue enough to decide which policy approaches they wish to support and which they wish to oppose. Therefore, understanding when citizens form and express opinions on policy issues and when they do not has been a topic of study for political scientists for decades. One particularly intriguing question in this arena has been the extent to which Americans form and express opinions on foreign policy issues. According to some scholars, most people are only engaged by policy matters that directly touch their own lives, such as taxes and health care (e.g., Almond 1950; Kagay and Caldeira 1980; Light and Lake 1985; Rosenau 1961). Foreign policy, by its very nature, involves matters that play out far away from most citizens. Certainly, the news media have brought vivid images of distant places into Americans' living rooms, and very recent history has made the everyday relevance of foreign peoples especially apparent to all Americans. But relations with African countries, economic aid to Mexico, and weapons agreements with Russia have implications for most people that are vague at best. Therefore, say some scholars, most issues of foreign affairs are unlikely to be of sufficient concern to most people most of the time for them to form opinions about desirable or undesirable courses of action (e.g., Almond 1950; Converse 1964; Hughes 1978; Rosenau 1961). As a result, vote choices and lobbying organization efforts will rarely reflect such opinions. But who composes the minority contradicting this general rule? Who does, in fact, use international relations matters to decide which candidates to support and to give money to lobbying organizations with purely international foci? Two different and competing scholarly answers to these questions are evident in the literature. According to Almond (1950), this subgroup is the "attentive public," an elite group of citizens who are especially attentive to and informed about a wide range of public affairs issues. People for whom CNN and The New York Times are central components of everyday life cannot help but learn and ruminate about a wide range of foreign affairs issues, so they form and use attitudes on all of them. To the extent that government's foreign policy actions are shaped by public opinion, it is these individuals' opinions that should be consequential because these are the people with such opinions (e. …

Evolution of the Modern Rhetorical Presidency: Presidential Presentation and Development of the State of the Union Address

Abstract: He [the president] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient. --U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section III More than the founders ever envisioned, the presidency is at the center of policy debates. From "going public" (1) to achieve his plans and goals as described by Samuel Kernell (1997) to bargaining with the public and Congress as observed by Richard Neustadt (1960), the modern president uses his rhetorical opportunities for many different purposes. After all, "a president who wishes to lead a nation rather than only the executive branch must be a loquacious president.... Speeches are the core of the modern presidency" (Gelderman 1997, 8-9). But as seen in Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency (1987), this was not always the case. In the past, speech making, as well as public appeal in the content of speeches, was not only infrequent but discouraged due to precedent and technology. Other scholars, such as Halford Ryan (1993), Smith and Smith (1994, 1985), Colin Seymore-Ure (1982), Richard Ellis (1998), Ellis and Kirk (1998), Greenstein (2000), Laracey (2002), and Lim (2002) have further examined the rhetorical past of the presidency to discover clues about how it began, when it changed, and the implications of this institutional shift for our political process. Indeed, The presidency over time has become larger and more complex than any one of its players, having acquired a portion of its identity from each who has won the part. No one person ever fully fulfills the role; the office includes all its occupants in its encompassing nature. (Fields 1996, 12) Drawing evidence from presidential rhetoric, scholars attempt to trace this complex and intertwined evolution of the modern president. This effort involves identifying not only trends in the presidency but also which presidents were responsible for these changes. These numerous studies have merits, but they suffer at times, not only from inability to obtain consistent documents across time but also from generalizations made from small samples and limited comparisons. This article builds from prior presidential rhetorical studies and hopes to provide insight into possible explanations for the modern rhetorical presidency as well as an analysis of the development of modern presidential rhetoric. I have selected, as a medium, a sample of state of the union addresses from George Washington to Bill Clinton to examine public address and identification, presidential policy pushing, and even "going public." My findings attempt neither to disprove suggestions that the modern rhetorical presidency began with Theodore Roosevelt as suggested by some (Gamm and Smith 1998; Milkis 1998; Kernell 1997 (2)) nor to displace studies claiming that the modern rhetorical presidency originates with the watershed presidency and rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson as suggested by Tulis (1998). This study instead finds an evolution of length and rhetorical verbiage within state of the union addresses that helps to shed light on the differences between and refine the definition of the modern and the traditional presidency distinction. I find that Wilson not only set precedents with his state of the union address that were followed by subsequent presidents but also that the rhetoric he employed provided a divergence from previous presidential speech-making patterns. The study here suggests that Wilson indeed exhibits patterns of speech and communication original in their kind and unrealized by previous presidents. However, it is unclear whether this is due to Wilson himself or the result of the rhetorical shift necessary in the change to public presentation of the state of the union address. This study does not attempt to supplant scholarly interpretations of the traditional versus the modern presidencies (Greenstein 2000; Bimes and Skowronek 1998) or presidential development of policy and agenda (Hill 1998; Cohen 1995; Ragsdale 1987; Brace and Hinckley 1991; Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles 2001). …

Presidential Success in Communicating with the Public through Televised Addresses

Abstract: One of the president's most conspicuous and potentially powerful uses of the bully pulpit is the televised address to the nation. With these addresses, the president has the opportunity to enter homes throughout America to speak to people directly, unfettered by the news media's questions, interpretations, and editing. The president's ability to speak to a nationwide audience has led many to believe the president has a disproportionate amount of power in leading the public and a subsequent advantage in working with other political actors. Televised addresses are often portrayed as the president's ultimate political weapon in shaping the nation's agenda, mobilizing public opinion, and building support for himself and the issue positions he espouses. Although the potential for televised addresses to influence public opinion is tremendous, there are formidable obstacles that stand in the way of the president's leading the public through national addresses (see Edwards and Wayne 1997, 115-20). One of the major challenges the president must overcome is communicating his message to a potentially inattentive audience. For a televised address to influence public opinion on particular issues or policies, the president not only must attract an audience to watch the address but he must also communicate his ideas and preferences to the public so that people are aware of them. In other words, if the president wants to influence public opinion on issues such as health care reform, an energy proposal, or a tax cut, people must be attentive enough to understand the issues the president is discussing. Only after the president has attracted an audience and has successfully conveyed to the public his preferences about an issue can he influence the public on that particular issue (see Salomon and Cohen 1978; Price and Zaller 1993). If a president has been successful at getting people to watch his address and in communicating his message to them, people will be able to "recall or remember the information after exposure" (DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach 1989, 314). The more successful a president is, the more people there will be who recall points from the speech and the more information people will recall. This article examines the president's success at using televised addresses to communicate his message to the public: How effective is the president at getting his message across to the public? With whom is he most effective? Why is the president more successful communicating his message to some rather than others? To answer these questions, this study looks at the points people remember from televised addresses. It examines the number of people who remember points from televised addresses, who the people are who remember the points, how people who remember points differ from those who do not, and why some people remember points from a speech while others do not. Examining People's Recall of Televised Presidential Addresses Although the president must attract an audience and communicate his message to the public for televised addresses to directly influence public opinion, studies have not examined the president's ability to communicate his message to the public. Studies measuring the influence of televised addresses on public opinion have implicitly assumed that because televised addresses receive extensive news coverage and are typically given during primetime hours on network television, audience attention and the president's ability to communicate his message to the public are constant and are not important variables in assessing the influence of televised addresses on public opinion (e.g., Mueller 1973; Ragsdale 1984, 1987; Simon and Ostrom 1989; Brace and Hinckley 1993; Cohen 1995). Yet, we know that the assumption that the audience is constant among televised addresses is not valid. Studies have examined the president's ability to attract an audience to watch televised addresses and have found that it is a more difficult feat for the president to accomplish than is usually recognized (Foote 1990; Baum and Kernell 1999; Welch 2000). …

Deference and Defiance: The Shifting Rhythms of Executive‐Legislative Relations in Foreign Policy

Abstract: The presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush contrast in many ways, perhaps no more so than in their divergent experiences in dealing with Congress on foreign policy. Clinton confronted a Congress that frequently sought to defy his initiatives and at times seemed to take glee in doing so. His list of defeats on Capitol Hill is long. Congress forced him to withdraw U.S. troops from Somalia in 1994. It slashed his foreign aid requests. It refused to grant him fast-track trade negotiating authority. It forced him to accept national missile defense and regime change in Iraq as goals of U.S. foreign policy even though he and many of his advisers doubted the wisdom and practicality of both. It blocked his efforts to pay U.S. back dues to the United Nations. The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Even when Congress backed Clinton on foreign policy, as with the dispatch of U.S. peacekeepers to Bosnia and the Senate’s approval of the Chemical Weapons Convention and NATO enlargement, the victories seemed to require inordinate administration effort. Bush’s experience has been far different. Congress was eager to defer to his leadership on many foreign policy issues. It overwhelmingly authorized him to wage not one but two wars. It acceded to his decisions to leave the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and move to develop an expansive new national missile defense. It gave him most everything he requested for defense and foreign affairs spending. It embraced his request to begin the largest reorganization of the federal government in more than a century. It gave him the trade-promotion (formerly fast-track) authority it had denied

