The Fallacy of ‘Going Public’:
Old Fears, New Strategies,
Premature Assessments
Diana Ichpekova
University of Bristol
© Diana Ichpekova
School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of
Bristol Working Paper No. 01-09
Diana Ichpekova is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of
Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Diana
graduated from the University of Bristol with a BSc in Joint Economic
and Politics, with First-Class Honours, in 2007. At UCLA, Diana is
double-majoring in American Politics and Quantitative Methods,
undertaking research in the areas of political psychology, mass public
opinion, the media, political and electoral behaviour, and the American
presidency. She also has a keen interest in the politics of post-Communist
Central and Eastern Europe and has recently written on the issues of
public trust and transitional justice in the region. Aside from her Ph.D.
studies, Diana works on the editorial team of the American Political
Science Review.
This paper, originally a BSc dissertation, received the highest mark of
awarded any BSc dissertation in Politics at the University of Bristol in
2006-7.
President Clinton, addressing a crowd in Market Square, Dundalk, Ireland
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/clinton/photos/ins4.gif
2
Contents
Introduction: Unravelling the Grounds for the Debate
2
Chapter I: Setting Up the Stage for the Presidential Spectacle
7
Chapter II: The President Takes the Mic, But is Anybody Listening?
12
Trends in Presidential Speechmaking
12
The Effects of Speaking Out
16
Rallies as Temporary Opportunities for Influence
21
Chapter III: The Public Thinks for Itself
23
The Concept of Issue Salience: Why It Matters
23
The Nature of Public Opinion
25
The Economy Speaks Louder than Words
26
The President’s Predicament
29
Chapter IV: The Underlying Forces of Public Opinion
32
Ronald Reagan: The Real Secret Behind the Charm
32
Underlying Cycles of ‘National Mood’
35
The Inevitable Decline in Support I:
The Expectations Gap and Presidential Decay Curves
36
The Inevitable Decline in Support II:
Diminishing Political Trust
39
Chapter V: Concluding Remarks: The Fallacy Revealed
42
Bibliography
46
3
Introduction:
Unravelling the Grounds for the Debate
“Power is based on opinion. What is government not supported by opinion?
Nothing.”
(Napoleon, cited in Ellul 1973: 123)
Studying the contemporary scholarly literature and observing the behaviours of recent
American presidents, it would seem that Napoleon’s words largely echo the emerging
consensus regarding effectual presidential leadership in today’s United States
(Tatalovich & Engeman 2002: 218, Cook 2002: 753). Fearful of tyranny and
abhorring executive dominance, the Founding Fathers certainly sought to stifle
presidential headship and ensnarl the president in a web of restraints and checks
(Shogan 1999: 13, Genovese 2003: 54; Cronin & Genovese 2004: 3, Graubard 2004:
3, Lind 2004: 188, Fisher 2004: 108). Unmistakable, on the other hand, is the fact that
the executive office of our day is a far cry from that envisioned and designed in the
hot summer of 1787 (Maltese 2003: 148, Pika & Maltese 2004: 25, Tulis 2006: 59).
No longer constrained by a “powerful political norm” (Laracey 2002: 3), which
previously censured direct public appeals in favour of strict, undeviating and written
deliberation with Congress, twentieth-century presidents have been better known as
‘rhetorical’ or ‘public’ presidents (Ceaser, Thurow, Tulis & Bessette 1981; Tulis
1987, 1996, 2006, Edwards 1983, 1996, 2000a: 50, Campbell & Jamieson 1990,
Stuckey 1990, Zarefsky 1990, Windt 1990, Medhurst 1993, Smith & Smith 1994,
Dorsey 1995, Thurow 1996). These presidents now aspire to lead the country through
4
“popular speeches aimed at the masses, the sort of oratory that the constitutional
framers regarded with suspicion” (Ivie 1996: 158. See also Rozell 2003: 135, Miroff
2006: 255). Rather than spending time nurturing their relations with legislators, these
public presidents are continuously embroiled in a whirlwind of image-enhancing
activities, arguably turning the modern presidency into “a perennial campaign,
combined with the essential features of a television network and a Hollywood studio”
(Gould 2003: 236-7. See also Blumenthal 1980, Loomis 2000). As perhaps most
notoriously defined by Samuel Kernell (1997: 2), these modern chief executives are
increasingly likely to ‘go public,’ adopting “a strategy whereby a president promotes
himself and his policies in Washington by appealing to the American public for
support…Forcing compliance from fellow Washingtonians by going over their heads
to appeal to their constituents.” Consequentially, since the earliest signs of its
instigation, the preponderance of scholarly work scrutinising this emerging mode of
governance has been broadly disparaging, stipulating that in this “era when almost
everything is bought and sold, when packaging and spin are often indistinguishable
from reality, and when ulterior motives seem to lurk behind almost every friendly
encounter, [it is clear that] our democratic process needs help” (Reich 1997, cited in
Waterman, Wright & St. Clair 1999: 12. See also Edwards III 1996, 2000a).
