Search

This article describes the people's voice in American politics by contrasting it to those of the nation's leaders and the working press. Based on a content analysis of all three actors (with letters to the editor serving as a stand-in for the citizenry), we find the people situated midway between politicians and the press. Citizen-writers show greater rhetorical optimism than media operatives but not as much as White House aspirants. Citizens also complain about politics, but it is the management of their buoyancy that makes them special. By understanding the people's voice, the roles of politicians and the press become eminently clearer.

As one who has done a considerable amount of research over the years with large data sets, I am delighted with Coe and Neumann's (2011) theoretical ambitions. The epistemological problem they address--that researchers have been grabbing at different portions of the presidential elephant and calling it the same thing--results in at least three unfortunate outcomes: (1) it lets all researchers be correct about everything, because their very choice of a text can determine what they find within it; (2) it lets scholars' conventional wisdom about which texts are worth studying suppress a broader range of questions that might have been asked ifa more randomized approach had been used; and (3) it lets idiosyncratic texts hide rhetorical regularities that would have been discovered if a large and representative sample of messages had been selected for examination. As an intellectual experiment, it would be interesting for scholars to restrict themselves to Coe and Neumann's text base to see if what they think they know about presidential discourse remains true when viewed through a more restricted aperture. Noble though it is, however, I must excuse myself from that experiment, although I feel sure that Coe and Neumann's (2011) approach will please scholars from many disciplines. For example, by restricting their text base to controlled, national addresses, the authors emphasize the issue orientation prized by political scientists. Too, by including spoken remarks addressed to the American people en masse, the authors feature the engaged arguments that have long been studied by communication scholars. Finally, Coe and Neumann's topical selectivity assures historians that the most relevant issues confronting the nation during the past 80 years will be duly represented in forthcoming studies. But what about Ohio? Only one of Coe and Neumann's (2011) addresses was given in that state--by George W. Bush in October of 2002--and the remaining 49 states play only bit parts as well (collectively they amount to 7% of Coe and Neumann's audiences). "Why should that matter?" the authors might ask. "Nothing happens in Ohio anyway," they would argue, "except on crisp, Saturday afternoons in the Fall." "In the District of Columbia, on the other hand, the world itself happens each day and brings with it a bouillabaisse of issues--nuclear disarmament, the Arab uprising, environmental degradation, refugees in Somalia, a menacing Chinese economy." "To speak of Ohio is to speak of trivialities," Coe and Neumann might assert, "since its issues are always already discussed in the nation's capital--more definitively and more programmatically. Ohio, in contrast, offers nothing but campaign stops for avaricious candidates, photo opportunities with union workers in Toledo, preachers in Dayton, farmers in Lima, and the State Fair queen in Columbus." "You dare speak of Ohio when we are putting serious intellectual issues on the table here?" Coe and Neumann would thunder. Ashamed is what I should be; ashamed is what I am. But I am not too ashamed to note, as I did some years earlier (Hart 1987) and as others have since affirmed (Cohen 2009), that Ohio is the birthplace of considerable presidential rhetoric. Every four years, presidents and would-be presidents make pilgrimages to that place, addressing the American people in all their unkempt glory. They go elsewhere as well--to Memphis, to Albuquerque--but never as often as to Cleveland and Cincinnati. They go to Ohio because they are craven but also because they are Americans and because nowhere is more American than Ohio. Ohio is a state within a nation within a state, with its blue-collar, city-based workers regularly repudiating the politics of its farmers and small town shopkeepers. As a result, its political hall of fame is robust, ranging from the thunderous William Jennings Bryant to the irrepressible Dennis Kucinich, from the politely Democratic John Glenn to the politely Republican John Kasich. …