Rhetorical Convergence and Issue Knowledge in the 2000 Presidential Election

Abstract: Both of us use similar language to reach an exactly opposite outcome. --Al Gore (presidential debate, October 17, 2000) Citizens often say that all politicians sound the same. While occasionally used as an excuse for apathy, this complaint captures, at least in part, a critical characteristic of contemporary political discourse. This was seldom more true than in the presidential campaign of 2000. Although the candidates' actual policy positions differed substantially on dozens of issues, at times it seemed to many that they were making similar arguments, using similar terms to describe their policies, and in general converging toward a single set of goals. This convergence influenced what voters knew and thought about George W. Bush and Al Gore. It also represented a successful rhetorical strategy on Bush's part and a failure by the Gore campaign. The subject of rhetorical ambiguity as a campaign strategy has been addressed before, with mixed results. While Downs (1957) argued that ambiguity was advantageous to candidates, a view supported by Page (1976), Shepsle (1972) attempted to demonstrate that theoretical conditions exist under which ambiguity results in fewer votes, a view supported by Alvarez (1998). Campbell (1983) showed that ambiguity is most effective when the candidate's position is at odds with majority opinion and when opinion is widely dispersed. Unsurprisingly, candidates have the greatest incentive to be ambiguous when specificity would alienate significant numbers of voters. When candidates are vague, one must surmise their true positions. Often, voters simply "project" their own views onto their candidates of choice; instead of looking at their positions and deciding whom they like, they decide whom they like and then infer that the candidate's positions mirror their own. The stronger and more apparent a candidate's ideology, the less likely it is that voters will project their own views on to that candidate (Conover and Feldman 1989). Unlike some other information shortcuts, such as the use of party identification to infer issue positions, projection is not inherently likely to be accurate, although in practice the accuracy of projection is related to an individual's political sophistication (Krosnick 1990). But ambiguity as explored by these scholars is not precisely the same as the rhetorical convergence that could be observed in the campaign of 2000. Bush and Gore did not simply decline to state where they stood or issue vague pronouncements potentially compatible with any policy position. Nor did they adopt a few selected positions associated with the other party to cloud perceptions of their general ideologies, a strategy Norpoth and Buchanan (1992) suggest may not be effective. Rather, they pledged support to a common set of ends--maintaining a strong military, providing prescription drug coverage, strengthening social security, and increasing accountability in education--but differed only on the means by which these ends could be achieved. Nonetheless, the most common interpretation of the 2000 presidential election is not that of common issue positioning. Instead, the election is seen as one in which one candidate had an advantage on issues, while the other had an advantage on personality. Consequently, Bush's victory may be explained by, as The Baltimore Sun put it, "negative attitudes toward [Gore] personally, which seem to be negating his perceived advantage on issues" (West 2000, A1). Although there were many factors contributing to the election's final outcome, the premise of the explanation--that Al Gore had the advantage on issues--has not been challenged. In contrast, we will argue that Gore's "advantage" on issues was substantially mitigated by the public's lack of knowledge and misperception, to the point of being no advantage at all. First, many and in some cases most voters were not aware of where the candidates stood. Second, partly because Gore's positions were in fact more popular, when people made mistakes in attributing issue positions to the candidates, the results helped Bush and hurt Gore. …

Suburban Voting in Presidential Elections

Abstract: This article examines the conventional wisdom that suburban voting patterns became increasingly favorable for Democratic presidential candidates from 1992 to 2000. Its genesis can be traced to a round table discussion of the congressional elections that aired on CSPAN in early January 2002. Charlie Cook, one of the most astute observers of American politics working today, suggested that the balance of power in the Congress would be determined by the preferences of voters in a handful of "collar counties"--counties that ring major urban counties such as Wayne (Detroit), Cuyahoga (Cleveland), and Cook (Chicago). Presumably, Cook made this claim because (1) a disproportionate number of competitive House seats are situated in and across these collar counties, (2) a high percentage of competitive Senate races occur in states with important collar counties (e.g., Missouri, New Jersey, Texas), and (3) collar counties tend to have a greater than average share of "persuadable" or swing voters. Cook went on to make two additional provocative points. First, he stated that the suburban vote did not revert back to its historically Republican proclivity for the 2000 presidential election. This implies that whatever changes occurred during the 1990s were more than simply a reaction to the charismatic appeal of Bill Clinton. Second, and perhaps even more interesting, he posited that changes in suburban voting patterns mask strong differences between northern and southern suburbs. (1) That is, Democratic gains in the suburbs are largely driven by changes in northern suburban counties. Cook is not alone in his assessment of the power of suburban voters. In his influential essay "The 49% Nation," Michael Barone (2001) points out that the Democrats have made almost all of their post-1988 gains in the top twenty-three major metro areas and have done especially well in the top seven. Although it is left unsaid, it is difficult to imagine that the suburban reaches of these metropoles have not been responsible for the lion's share of these shifts. But while Barone distinguishes between peripheral areas of the North and South, he does not offer (as Cook does) a regional distinction when considering the political behavior of suburbanites. All of this underscores the reality that while we may have suspicions about the interactive role of region and residential location, we have little by way of empirical analysis. This article addresses this gap in several important ways. Initially, we offer a brief overview of the existing literature on the influence of residential locale on voting behavior. We then propose a set of hypotheses about the dynamics of presidential candidate preference over the past decade and the reasons for the 2000 presidential vote distribution. Aggregate and individual-level survey data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) and network exit polls are introduced to test these hypotheses, including the particular notion that there are regional differences in suburban voting tendencies. Finally, we conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of the analysis for 2000 and subsequent elections. What We Know (and Don't Know) about Suburban Voting The importance of suburban voters to many state and national elections became an article of faith in the late 1980s. The logic behind this assumption is fairly simple. Voters living in urban areas tend to be disproportionately African American or Hispanic or less affluent and therefore more likely to identify with the Democratic Party. At the other end of the spectrum, rural voters are more likely to be white, southern, and religiously observant and therefore more likely to identify with the Republican Party. (2) In contrast, by 1990 the suburbs of major metropolitan areas contained something like a representative cross section of the American public: predominantly (but not overwhelmingly) white, only slightly more educated, affluent, and more likely to be married than the rest of the nation, and balanced in terms of gender and age. …

The Polls: Can Presidential Rhetoric Affect the Public's Economic Perceptions?

Abstract: A small but important literature has found that major presidential speeches may improve the level of public approval toward the president under certain conditions (Ragsdale 1984, 1987; Brace and Hinckley 1992). (1) Ragsdale (1984, 980) reports that each major speech lifts presidential approval by about 3 percentage points. In a refinement, Brace and Hinckley (1992) find that major speeches during a president's first term will boost his popularity by about 6 percentage points (p. 56) but will display no impact during the second term (p. 60). Ostrom and Simon (1989) and Simon and Ostrom (1989) argue that speeches will have an impact on approval under limited conditions and find that the public responds with greater levels of approval for the president only when an approval-enhancing event accompanies the speech. All agree, though, that when popularity boosts occur, they are short-lived, disappearing almost as fast as they arrived. (2) This influential literature has laid an important foundation for understanding the impact of presidential speeches on public opinion but leaves important terrain on the topic unexplored. First, published studies may not have paid enough attention to how major speeches should be classified. We argue below that different types of speeches may have different impacts on public opinion. Thus, while Brace and Hinckley (1992, 95) distinguish between foreign policy and non-foreign-policy speeches, they bundle foreign policy speeches with other foreign policy activities; they do not compare the impact of foreign policy speeches on public opinion with other types of speeches, which we do below. Simon and Ostrom (1989, 76) offer a more refined categorization of speeches, five types based on their content, but they do not suggest why one would expect the different types of speeches to affect public opinion differently. In any event, they detect no differences in impact on public opinion across their speech types. Theoretically, more work needs to be devoted to conceptualizing the linkages between speech type and public opinion. We argue that foreign policy speeches will have greater impact on the public than other types, for instance, economic or domestic policy speeches, because foreign policy ones are better at portraying the president as a strong leader, a public image that is necessary for presidential leadership of public opinion. Also, current studies focus almost exclusively on public support for the president as the dependent variable. Boosting public support is important to presidents, but it is not the only aspect of public opinion that presidents would like to influence. Speech effect studies may benefit by exploring the effects of speeches on other aspects of public opinion important to presidents. As Kernell (1993) argues, presidents also "go public" to alter public thinking about policies or to influence public impressions of the president. Hinckley (1990) stresses the symbolic aspects of presidential speech, and Cohen (1995, 1997) shows that presidential speech may be used to influence the public's agenda. Presidents may also speak to affect the public's mood, such as its orientation toward the future, its sense of optimism or pessimism, our topic in this article. Finally, analyses may benefit from conceptualizing popularity other than as the dependent variable or ultimate end of speech making. Critics often complained that Ronald Reagan, for instance, tried to instill a "false" sense of well-being and future optimism in citizens. However, one may argue that Reagan might have calculated that an optimistic public would allow him greater latitude in policy choice and would be more likely to follow his lead. He might have further calculated that his ability to foster a sense of optimism would be greatest when he was popular with the public. Hence, instilling an atmosphere of optimism was part of his overall leadership strategy, and he used his popularity to instill such optimism. …

The Contemporary Presidency: Communications Operations in the White House of President George W. Bush: Making News on His Terms

Abstract: White House operations reflect the president whom the staff serve. His strengths are theirs and his weaknesses are mirrored in the organization. To understand the communications operation in the George W. Bush administration, one has to begin with the president's management approach because his style is reflected throughout all White House operations. In the system the president and senior advisers set in place, there are several core elements: a presidential management system with three central features–set the goals, establish how to get from point A to point B, and assign specific tasks and responsibilities to staff members; a compartmentalized White Home operation where each communications unit and staff member has specific responsibilities; a three-tier communications operation focused on strategy, operations, and implementation; four and later two additional units carrying out tasks associated with publicity operations; White House control over the appointment of departmental public affairs officers; and regular coordination with those officers.

Source Material: “Does This Constitute a Press Conference?” Defining and Tabulating Modern Presidential Press Conferences

Abstract: Shortly before Thanksgiving, when President Bush was in the Rose Garden granting his annual pardon to a turkey, he remarked on the apparent anxiety of the turkey. "He looks a little nervous, doesn't he," the president said to the assembled group of youngsters, parents, and teachers (Remarks at the annual pardoning 2002). "He probably thinks he's going to have a press conference." President Eisenhower put the same sentiment a bit more starkly when he began a press conference with his observation of the process: "I will mount the usual weekly cross and let you drive the nails. (1) President Bush, like his predecessors, may not like press conferences, but presidents hold them in spite of their own discomfort. On November 7, 2002, President Bush held a press conference in Room 450 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building almost ninety years after President Wilson gave the first formal news conference in the East Room of the White House on March 19, 1913. In their conferences, both men answered questions from reporters covering a broad range of topics, and the reporters came in on an equal-access basis. The fourteen presidents serving in the years between Presidents Wilson and Bush also held such conferences where they met with reporters to answer their queries. The presidential press conference represents one of the enduring types of presidential public appearances and demonstrates the ways in which a forum can adapt to the many changes in the environment within which presidents and reporters do their respective jobs. The two basic elements of the press conference mentioned above have remained, while at the same time there have been a great number of developments in the intervening years affecting the format of the conference, their frequency, the ground rules the two sides work under, the participants, and the locations where they take place. The presidential press conference has demonstrated the way in which both sides have adapted to their own environments. In President Wilson's time, the press conference was an off-the-record event held in the White House with the president alone meeting with reporters. Today, the president speaks for the record and, in the past three administrations, most frequently holds his press conferences together with a foreign head of state, often in another country. Those differences, though, should not mask the importance of the forum as an important event for us as presidential scholars seeking to understand the evolution of presidential public appearances. In fact, they help us appreciate these changes. By studying the frequency, format, location, and participants, we can see the ways in which a president responds to reporters' needs for information and the president's own need to present himself and his programs but to do so in an environment where the risk level is manageable. In this article, I am looking at the variations in the basic elements of the press conference as seen in the modern era conferences of Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. In this period, one can see many of the above mentioned changes take shape. Rather than look for conferences that are similar in all aspects, as scholars we should be just as interested in the ways the conferences have adapted to their changing circumstances. I will leave to another article the issues of the importance and organization of press conferences from the viewpoint of White House officials and reporters. This piece is restricted to looking at the classification of press conferences and exploring their variety as expressed in the number of the locations where they are held and the assortment of participants in addition to the president. Before we view the statistics of modern era conferences, we need to establish how we determine what a press conference is. Political scientists, historians, and government officials agree that press conferences are important as an aspect of a president's public record. …

The War Power and Its Limits

Abstract: On March 20, 2003, the day after President George W. Bush initiated the war against Iraq, the following exchange occurred between a reporter and White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: "QUESTIONER: Could you amplify a little bit on how the president is mobilizing the powers of his office for war? MR. FLEISCHER: I think if you were to put that question to the president, what he would tell you is, unfortunately, since September the llth of 2001, this has been a wartime presidency. The fact of the matter is that ... the war on terrorism began September 11th, with the attack on our country. And then the president has, unfortunately, been in the position of authorizing the use of force to protect our country in the actions against the Taliban and the al Qaeda. This (the war against Iraq) is a continuation in many ways of that effort, because at its core, the president's concern is protecting the American people from the Iraqi regime's possession of biological or chemical weapons, which they could pass on to terrorists, who, if they could, would use them against us in our country.... So, that is the president's approach to this" (Fleischer, 2003). Fleischer's description of President George W. Bush's approach to the war on terrorism is deadly accurate. In the past two years, the president has never tired of noting how his worldview changed after the terrorist attacks of September 1lth, and how that event galvanized his will in a single-minded and dramatic way. It prompted him to focus his presidency on the urgent and unparalleled need to protect the physical integrity of the nation from any future attacks. By characterizing the September 2001 attacks as "acts of war," where war had been declared upon the U.S. by Al Qaeda terrorists, he termed himself a "wartime president," and looked to the authority that flows to presidents during such periods (Von Drehle 2003, A22). In defining that war as a "continuing threat," he set in place a network of laws and policies of expansive scope and uncertain duration. Unlike previous wars that ended with a definitive peace agreement or treaty or surrender, the war against terrorism is not likely to correspond to such definable finality. Moreover, because, in large part, the broadest sweep of these policies applies domestically, there is a magnified concern for any appreciable lack of limits. Wartime is not kind to liberties, and restrictions on personal freedom for reasons of national security have a notorious reputation for overstaying their welcome, long past the termination of the crisis. When that termination itself is unclear, these risks to liberty become even greater. President Bush also never refrains from reminding his audiences that "It's a different kind of war. It's a war that is not measured by the destruction of tanks, or ships, or aircraft, because we're fighting a different kind of enemy. This is a war that is measured in terms of killers caught" (Republican Governors Association 2002). That mixture of metaphors--"war," on the one hand, "killers," on the other--speaks volumes to the duality of the way this effort has unfolded (Roth 2002). More than just the correct metaphor is at stake here, for there are very real distinctions as to how a government conducts itself, depending on whether it engages in a war under the jurisdiction of the military, or in criminal prosecutions within the judicial system. In fact, the Bush administration has pursued both in its efforts to uproot and eradicate international terrorism, and has fused the two into what might be termed the "militarization of law enforcement," with the "war" on terrorism furnishing the predicate for both military action abroad and aggressive prosecution of terrorist suspects at home. Introduction All presidents view their responsibility to protect their citizens and their nation from hostile attack as the most solemn duty of the office. Nothing matters more than this profound obligation. …

The Polls: Presidential Greatness as Seen in the Mass Public: An Extension and Application of the Simonton Model

Abstract: I raise two questions in this article. In light of the scandals of the Clinton years, have the standards used to rate presidents changed or not? Second, do experts and informed citizens rate presidents similarly, and do they rely on the same criteria in their ratings? I use a C-SPAN poll administered in 2000 to experts, and through the Internet to the citizenry, as the data to address these questions. Results find great temporal stability in how presidents are rated. Furthermore, in applying a predictive model developed by Simonton, I find stability in the factors that predict presidential greatness ratings. In particular, experts and informed citizens rate presidents similarly and use similar criteria. Substantively, the most important and consistent predictor of presidential greatness is the number of years that the president served in office. This finding brings us full circle to a question that motivates much scholarship on the presidency: why do presidents get reelected for a second term?

The Bush Presidency and the American Electorate

Abstract: Introduction George W. Bush entered the White House with the electorate evenly divided between the parties and sharply polarized along party lines, not least on the legitimacy of his victory. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans of all political persuasions rallied to his side, and questions about his legitimacy no longer even appeared in public opinion polls. Bush subsequently enjoyed the longest stretch of approval ratings above 60 percent of any president in 40 years. (1) On the strength of Bush's popularity and leadership in the war on terrorism, his party avoided the usual midterm decline in 2002; Republicans picked up seats in both houses and took undisputed control of Congress. Clearly, the national trauma inflicted by the attacks and Bush's response to the crisis radically altered the president's standing with the American people, to the manifest benefit of his fellow Republicans in 2002. The question remains, however, whether September 11, and the public's strong endorsement of the president's response to the crisis, has had any lasting effect on partisan attitudes, the partisan balance, or the degree of polarization in the electorate. The same question, of course, applies to public responses to the war in Iraq. In this article, I examine the rich trove of public opinion data from the hundreds of national surveys taken during the George W. Bush administration to consider both the immediate and longer term electoral effects of the president's first two years in office and, more speculatively, the military victory in Iraq. G.W. Bush and the Electorate before September 11 The 2000 election crowned three decades of growing partisan polarization among both American politicians and the voters who elect them. By every measure, politics in Washington had become increasingly polarized along partisan and ideological lines in the decades between the Nixon and Clinton administrations (Aldrich 1995; Rohde 1991; Sinclair 2000; Jacobson 2000a; McCarty et al. 1997; Fleisher and Bond 1996). The fierce partisan struggle provoked by the Republicans' attempt to impeach and remove Clinton during his second term epitomized the trend (Jacobson 2000b). Indeed, partisan rancor in Washington had grown so conspicuous that it became a central target of Bush's 2000 campaign. Promising to be "a uniter, not a divider," Bush emphasized his status as a Washington outsider with "no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years" who could "change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect." (2) Bush's implicit premise, that partisan polarization is an inside-the-beltway phenomenon with little popular resonance, was belied by the conditions of his election. Extending the long-term trend toward greater partisan and ideological coherence in the electorate (Jacobson 2000c), the 2000 presidential election produced the highest levels of party line voting in the 48-year history of the National Election Studies. Ticket splitting fell to its lowest level since 1960; the number of districts delivering pluralities to House and presidential candidates of different parties was the smallest since 1952 (Jacobson 2003a). The elections also highlighted the emergence of distinct regional and cultural divisions between the parties' respective electoral coalitions at both the presidential and congressional levels (Jacobson 2001a). In short, G.W. Bush entered the White House on the heels of the most partisan election in half a century. Any hope Bush might have entertained of bridging the partisan divide was dashed by the denouement in Florida, which not only put politicians and activists on both sides at each other's throats, but also split ordinary citizens decisively along party lines. Surveys found self-identified Republicans and Democrats in nearly complete disagreement on who had actually won the most votes in Florida, how the candidates were handling the situation, whether the Supreme Court decided properly and impartially, and who was the legitimate victor (Jacobson 2001a). …