One of the most important questions about political leadership is also one of the oldest: How strong must a leader be? For many, the answer is simple: A leader must be the strongest person on the block, able to conquer all rivals. But a moment's reflection shows that politics is more than fisticuffs, more than weight lifting and hammer throwing, too. The ability to calculate how much force to use in a given instance spells the difference between the wise leader and the failed despot. When it comes to strength, politics is an art where a deft interpersonal touch can sometimes win the day and where harshness or bluster can lead to regime change. That principle holds more often in democracies than autocracies but, even there, the misapplication of force can doom a leader, a fate suffered in recent years by Idi Amin, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milosevic, to name but a few. To be successful, a democratic leader must become an oxymoron, promising all the strength that followership allows. A democratic leader must be strong and yet listen, proclaim a vision without becoming transfixed by it. Michael Novak (1985) has famously declared an American president to be a priest, a prophet, and a king but he could just as easily have called him a First Acolyte or First Citizen. A democratic leader hangs constantly on tenterhooks. Such tensions have been especially sharp in the United States. Harry Truman, the ultimate dealmaker of the 1920s, became a man of extraordinary resolve just 20 years later. Dwight Eisenhower, who oversaw the allied landing in North Africa and served as Supreme Commander in France, became a surprisingly flexible politician when living in the White House. How did they know when to stand and when to bend, when to hold forth and when to keep their own counsel? Those attracted to traditional models of politics feature John Kennedy's performance during the Bay of Pigs or Ronald Reagan's stand at the Berlin Wall as the personification of leadership. But they could just as easily have looked elsewhere for their models: Lyndon Johnson, a man of the South, delicately negotiating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or Richard Nixon repudiating his hortatory past when opening up the West to Red China. The first President Bush found it prudent to stop short of Baghdad in 1991 while the second President Bush brought the fight directly to Iraq's supreme leader a dozen years later. Firmness and tractability: Which to use, when? Figure 1 provides a simple depiction of the options. The vertical axis indicates whether the president has taken some overt, empirical action (e.g., sending in the National Guard, interdicting foreign ships, etc.) or used rhetoric instead (arguing for tax cuts, for example, or soothing the nation during times of travail). The president's options along this continuum differ in revocability. After a certain point, that is, Air Force bombers cannot be recalled, while an executive order on toxic waste dumps can be abandoned or rewritten at will. Presidential speech varies too especially in comsummatoriness--with some remarks being entirely ceremonial (e.g., a state eulogy or a May Day celebration) while others are spoken in policy-making contexts (e.g., the State of the Union address) and hence have more injunctive force. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Cutting across the action/language continuum is a measure of the president's performative strength. Is the act emphatic and unyielding (hostilities commenced, taxes increased) or is it more tentative (e.g., a low-key diplomatic mission)? Presidential speech can also vary along this continuum, with some remarks being unmistakably clear (e.g., George W. Bush's invitation to the Iraqi commanders to "bring it on") while others are equivocal (e.g., James Buchanan's "what is right and what is practicable are two different things") or opaque (e.g., Bill Clinton's "it depends on what the definition of 'is' is"). …

I begin with two quotations and two facts. The quotations are elliptical and the facts curious. Their meanings are curiouser still. That seems to be the state of the art for the American presidency at the dawn of the millennium. Theodore Roosevelt offered the first rumination when urging that one "treat the political audience as one coming, not to see an etching, but a poster" (quoted in Hughes 1972, 94). How strangely these words fall on modern ears. Imbedded in Roosevelt's claim is the image of a congealed, physical audience, not one consisting of imagined demographic subsectors and media markets. Roosevelt also envisioned politician and audience coming together in real time, real space, not electronically as they do today. Mr. Roosevelt also assumed a politician able to dominate an electorate's perceptions, not one who must fight for every shard of attention granted by the fickle mass media. Able though he was, Theodore Roosevelt could not imagine a postindustrial, poststructural era in which all things--power, space, time, wealth, emotion, ideas--would take on virtual qualities. The turn of the new century finds no Rooseveltian posters, only Clintonian etchings. Not surprisingly, Michael Oakshott (1996, 132-33) captures our times better: "It is our predicament to be able to enjoy a complex manner of government only at the cost of an equivocal political vocabulary." Here, surely, is the essence of the twenty-first century: complexity cum equivocation. Contemporary American presidents inhabit a world in which German chancellors and Japanese prime ministers have become their closest allies, a world in which Russians are dismantling nuclear weapons and terrorists are flying into skyscrapers, a world in which China is becoming a U.S. tourist destination and in which blacks are in charge in Pretoria. Only today's Middle East might seem somewhat familiar to Mr. Roosevelt, although he would quickly learn that diplomacy and not a bully pulpit is required there and that, even then, success is elusive. To say that the times have changed is to say very little. But these contrasting quotations say something more: that the language of American politics has changed in important ways and with it have come changes in governance itself. As Tulis (1987) has argued, the American presidency has become a full-time propaganda machine during the past century, a machine that does not just put a happy face on unhappy politics but that imagines a different kind of politics entirely. In a rhetorical world, a man of intellectual substance (Jimmy Carter) can be tossed aside for a man of buoyancy and vision (Ronald Reagan), a world in which a man of enormous governmental experience (George H. W. Bush) can be replaced by a youngster with his heart on his sleeve (Bill Clinton). In a rhetorical world, that same buoyant visionary can trade arms for hostages and be excused with an aw-shucks apology. In that same world, boys can still be boys in the White House if they can sing a happy tune while keeping the nation's economy afloat. When Theodore Roosevelt served as the nation's twenty-sixth president, Hollywood and the District of Columbia were separated by three thousand miles. Today they are neighboring suburbs. But this is not to say that being president has become easy. Figure 1 reports a slender but important fact: acceptance addresses at the Republican and Democratic conventions have gotten steadily longer during the past fifty years. Why? Do modern presidential candidates now have more substance to share with their listeners, or has the political world gotten larger, requiring that greater attention be devoted to the details of governance? Both explanations seem unlikely. What has changed are the demands of governance. Political parties have become more fractious, so a candidate must now worry about pleasing all while alienating none. There are also the demands of simultaneity. …