Source Material: Toward the Study of the First Lady: The State of Scholarship

Abstract: I hope that someday someone will take the time to evaluate the true role of the wife of a president, and to assess the many burdens she has to bear and the contributions she makes. --Harry S. Truman Getting right to the point, first ladies have done it all. Presidential spouses dating to Martha Washington have functioned as their husband's trusted confidante, key supporter, and counselor in times of crisis. First ladies presided over state dinners and a variety of social affairs held at the executive mansion and also deserve credit for renovating and preserving the White House. So too have these wives edited presidential speeches, hit the campaign trail, testified before Congress, lobbied on behalf of legislation, chaired task forces, traveled internationally as unofficial presidential envoys, and championed important social causes. Indeed, the accomplishments and political activities of first ladies--at least those serving from Eleanor Roosevelt to the present time--have been fairly well documented in recent years. Quite early on, the first lady emerged as a key player in what would become known as the White House. The first ladyship is an institution in that the far majority of presidents have served with their wife beside them, presidential spouses are well-known public figures, and the first ladyship has become an office-albeit one of extraconstitutional design--complete with office space, staff, and budget. Nevertheless, scholarship on the first ladies is a quite recent phenomenon and, as a subfield, it is still maturing. Growing Interest in First Ladies Possibly due to the controversial and highly public first ladyship of Hillary Clinton, coming on the heels of the controversial but powerful first ladyship of Nancy Reagan and the popular first ladyship of Barbara Bush, the office has generated much interest by the public, press, and scholars alike. However, as will be noted, scholars came quite late to the game. With the exception of the significant media coverage of and public attention paid to Eleanor Roosevelt, popular interest in modern first ladies grew considerably in the 1980s. In April 1984, a conference titled "Modern First Ladies: Private Lives and Public Duties" was held at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Michigan. A year later, NBC aired a one-hour, primetime special on First Lady Nancy Reagan. During the 1988 presidential campaign, the press and pundits pondered a first lady forum for the candidates' wives. Analysts noted that the candidates--George Bush and Michael Dukakis--were nowhere near as interesting as their wives, Barbara and Kitty (Watson 2000b). In addition to Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Dukakis--who had lectured at Harvard-the other presidential hopefuls in 1988 boasted capable spouses. The group included three lawyers--Hattie Babbitt, wife of Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt; Jeanne Simon, wife of Illinois senator Paul Simon; and Elise du Pont, wife of former Delaware governor Pierre "Pete" du Pont. Tipper Gore, wife of then-Tennessee senator Al Gore, was an author and activist with a graduate education; and Jill Jacobs, wife of Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, was, at the time, pursuing her second master's degree. In 1992, the candidates' wives again proved to be newsworthy. Hillary Rodham Clinton would become the first first lady with a graduate education, completing her law degree at Yale. During Mrs. Clinton's first term as first lady, a $1,000-a-plate event was held at the U.S. National Botanical Garden to raise awareness, support, and funding for the new National Garden in Washington, a monument dedicated to the first ladies. First ladies Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush joined Mrs. Clinton in honoring the service of all first ladies. In 1996, both presidential candidates' spouses--Hillary Clinton, with degrees from Wellesley and Yale; and Elizabeth Dole, with degrees from Harvard and Duke--possessed ivy league diplomas, law degrees, and impressive political resumes. …

“Who Ever Believed in the ‘Missile Gap’?”: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security

Abstract: This article examines John F. Kennedy's references to the missile gap—a presumed strategic disparity between the Soviet Union and the United States believed to have been created by the USSR's technological achievements in the late 1950s. Kennedy's missile gap rhetoric was grounded in a political, economic, and military/strategic critique of the policies of the Eisenhower administration. This article examines Kennedy's belief in the missile gap, reveals the central role played by Joseph Alsop in propagating the missile gap myth, and considers the missile gap within the context of the Kennedy administration's national security policies.

George Bush and the 102d Congress: The Impact of Public and “Private” Veto Threats on Policy Outcomes

Abstract: Introduction Changing institutional and electoral dynamics in Congress in the last several decades have placed greater limitations on presidents' ability to influence roll call outcomes. Presidents' floor success rates have been a casualty of the interaction of split-party control of the presidency and Congress, or "divided government," with heightened intra-party cohesion on Capitol Hill (Fleisher and Bond 2000). Recent presidents who have confronted assertive opposition majorities in Congress have adapted to these conditions by turning to a powerful tool in the bargaining process: the veto. Although critics may contend that "frequent use of the veto is difficult to reconcile with the Neustadtian imperative to govern by persuasion" (McKay 1994, 449), presidents' veto success was exceptional in the closing decade of the twentieth century. President George Bush sustained 28 of the 29 regular vetoes he cast from 1989 to 1992. Similarly, only one of Bill Clinton's 36 regular vetoes was successfully challenged in Congress from 1995 to 2000. Scholars have consequently taken a renewed interest not only in presidents' ability to halt legislation through the veto power but also in their strategic use of implied vetoes to mold policy outcomes. Chief executives' success in wresting concessions from Congress through veto threats is a central test of legislative influence (Wayne 1978; Watson 1993; Deen and Arnold 2002). Emerging scholarship on this aspect of presidential behavior has been based largely on veto threats that are issued publicly (Cameron 2000). As Bond, Fleisher, and Krutz (1996, 134) remind us, however, public veto threats may not constitute a representative sample of the actual signals presidents employ. Presidents may have incentives to issue veto threats privately or behind the scenes in order to escape public and media scrutiny and avoid confrontation with Congress. With the benefit of archival data uncovered at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, this article compares the effects of "private" and "public" veto threats on executive-legislative bargaining and policy outcomes in the 102d Congress (1991-1992). Archival research revealed 82 veto threats that were initially issued by the Bush administration outside the public eye. Thirty-nine of these threats were never publicly disclosed in media sources. The other 43 threats were later made public. This subset of veto threats is distinguishable from the 162 veto threats that were initially reported in the national media and for which no archival documentation was uncovered. This article develops a typology of veto threats and compares the impact of Bush's threats on legislative outcomes according to the policy significance of bills. The results of the analysis do not so much dispute formal models of veto threats that emphasize the importance of the president's public rhetoric as they show such models to be incomplete. Private veto threats "killed" a host of minor legislation to which Bush objected. Veto threats that started off privately and served as early signals to the Democratic majority, only to be made public via "inside the beltway" reporting later, led to a high probability of executive-legislative compromise on ordinary bills such as appropriations measures. Consistent with Cameron's (2000) analysis, however, public threats on the most salient legislation, such as Mayhew's (1991) "landmark" bills, were most likely to result in vetoes and inter-branch confrontation. Indeed, public threats on important legislation often led to "blame game" politics between the White House and Capitol Hill in the 102d Congress. The analysis progresses in four stages. The first section contrasts an "insider" approach to veto threats with the assumptions of formal theories of veto threats that accentuate the necessity of "going public" (Kernell 1997). The second section provides an overview of the archival data and methods employed. …

Presidential Election Polls in 2000: A Study in Dynamics

Abstract: The study of voters and elections has taught us a lot about individuals' vote choices and election outcomes themselves. We know that voters behave in fairly understandable ways on election day (see, e.g., Alvarez 1997; Campbell 2000; Campbell et al. 1960; Gelman and King 1993; Johnston et al. 1992; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944; Lewis-Beck 1988). We also know that the actual outcomes are fairly predictable (see, e.g., Campbell and Garand 2000). Of course, what we do know is imperfect. (1) Even to the extent we can predict what voters and electorates do at the very end, we know relatively little about how voter preferences evolve to that point. How does the outcome come into focus as the election campaign unfolds? Put differently, how does the campaign bring the fundamentals of the election to the voters? Previous research suggests that preferences evolve in a fairly patterned and understandable way (Campbell 2000; Wlezien and Erikson 2002). This research focuses on the relationship between election results for a set of years and trial-heat poll readings at varying points in time during the election cycle, mostly for presidential elections in the United States. (2) What it shows is that the predictability of outcomes increases in proportion to the closeness of the polling date to election day. The closer we are to the end of the race, the more the polls tell us about the ultimate outcome. Although this may not be surprising, it is important: the basic pattern implies that electoral sentiment crystallizes over the course of election campaigns. The previous research takes us only part of the way. That is, it does not explicitly address dynamics. This is quite understandable; after all, we lack anything approaching a daily time series of candidate preferences until only the most recent elections. In this context, the U.S. presidential race in 2000 offers us a fairly unique opportunity. The volume of available data for this election allows us to directly observe the dynamics of voter preferences for much of the election cycle. We cannot generalize with but a single series of polls. We nevertheless can explore at much greater depth than has been possible in the past. The analysis in this article attempts to answer two specific questions. First, to what extent does the observable variation in poll results reflect real change in electoral preferences as opposed to survey error? Second, to the extent poll results reflect real change in preferences, did this change in preferences actually last or else decay? Answers to these questions tell us a lot about the evolution of electoral sentiment during the 2000 presidential race. They also tell us something about the effects of the election campaign itself. Now, let us see what we can glean from the data. The Polls For the 2000 election year itself, the pollingreport.com Web site contains some 524 national polls of the Bush-Gore(-Nader) division reported by different survey organizations. In each of the polls, respondents were asked about how they would vote "if the election were held today," with slight differences in question wording. Where multiple results for different universes were reported for the same polling organizations and dates, data for the universe that best approximates the actual voting electorate are used, for example, a sample of likely voters over a sample of registered voters. Most important, all overlap in the polls-typically tracking polls-conducted by the same survey houses for the same reporting organizations is removed. For example, where a survey house operates a tracking poll and reports three-day moving averages, we only use poll results for every third day. This leaves 295 separate national polls. Wherever possible, respondents who were undecided but leaned toward one of the candidates were included in the tallies. Figure 1 displays results for the complete set of polls. Specifically, it shows Gore's percentage share of the two-party vote (ignoring Nader and Buchanan) for each poll. …

American Values or Human Rights? U.S. Foreign Policy and the Fractured Myth of Virtuous Power

Abstract: May 2002 brought the odd spectacle of ex-President Jimmy Carter standing shoulder to shoulder in Havana with one of the U.S. government's oldest enemies, Cuban president Fidel Castro. Carter, on a mission to convey a message of friendship to the Cuban people and to seek some common ground between Cuba and the United States, made a point of meeting and encouraging local democratic, religious, and human rights activists. In a televised address, he endorsed the rights of dissidents and urged democracy on the island nation (Sullivan 2002). He also advocated an end to the U.S. embargo on Cuba (a call immediately echoed at home by 20 Democratic and 20 Republican representatives in Congress). President George W. Bush's administration responded angrily to Carter's latest adventure as international arbiter. A senior state department official tried to sabotage the ex-president's visit with a carefully timed release of a report claiming that Cuba was conducting bio-weapons research and sharing its findings with other "rogue nations." Bush himself was quick to reaffirm the sanctions on trade and travel, demanding free elections and a liberalization of Cuba's economy as preconditions of U.S. relaxation. Bush was of course concerned with the votes of large numbers of Cuban-Americans in Florida whose Republican sympathies are closely tied to a strong anti-Castro stance. He was also reportedly angry, in a week when he was finalizing an arms reduction deal with the Russians, at being upstaged in the media by the peripatetic elder statesman. Nevertheless, there was a certain irony in his implied charge that Carter, who had once put human rights centrally on the foreign policy agenda of the United States, was giving aid and comfort to a notorious violator. There was also an interesting question as to the essential difference, if any, between Carter's excursion and Bush's own previous visit (in February 2002) to China where, in a similarly televised address, he had issued a democratic challenge to the Chinese Communist leadership (Allen and Pan 2002). Bush had not, of course, made continuing U.S. Chinese trade dependent on democratic progress in China, but policy inconsistency is not what concerns me here. I want rather to draw attention to the differences and similarities between Bush's and Carter's proselytizing appeals. Carter, on his return to the United States, argued that his own and the administration's aims for Cuba were identical, and that only their opinions on means and timing were at variance (Carter 2002). I want to argue, however, that there were in contention here two distinct though connected rhetorical positions whose historical interrelationship it is important to understand. The first rhetoric is that of human rights per se; the second is the rhetoric of specifically American values. Thus in China, Bush invited the Chinese in the course of their historical economic transformation to draw on specifically "American ideals of liberty, faith and family" (Allan and Pan 2002; emphasis added). Bush had begun, quite deliberately and defiantly, to speak this language of American values only after the events of September 11. It was a highly significant rhetorical move aimed at reaffirming a national faith which, according to Henry Kissinger (2000; 2001), had been lost decades earlier. Kissinger argued that the tradition known as American exceptionalism, within which American values were historically embedded, was one of the most important casualties of the Vietnam War. Characterizing Vietnam 25 years after the flail of Saigon as a national "tragedy," (1) he claimed that the war had opened a rift, still unhealed, in American society and destroyed faith in the uniqueness and universal relevance of American values. (2) One unfortunate consequence was a continuing failure to develop a new, rational foreign policy consensus (Kissinger 2000). Americans after Vietnam could no longer confidently assert their own values or feel comfortable about imposing them on others, and were consequently at a loss as to what to do with their own predominant power. …

Organizing for Homeland Security

Abstract: During the latter half of 2002, a contest was underway over the organization of the federal government for homeland security. It had begun in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when homeland security came into popular parlance. For several months, this phrase was a symbol, a goal--preservation of the security of the homeland. Then, as various responses to the terrorist attacks were developed, homeland security began to migrate from its symbolic status to that of a policy concept. When President George W. Bush released his National Strategy for Homeland Security on July 15, 2002, the concept was defined as "a concerted national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce America's vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do occur" (U.S. Office of Homeland Security 2002, 2). By this time, however, homeland security was seen by some as a substitute for the Cold War-weary national security concept, and possibly prone to the same use as a justification for the exercise of prerogative or implied powers by the president. Certainly President Bush made a strong effort to determine the organization and management arrangements for the executive branch that he perceived to be necessary for homeland security. The contest, in which he was largely successful in obtaining what he wanted from Congress, was the most recent development in a long history of inter-branch rivalry regarding government organization. Reorganization Rivalry Because the Constitution vests in Congress the authority to "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution" the expressed powers of Article I, Section 8, "and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof," as well as to establish, by law, all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not otherwise mandated by the Constitution, it was long assumed that the organization of the federal government, including the structuring of the departments and agencies of the executive branch, was an exclusive responsibility of Congress. In the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln's actions to save the union constituted, according to one generally accepted assessment, "the highwater mark of the exercise of executive power in the United States." Indeed, continued Wilfred Binkley, "No one can ever know just what Lincoln conceived to be limits of his powers" (Binkley 1947, 126). Nonetheless, during his tenure, he made no attempt to restructure the executive branch unilaterally or modify its component organizations in any way. His ten immediate successors emulated his example in this regard, while Congress, during this period (1865-1913), mandated additional Cabinet-level departments and began experimenting with so-called independent agencies and independent regulatory agencies. The ninth of Lincoln's successors to the presidency--Theodore Roosevelt--is credited as being the first holder of the office "to perceive and to assert the executive view of reorganization which is concerned with efficiency of operations as well as with their economy" (Emmerich 1971, 38). Roosevelt had come to this view as someone involved in the Progressive Movement and as a result of his executive experience as a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, and vice president. It was manifested in the 1903 statute mandating the Department of Commerce and Labor, which authorized the president "by order in writing, to transfer to the new department any unit engaged in statistical or scientific work, together with their duties and authority." (1) It was reflected, as well, in two advisory committees unilaterally created by Roosevelt to advise him on government organization and administration. The first of these, the Committee on Organization of Government Scientific Work, was established in 1903 at the suggestion of Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U. …

What Presidents Talk About: The Nixon Case

Abstract: Why do presidents talk at length about some policy issues, while ignoring others? Which issues do presidents emphasize in their public rhetoric, how do they talk about them, why, and with what effects? How do they divide their messages between oral and written modes? How often do they address different sorts of audiences, and on what kinds of issues? The existing literature offers a number of provocative theories to account for presidential talk but has not conducted systematic and sustained research on the content and volume of presidential talk, particularly outside the much-analyzed State of the Union addresses and other major speeches (e.g., Cohen 1997). William Riker's (1996) general lament that "we do not know much substantively about how policies are presented [in public]" is particularly striking in the case of presidents, whose public comments are uniquely visible and can create a decisive strategic advantage (4). An important literature on the "rhetorical presidency" and the phenomenon of presidents "going public" has examined the president's increasing tendency over time toward appealing over the heads of Washingtonians to establish a direct and unmediated relationship with the mass public (Kernell 1997; Tulis 1987). Although this literature on the "public presidency" is valuable, little research has investigated precisely what sorts of policy issues presidents discuss, what audiences they address, and how and why their positions, emphasis, and framing of their statements on specific policy issues change over time (see, however, Hart 2000). Hypotheses Although presidency research on the actual substantive policy content of presidential talk during their terms in office has been limited, this research tradition does offer four hypotheses for explaining the rhetorical format, audience, policy domain, and variations in presidential talk. First, the modern "rhetorical presidency" is expected to appeal to the broad public by predominantly using the format of orally delivering a statement instead of depending on a written format (Tulis 1987). Second, presidents are often expected to "go public," bypassing the dynamics of bargaining and persuasion among elites in favor of talking to the general public, with addresses to elite audiences made up of business, labor, and government officials constituting a far smaller proportion of their attention (Kernell 1997). Third, there has been some (though not consistent) evidence that presidents face greater leeway on pursuing foreign than domestic policy and therefore enjoy greater success in this policy domain. The "two presidencies" in legislative politics, to the extent it exists, may motivate presidents to focus their attention and public talk on foreign policy rather than domestic affairs. There may be variations over time, though, with greater emphasis on domestic affairs as elections approach (as implied by performance-based models of American electoral politics; e.g., Fiorina 1981). Fourth, the public presidency literature also offers two possible explanations for variations over time in the amount and content of presidential rhetoric. First, the "going public" literature suggests that presidents speak out when they seek policy changes but encounter resistance in Congress, the interest group community, news media, business, or from foreign powers (Kernell 1997; Rose 1988; Manheim 1994). According to this body of research, presidents calibrate their public rhetoric to serve as a strategic tool that moves external events--news media coverage, economic activities, and political developments. Indeed, talk from such a powerful world leader as the president of the United States, whether or not combined with other forms of action, may well influence the behavior of others at home and abroad, thus precipitating events domestically and on the world scene (Canes-Wrone 2001; Cohen 1997). A second possible explanation for the variations in presidential rhetoric is that outside events influence presidential rhetoric. …