A presidential election is more than a search for votes. It is also a search for the American people. Every four years, Republicans and Democrats traverse the nation's landscape searching for that odd concoction of attitude, party, race, region, and gender--that 51 percent--that will bring them victory in November. In doing so, they cannot depend exclusively on loyal Republicans or loyal Democrats, for there are not enough of either to make them president. Rather, candidates must search among the restless middle, that 30 to 40 percent of the American people that pledges allegiance to nothing for very long. To make matters worse, this restless middle changes its identity from day to day and from issue to issue: they can be progressive on civil rights, angry about taxes, populist about education, troglodytes on gun control. In these ways and more, "the American people" are an emergent thing. In light of these realities, presidential candidates invest large sums of money in polling operations to discover who the American people are and why they are that way. But the candidates are not just reactive about such matters. They also take active steps to define the people for the people. That is, the American people are more a stipulation than an instantiation, a people that comes into being via definition rather than through experience. Perhaps that is how it must be in a land of 270 million persons sharing a scant national history. Perhaps such a nation must always be in a state of becoming. Sensing that, the candidates offer new-yet-old definitions of the American people every four years. In doing politics, that is, they also do sociology. In this article, we trace the rhetorical construction of the American people during the past fifty years. Using a sizable database of some five hundred speeches authored by the major-party candidates between 1948 and 1996, a database assembled in connection with the Campaign Mapping Project (an endeavor overseen by the first author and Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania), we found roughly nine hundred uses of the phrase "the American people."(1) We puzzled over these uses in a variety of ways, asking who the described people were, how they spent their rime, what gave their lives meaning, and what forces challenged them. To be sure, these descriptions of the American people, coming as they did from self-interested politicians, cannot be trusted as empirical descriptions of the nation's condition. They are, in Kenneth Burke's terms, secular prayers--factual-sounding commentaries uttered projectively, hopefully. Nevertheless, these rhetorical constructions can be powerful: as Marc Hetherington (1996) has shown, Bill Clinton's worrisome descriptions of the nation's economic situation in 1992 resonated with people whose own, empirical circumstances were, in fact, quite good. Clinton's became a taken-for-granted rhetoric, an unargued rhetoric, and that made it seem truer than truth. That same sort of truth can often be found when the American people are introduced into the modern political campaign. Background From almost any perspective, the American people are a complex thing: television news portrays blacks and whites living in separate communities, attending separate schools. The poorest of the poor live on the outer fringes of society, homeless and unnoticed. Southern Baptists dash with gay-rights activists. Native Americans struggle to maintain their island of language in a sea of MTV images and Anglo-hegemony. Watching just a few hours of CNN shows a fractured society, a people without coherence. And then there are the commercials: happy, multiracial children saluting a flag that dwarfs them, veterans marching in a parade of yellow ribbons down Main Street, families holding their reunions in cozy city parks, Air Force jets streaking across the summer sky to thunderous applause. During these latter moments, America seems whole. …