Was Reagan Really a Great Communicator? The Influence of Televised Addresses on Public Opinion

Abstract: This article examines the influence that televised addresses have on the public's evaluation of the president. To do this it measures the influence of 10 of President Reagan's televised addresses from 1981 to 1984, using individual-level data gathered in national public opinion surveys. Although scholars and pundits universally acknowledged Reagan's prowess with televised addresses, this study finds, contrary to expectations, that Reagan's televised addresses had limited success in influencing the public's evaluation of him and his presidency. Given these results, this article examines what opportunities presidents who are not as rhetorically skilled as Reagan have in trying to influence public opinion with televised addresses. This study concludes that although presidents must be careful choosing when to deliver a televised address, televised addresses nevertheless remain a potentially useful tool in helping presidents accomplish their purposes.

Presidential Renomination Challenges in the 20th Century

Abstract: One of the common generalizations about presidential elections is that incumbents win their political party's nomination if they seek it (David et al. 1960, 67; Keech and Matthews 1976, ch. 2; Epstein 1978, 178; Abramson et al. 1987). Though renomination challengers have not defeated an incumbent in over 100 years, several have generated significant attention and public support. (1) Most notable are Theodore Roosevelt's challenge to William H. Taft (1912), Ronald Reagan's challenge to Gerald Ford (1976), and Ted Kennedy's challenge to Jimmy Carter (1980). Lesser challenges include Hiram Johnson against Calvin Coolidge (1924), Joseph France against Herbert Hoover (1932), George Wallace against Lyndon Johnson (1964), and Pat Buchanan's challenge to George Bush (1992). Harry Truman also faced opposition to his nomination from southern Democrats in 1948, though no serious alternative emerged during the primaries. Truman (1952) and Johnson (1968) chose not to seek reelection, decisions that may have been influenced in part by the strength of other candidates in the New Hampshire primary (Keech and Matthews 1976, 45-51). (2) Since 1912, only Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton were essentially unchallenged in their renomination bids. While incumbents prevailed in every case, it is worth asking when and why candidates challenge incumbent presidents, and why some challenges attract more support than others. Renomination challenges correlate strongly with the president's chances in the general election. In the last 100 years, five of the six most serious renomination challenges preceded the president's defeat in the general election. Presidents who faced no or only weak renomination challenges won reelection, typically by a landslide. Whether renomination challenges affect or reflect a president's chances in the general election is a matter of debate. Crotty and Jackson (1985, 205-06) characterize renomination challenges as increasing the likelihood of defeat in the general election. Mayer (1996b, 58-60) argues that presidents face renomination challenges when they are already likely to lose the general election. I address this debate by investigating the circumstances in which different kinds of candidates enter the race. Despite their frequency and apparent significance, we know relatively little about when and why renomination challenges occur. Key (1964, 399) recognized the incidence of renomination challenges, but dismissed them as "revolts by noisy dissident factions within the parties." Though Keech and Matthews (1976, ch. 2) offered a detailed analysis, they excluded the most significant renomination challenges. (3) Abramson, Aldrich, and Rhode (1987) concluded that senators rarely challenge incumbents, but their theory does not explain why senators were the most frequent renomination challengers in the 20th century. (4) Crotty and Jackson (1985, 205-06) recognized that incumbents generally lose their reelection bids after facing a renomination challenge, but they did not address why incumbents are challenged. All of these studies discuss the difficulties of defeating an incumbent; none explain when and why presidents face renomination challenges in the first place. Mayer (1996b, 46, 58-60) comes closest to providing an explanation when he observed that incumbents who are popular with their party members tend to be renominated with ease, while those who are not face a rocky reception. I agree with Mayer that renomination challenges depend on party members' evaluations of the incumbent's performance, but argue that renomination challenges are more complex. First, whether a challenger attracts support depends on party members' opinion of the president's performance and the characteristics and strategies of the candidates who pose an alternative to the president. Second, in contrast to Mayer (1996b), the model leads to the prediction that no, or only a weak candidate will challenge an incumbent when the president's party is considered likely to lose the general election. …

Presidential Greatness as an Attribute of Warmaking

Abstract: There lies behind the title of this essay a working assumption among students of the presidency of a direct correlation between presidential tenure during war and presidential greatness. President John F. Kennedy, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "observed that war made it easier for a president to achieve greatness" (Schlesinger 2003, 18). No doubt the assumption has been encouraged by the practice of presidential rankings undertaken by political scientists and historians who, with some slight variation, typically have rated as "great" or "near-great" twelve men who constitute the top tier of chief executives and are associated with warfare: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman, John Adams, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, and James Polk (Murray and Blessing 1983). To the extent that scholars have drawn a correlation between wartime presidents and presidential greatness, some consideration must necessarily have been given to either the decision to go to war or to the president's conduct of it, or perhaps to both factors. In any event, it is difficult to contemplate the premise of a correlation between wartime tenure and presidential greatness without recognition of at least one of the factors as a basis for evaluation and judgment. The purpose of this essay is to explore, both analytically and historically, the premise of presidential greatness as an attribute of warmaking. The subject is intrinsically interesting, as measured by both the attention devoted to it in scholarly works and the broad range of coffeehouse rants and ruminations that it engenders. There is, as well, an utterly pragmatic point to it: power. For with distinction, honor, and glory, whether long lasting or merely transitory, there is opportunity. A popular president can draw upon the well of appreciation and admiration for the purpose of effectuating his agenda. This capability has not been lost on advisers to President George W. Bush, who believed that his deep wellspring of popular adoration, gained by his status as a wartime president, would be a major weapon in his 2004 reelection campaign (Balz 2003, A1). And where there is power, there are seekers--hence the broad and deep interest in the issue of presidential greatness. This work is conceived as an essay because an adequate examination of this subject exceeds the capacity of a single article. "The essay," Felix Frankfurter once wrote, "is tentative, reflective, suggestive, contradictory, and incomplete. It mirrors the perversities and complexities of life" (quoted in Casper 1997, 6). This essay is not without a point of view, however, because the subject is one of central importance to the study of the presidency and constitutional government. The question of the relationship between executive use of force and a reputation of greatness is, of course, older than the Republic itself and, indeed, plumbs the depths of history. The founders of the nation, like the Framers of the Constitution, engaged in an extended, thoughtful, and penetrating examination and analysis of the question of whether an individual might achieve some measure of fame and glory through the use of military force. Their assessments and conclusions, as we shall see, represented driving forces behind the design and configuration of the War Clause of the Constitution. Various presidents and their advisers, moreover, have viewed the use of military power as a means of achieving both immediate popularity and historical standing. Yet, questions remain. Does the historical record support an assumption of a significant correlation between presidential employment of force and presidential greatness? What conclusions may be drawn about the "success" of unilateral executive warmaking ventures? What, indeed, is the relationship, if any, between executive use of force and the national interest? These, and related questions, constitute the focal point of this essay. …

The Contemporay Presidency: Postpresidential Influence in the Postmodern Era

Abstract: George W. Bush's presidency may someday be remembered as a watershed in the future of the American postpresidency. During Bush's campaign, his father and former president George H. W. Bush provided his son advice and fund-raising firepower. That same year, outgoing President Bill Clinton campaigned for wife Hillary in her successful bid to become the first former first lady to win elected office. The first eighteen months of Bush's presidency also witnessed plenty of activity by ex-presidents, (1) all of whom except Ronald Reagan played a role in either domestic or international politics, or both. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford served as honorary cochairs of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform that proposed changes in voting procedures in the wake of the 2000 presidential election. In May 2002, as Clinton was denying rumors that he would host a nationally syndicated television talk show, President Bush appointed his predecessor to a delegation that went to East Timor to celebrate the island nation's independence from Indonesia. That same week, Carter made international headlines as the first sitting or former American president to visit Cuba since Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. In this article, we examine the postpresidency, with a special focus on the influence of postmodern ex-presidents. (2) Whether campaigning for fellow partisans, traveling on diplomatic missions, writing books and memoirs, opining in the media, or serving as informal advisers to sitting presidents, ex-presidents influence American politics in a variety of ways. But has the power of the postpresidency changed with changes in the power of the presidency? We contend that postpresidential power has grown, albeit not proportionally, with presidential power. The heightened role of electronic media, the globalization of politics, the successes of governors winning the presidency, and the increasing significance of campaign finance are just a few recent developments that combine to give postmodern ex-presidents unprecedented opportunities to influence politics and policy. How and how well postmodern ex-presidents avail themselves of those opportunities are separate, related questions. This article proceeds in three sections. First, we provide a brief history of the postpresidency, including descriptive statistics and brief summaries of the postpresidential activities of ex-presidents from George Washington to Lyndon Johnson. In the next section, we focus on postmodern ex-presidents Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton, arguing that the contemporary era provides former presidents unique and unprecedented opportunities to influence public affairs. We conclude with some observations on the state of the American postpresidency. Postpresidential Power According to James David Barber (1985), presidential success is a function of a president's psychology and worldview. Similarly, Irina Belenky (1999) classifies the behavior of ex-presidents based on their personal ambitions and agendas, from a desire to restore a damaged public reputation to the advocacy of specific political causes. Paul Light (1991) likens the power of American presidents to that of a "vehicle" of enumerated, formal powers propelled by each president's "fuel" in the form of time, energy, expertise, and information. These studies reify the point that individual capacity, disposition, and ambition affect how presidents approach their public lives in office and beyond. Of course, presidents exercise real, formal powers beyond the idiosyncratic inputs they bring to office. The president serves as both the head of government and head of state, oversees both foreign and domestic policy, and in addition to exercising constitutionally prescribed responsibilities ranging from commander-in-chief to reporter of the state of the union, acts as the singular political voice and symbolic leader of the nation. …

Presidential Authority to Detain “Enemy Combatants”

Abstract: President Bush claims the power, as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, to determine that any person, including an American citizen, who is suspected of being a member, agent, or associate of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or possibly any other terrorist organization, is an "enemy combatant" who can be detained in U.S. military custody until hostilities end, pursuant to the international law of war (Dworkin 2002). Attorney General John Ashcroft has taken the view that the authority to detain "enemy combatants" belongs to the president alone, and that any interference in that authority by Congress would thus be unconstitutional (U.S. Senate 2002). Even if congressional authority were necessary, the government argues, such permission can be found in the Authorization to Use Force (AUF; Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 [2001]). So far, the courts have agreed that Congress has authorized the detention of "enemy combatants." The definition of "enemy combatant," (1) however, appears to be much broader than that which has historically applied during armed conflict, and, as applied in the particular case of suspected "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, appears to be without precedent. The detention of Yaser Hamdi seems to be more defensible in terms of the law of war, because he was allegedly captured during combat, yet he is not being held as a prisoner of war. Both men are held incommunicado in the custody of the military, neither has been charged with a crime, and the government is seeking to deny them access to counsel, saying that enemy combatants have no right to counsel, and that allowing such access would interfere with wartime intelligence efforts. Traditionally, the only persons treated as enemy combatants were those captured during actual battle, with the exception of the German saboteurs who landed on U.S. beaches from military submarines. (2) "Fifth columnists," or those agents of the enemy who infiltrate the domestic territory of a belligerent to commit acts of sabotage or terror in furtherance of the enemy's war efforts, have been arrested and tried as criminals in civil courts, or, if the accused were members of the enemy's armed forces, tried for violation of the law of war in military court. Citizens from enemy foreign countries who were thought to present a danger, but who could not be charged with a crime have been interned as enemy aliens under the Alien Enemy Act, 50 U.S.C. [subsection] 21 et seq., even if they were bona fide members of the armed forces of an enemy state. (3) The only other circumstances in which courts have explicitly upheld the preventive detention of citizens for security reasons, without charge or any kind of hearing, have involved instances of martial law (Moyer v. Peabody, 212 U.S. 78 [1909]; Zimmerman v. United States 132 F.2d 442 [9th Cir. 1943]). The distinction between enemy aliens and enemy combatants may prove critical. Whereas Congress has traditionally declined to regulate the conduct of the military in its treatment of prisoners taken during battle, Congress has taken a more active role regarding the treatment of enemy aliens, setting down a more precise definition for who may be treated as such and under what conditions. Under the Alien Enemy Act, 50 U.S.C. [subsection] 21 et seq., alien enemies include "all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized." This designation is further limited to times of declared war or presidentially proclaimed "predatory invasion," and the statute broadly prescribes the types of restrictions the president may place, by proclamation, on alien enemies, including possible detention and deportation, and the denial of access to U.S. courts. Where U.S. citizens not subject to treatment as prisoners of war have been interned as possible threats to the national security, additional statutory authority to at least ratify the presidentially claimed power to intern them was crucial if the detentions were to be validated by the courts, and even then it appears that due process considerations played a role. …

The Basic Dynamics of the Presidential Nomination Process: Putting the 2000 Races in Perspective

Abstract: How did George W. Bush and Al Gore come to win the 2000 presidential nominations of America's two major political parties? Of all the dozens or even hundreds of persons who might plausibly have aspired to serve as the nation's forty-third president, how was it that the choice was effectively narrowed down to these two individuals? The thesis of this article is that at least during the nomination phase of the campaign, the 2000 election was pretty much business as usual. Over the past two decades, the presidential nomination process, once widely thought of as an almost uniquely turbulent and unpredictable enterprise, has in fact usually operated in a quite regular and predictable fashion. And while every election has its new wrinkles and novel situations, most of what transpired during the 2000 nomination contests has clear and obvious parallels in the races that preceded them. The analysis in this article thus proceeds along two tracks. In the first place, I attempt to describe and document some of the basic dynamics of the contemporary nomination process. In particular, I focus on the issue of how it is that the process finally settles on a candidate: how and why it is that one candidate rather than another finally wins the nomination. With that as background, I then examine the particular circumstances of 2000, showing how much of that election was simply the latest remake of a quite familiar plotline but also highlighting those aspects of the 2000 campaign that genuinely were exceptional. An Initial Model The starting point for this analysis is a nomination forecasting model that I first developed almost ten years ago. (1) Though presidential nomination races often seemed to be chaotic and unpredictable, there were, I argued, two indicators, both available before any of the primaries and caucuses had taken place, that correctly predicted which candidate would win his party's presidential nomination in six of the past seven contested nomination races. (2) The first of these indicators was the candidates' relative standing in polls of the national party electorate. Well before any of the national convention delegates are actually selected-in fact, quite soon after the conclusion of the previous presidential election-pollsters regularly ask national samples of Democrats and Republicans whom they would like to see nominated as their parties' candidate for president. As shown in Table 1, if one focuses on the last poll taken before the start of delegate selection activities--meaning, in most years, the last poll before the Iowa caucuses--the candidate leading in that poll went on to win the nomination in six of the seven contested nomination races held between 1980 and 1992. The second indicator was the candidates' relative success in raising money. Under the campaign finance laws enacted in 1974, every active presidential candidate is required to make periodic reports to the Federal Election Commission indicating how much money he or she has raised and spent for the campaign. As is also shown in Table 1, the leading money raiser during the preprimary campaign--more precisely, the candidate who had raised the largest amount of money by December 31 of the year before the election--went on to win the nomination in six of seven cases. Since that article was published, the country has seen three contested presidential nomination races, and both indicators worked perfectly in every case. The relevant data for the 2000 election are shown in Table 2. On the Democratic side, Al Gore had a large lead over Bill Bradley in the polls; Gore was also his party's leading preelection year fund-raiser, though by a surprisingly narrow margin. As for George Bush, to say that he was the Republican front-runner in 2000 is a distinct understatement. In fact, Bush had perhaps the most successful invisible primary season in the modern history of presidential elections. The most publicized measure of his success was his fund-raising. …

Who Wins? Campaigns and the Third Party Vote

Abstract: The conventional wisdom among students of elections is that the choices of voters are largely driven by powerful forces that have lasting effects from one election to the nextenduring political orientations and retrospective judgments about economic performance. Despite the media's focus on personalities and the individual traits of the candidates, the scholarly consensus is that "campaigns don't matter"--the choices of voters are largely beyond the influence of candidates when weighed against enduring electoral forces. Our article argues, however, that campaigns and voters' evaluations of the personality traits of candidates (such as their morality, knowledge, and leadership) do matter. Previous research has tested the impact on vote choice (often in presidential elections) of two sets of influences--voter evaluation of candidate personality traits, which is treated as measuring the effects of campaigns, and such enduring electoral forces as party identification, ideological orientation, and retrospective judgments. What is particularly telling is that this tradition of research has focused on two-party competition and has asked if candidate traits or enduring political forces have the greatest impact on the choice of voters between the Republican and Democratic candidates. We argue that this previous research tradition of parsing out the relative effects of personality traits and party identification on the choice among the two main political parties misses a fundamental aspect of contemporary elections, especially presidential elections: the substantial and decisive votes won by third party candidates. No president in the past three elections has won a majority of votes cast; third party candidates are drawing enough votes to swing the popular vote of some recent elections. Put simply, scholars have been looking in the wrong place for campaign effects. Our article synthesizes contradictory findings about the effects of campaigns. It largely acknowledges the consistent finding that enduring electoral forces severely limit the impact of Democratic and Republican campaigns while taking seriously the direct evidence from campaigns that they can have some influence. In particular, our analysis examines the effects of candidate trait ratings on the decision to vote for third party candidates in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections. The results challenge the scholarly consensus that candidate traits do not matter and suggest that campaign effects are sufficient to determine who wins contemporary presidential elections. Debating the Effects of Campaigns A long line of research stretching over half a century has provided strong support for the "enduring effects" interpretation of elections and vote choice. The enduring effects school has identified three sets of factors as severely limiting the effects of campaigns. First, research since the beginning of behavioralism has found that the votes of many Americans were "locked up" before the fall general election campaign even began. For instance, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1944) found that voters in the 1940 election expressed a vote intention in the spring, with very few changing their choice by election day in November. From this evidence, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet concluded that campaigns only serve to reinforce predispositions, rather than change the choices of voters about the candidates. Second, the hold of political party loyalty has also been consistently identified as a powerful check on campaigns. Campbell et al. (1960) reported in The American Voter that party identification was a lasting political orientation and that it was the single most important influence on vote choice. Campaigns introduced short-term effects, but these were dwarfed by the overwhelming influence of party identification. Third, V. O. Key (1966) reported that retrospective evaluations of the national economy introduced another significant longer term effect on elections that severely restricted the impact of campaigns (see also Frankovic 1993; Fiorina 1981; Kinder, Adams, and Gronke 1989; Markus 1988; Pomper 1993). …

The Role of Issues in the 2000 U. S. Presidential Election

Abstract: What was the impact of issues in the 2000 presidential election? Does an examination of the issues shed any light on why the election ended in a virtual tie between the two candidates, with a very narrow popular victory by half a million more votes nationally for Al Gore but with George W. Bush winning the electoral vote (223 to 217)? In this article, we will consider the potential impact that issues and broad policy concerns articulated during the 2000 election campaign had on the outcome of that election. Some scholars suggest that election outcomes are the result of long-term factors such as the state of the national economy and that short-term factors that appear during the election campaign, such as issues, lack relevance to the election outcome (see, for example, Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992; Fair 1988; Abramowitz 1996; Campbell 1996). Using prediction models based largely on measures of the national economy, these scholars claim they can accurately predict presidential election outcomes six months or more in advance of the general election, thereby suggesting that campaign activities and issues are superfluous. However, the prediction modeling approach suffered a major setback in 2000. Virtually all of the models predicted that Gore would handily win the presidential election in 2000. The fact that the prediction models were in error gives greater emphasis to the potential impact and role of issues in the outcome of that election contest. Yet to raise this consideration is not to imply that we should take a narrow view of the role that issues play in elections and voting behavior more generally. In the broader literature, issues have come to be seen as more than just one of the factors influencing the candidate choice in an election. For example, democratic theory raises the ideal of an informed dialogue between candidates and citizens that guides subsequent policy decisions made by the elected officials. Even if scholarly works such as The American Voter (Campbell et al. 1960) raise doubts about the reality of the democratic ideal, issues are seen as playing other important roles in elections and election campaigns. A cataloguing of the issues addressed by the candidates and the prevalence of various issues on the minds of the public convey a portrait of the concerns confronting the nation at the time of the election. Knowing what issues and themes are discussed in the campaign tells us a great deal about the public agenda, even if the election outcome does not act as a policy mandate for the newly elected officials. The candidates use their issue messages as a means of creating an image illustrating not only the future direction their decisions may take but the manner in which they may carry out their duties once in office. The issue messages articulated by the candidates no doubt convey subtle cues regarding the differences in the style of the candidates, but presumably they also convey more cognitive information that voters can employ to determine if there are meaningful policy differences between the candidates. Regardless of whether the preferences citizens have on issues influence their voting decisions, it is important to know if the public even perceives a policy difference between the contending candidates. If no differences emerge on particular issues, it is obvious that those issues could hardly have an impact on the voter's candidate choice. Yet perceived differences between the candidates also tell us about the extent to which various issues were contentious during the election campaign. Knowing what issues are worthy of public debate at the time of a presidential election is itself a noteworthy piece of evidence about social evolution. Likewise, the very issue preferences articulated by the citizens present an elaborate self-image of the American electorate. Elections provide an important moment in history when citizens have an opportunity to express their values and deep-seated beliefs through a dialogue with presidential candidates. …

Source Material: The White House and the Press: News Organizations as a Presidential Resource and as a Source of Pressure

Abstract: News organizations represent a source of pressure on a president and also serve as an important resource as he seeks to govern. In the 1990s and now in the new century, a president can expect to answer the queries of reporters two or three times a week and to make public addresses and remarks on an average of once a day, six days a week. Such appearances are regularly broadcast nationally on cable television. Gone are the days when presidential remarks were delivered to a select audience and only that audience. Now a president's responses to reporters' questions and his remarks to groups are broadcast live on more than one cable television channel. For a president in the new century, there are no off the record remarks, no statements made on background, and no speeches to a limited audience. The presidency today is on the record and broadcast live to audiences around the world. Reporters as a White House Presence: Questioning the President When President Bush came into office, there was in place at the White House a communications operation with nearly 100 reporters at their station ready for the new president to make news. Then and now, television reporters are prepared to broadcast from the north driveway from an area known as "Pebble Beach" where 13 news organizations can go live with their regular and breaking news reports. The Press Room is in operation with radio and wire reporters housed in ten and two booths, respectively, set aside for use for their frequent reports, five booths for individual television network correspondents as well as space for their crews, and assigned space for those working for daily newspapers and news magazines, including photographers. Whereas on a typical day not all of the spaces are occupied, there are others around who sometimes fill those places. On a normal day when there is an event to cover, there are ten to fifteen photographers around the Press Room as well as twenty camera people working as crews for the networks. Thus, the White House staff faces an operation in place over which they have no directional authority, which is poised to cover the president. The approximately one hundred people included among those regularly working at the White House for news organizations expect a president to make news and for the White House staff to provide them on a regular basis with the information they need in order to file their reports and go on the air. Because news organizations view chronicling the presidency in terms of covering the president himself, their reporters focus their attention on getting the president on the record on a daily basis. In particular, they seek his public responses to their queries in preference to getting his views as spoken by his surrogates. Although reporters do not get to query him every day, they expect to see and hear from him daily and to question him in at least a brief session two or three times a week. The expectations of White House reporters are based on their recent experiences. President Clinton and his immediate predecessors left behind for President Bush a record of meeting fairly frequently with reporters to answer their queries. Whereas the longer press conferences reporters prefer are not as frequent as the shorter question and answer sessions, in recent years news organizations have had significant opportunities to directly query a president. When a new president comes into office, news organizations anticipate the pattern of frequent access will continue. With the expansion of cable news networks from a lone network, CNN (established in 1981), to the addition of MSNBC (1996) and Fox (1996), the expectations of regular queries from reporters grew during the Clinton years. Not only did reporters expect the president to meet with them on a fairly regular basis in a press conference setting, they anticipated he would take their queries at sessions before and following official presidential sessions with members of Congress, the Cabinet, and visiting foreign and international leaders. …

Reassessing Public Opinion Polling in the Truman Administration

Abstract: Scholars have recently explored the origins of the institutionalization of public opinion polling in the administrative apparatus of the White House (see Jacobs and Shapiro 1995; Heith 1998; Eisinger and Brown 1998; Eisinger 2000). However, the development and utilization of public opinion polls by presidents has yet to be fully explicated, in part because of incomplete historical information on the presidential administration of Harry Truman. Truman remains an aberration in the development of presidential polling, using fewer polls than Franklin Roosevelt and presidents who served subsequent to Truman. However, Truman's presidency perpetuated and advanced the polling apparatus, given new evidence showing poll consultation in the Truman administration. Presidential scholars (Brace and Hinckley 1992; Kemell 1986; Cornwell 1965), scholars of public opinion (Heith 1998; Geer 1996;Jacobs and Shapiro 1995; Herbst 1993;Jacobs 1993, 1992), and historians of President Truman (Hamby 1995; Heller 1980) all concede that the Truman administration did not have much interest in public opinion polling. Truman himself is also often quoted as negatively referring to polling and pollsters and disavowing the usefulness and accuracy of polls. As a revision to these claims, uncovered archival work shows that the Truman administration was concerned with public opinion polling and did consult polling on selected issues, both in the White House and during the 1948 election. Truman's View of Public Opinion Polling Truman's public position on opinion polls was very clear. He did not put much stock in the polls, the pollsters who developed them, or the politicians who obsessed over them. Truman was openly critical of these polls and pollsters for a variety of reasons. The fluctuation of Gallup's presidential approval polls (from a height of 80 percent to a depth of 23 percent) over the course of Truman's presidency combined with Gallup's famous failed prediction of the president's defeat to Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential election convinced Truman that polling was unreliable, ineffective, and capricious. Truman wrote in his memoirs, I never paid any attention to the polls myself, because in my judgment they did not represent a true cross section of American opinion. I did not believe that the major components of our society, such as agriculture, management, and labor, were accurately sampled. I also know that the polls did not represent facts but mere speculation, and I have always placed my faith in the known facts. (Truman 1956) In an unsent letter addressed to Elmo Roper responding to Roper's postelection poll results dated December 30, 1948, Truman writes, (1) It [Roper's report] is interesting, but it still misses the main point. Candidates make election contests, not pole [sic] takers of press comments by paid column writers. Edited news columns and misleading headlines have some effect--not much. People in general have lost faith in the modern press and its policies. That is a good thing too. No one segment should be able to control public opinion. Leadership still counts. Truman's opinion on polls is consistent with his definition of leadership. Truman is often quoted as saying, I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if he'd taken a poll in Israel? Where would the Reformation have gone if Martin Luther had taken a poll? It isn't polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It is right and wrong, and leadership--men with fortitude, honesty and a belief in the right that makes epochs in the history of the world. (Hamby 1995) Based on these public and private assertions from Truman, it seems he was a president who led an administration that did not rely on public opinion polls on any level. …