But whilst it may be true that modern presidents have often attempted to use symbols,
extensive polling and crafty rhetoric to advantageously influence public opinion and
bypass Congress, it would seem reasonable to contend that the adverse implications
associated with this leadership strategy, such as suboptimal policy outcomes,
tarnished executive-legislative relations and potential Congressional submissiveness,
only materialise and become relevant if the chief executive can shape public attitudes
5
in the first place (Edwards III 1980, 1989, Hart & Kendall 1996: 86, Warshaw 2000:
301-2). Undoubtedly, “going public renders the president’s future influence ever more
dependant upon his ability to generate popular support” (Kernell (1997: 4), but a
public president may very well find that “all the techniques of Madison Avenue and
the advertising industry may be incapable of fundamentally altering how the public
feels about its leading political leader” (Cohen 2001: 734). Certainly, a glance into
American political history, and, in particular, noting the presidency of Bill Clinton,
“the ultimate example of the rhetorical presidency” (Edwards III 2000b: 33), would
certainly insinuate that ‘going public’ offers no guarantee of legislative success or of a
receptive mass public (Jamieson & Cappella 1998, Campbell 2000: 49, Sinclair 2000:
93, Fisher 2002, Cook 2002: 755, Rozell 2003: 144, Gould 2003: 213, Jacobs 2006:
289).
In this sense, thus, it would seem that the political literature on the public presidency,
primarily “equat[ing] rhetoric with myth and both with deception, cliché, exhortation,
emotional appeals, manipulation [and] storytelling” (Ivie 1996: 157) has
disproportionately emphasised presidential efforts at leading the public (see Hart
1987, Tulis 1987, 1996, 2006, Smith & Smith 1994, Edwards III 1996, 2000a: 50).
The power to do so has been assumed (Ivie 1996: 158, Edwards III & Eshbaugh-Soha
2000: 4). As Edwards III (1996: 200) most compellingly puts it, “underlying most of
the work on political rhetoric, however, is the premise that rhetoric matters-not just to
the speaker, but, most importantly, to the audience…the assumption of the influence
of rhetoric is pervasive in the literature and central to the justification of rhetoric as a
field of study.”
6
Prompted by this apparent necessity for an in-depth analysis into the effects of recent
presidential ‘public relations’ endeavours, this study will explore a chief executive’s
underlying scope for influencing public opinion. By critically examining the core
condition for any president striving to ‘go public,’ the paper should thereby offer a
vital contribution to the political literature investigating the development of the
modern presidency and, even more generally, to the study of American Government
and Politics. “In an age where the visual image and the related reaction to symbolism
has become so all-pervasively important…the public presidency cannot be ignored”
(Gregg II 2004: 89). Most urgently needed, however, is systematic research assessing
the degree to which modern American presidents will effectively be able to utilise the
opportunities presented by ‘going public.’
Armed with this objective, Chapter I commences with a comprehensive review of the
scholarly literature on the public presidency, assessing, in particular, the rationale
behind this style of leadership and illustrating its various manifestations within the
White House. Chapter II initiates the formal analysis by moving beyond reviews of
the calculating strategies invoked by presidents and, instead, thoroughly examining
the theoretical, empirical and quantitative data regarding the documented impacts of
presidential speechmaking on American public opinion. Having established the
possibilities and limitations associated with direct public appeals, Chapter III
investigates an alternative path for presidential influence. Specifically, it evaluates the
presence and significance of issue salience on a chief executive’s prospects, analysing
the extent to which public presidents can raise public awareness of an issue or
advantageously frame the public debate, so as to indirectly shape the policy agenda
and tweak their own evaluations. Chapter IV then considers these capabilities in light
7
of Ronald Reagan, notoriously depicted to be a “public relations phenomenon”
(Edwards III 2003a: 160). Through more detailed investigation into the trends of
aggregate public opinion during the 1980s, the chapter will analyse his genuine
triumph in leading the masses, and, even more significantly, explore the presence of
some entrenched and underlying forces in American society, including a cyclical
‘national mood,’ paradoxical public expectations and discouraging long-term trends
of political trust, which fundamentally sculpt and public opinion and, thus, inevitably
constrain presidential influence. Chapter V concludes the analysis with a review of
the major findings, drawing together the inherent and inescapable challenges faced by
modern, rhetorical presidents seeking to shape public opinion, and thereby unearthing
the core restriction of the public presidency, that is, the underlying fallacy of ‘going
public.’
8
Chapter I:
Setting Up the Stage for the Presidential Spectacle
Considering the “multiple roadblocks built into the presidential condition” (Genovese
2003: 43) in light of the major twentieth-century transformations within the American
political environment, it certainly seems less of a mystery that the public presidency
has transpired (Cook 2002: 754, Skowronek 2006: 128). Rather, it would seem clear
that modern “presidents who want to be influential in the public policy sphere must go
public. This is the institutional logic of the new American system” (Laracey 2002:
156).
Indeed, given the substantial growth of executive responsibilities since the 1930s,
which has inevitably intensified the relationship between the public and the president,
giving rise to a “Second Republic…a plebiscitary republic with a personal
presidency” (Lowi 1985: xi. See also Aberbach & Rockman 1999, Sinclair 2000: 70,
Tatalovich & Engeman 2002: 218, Hoxie 2004: 197, Jenkins-Smith, Silva &
Waterman 2005, Nelson 2006: 17), in combination with the simultaneous decline of
political parties, the growth of presidential primaries and the persistence of divided
government-which have altogether enabled ‘outsiders’ with weak party ties, minimal
experience in the art of bargaining but highly trained in the methods of campaigning,
to enter the severely hostile political arena-it is somewhat understandable that modern
American presidents have had “every reason to try to become the hub of their own
personal permanent campaign organizations” (Heclo 2003: 126 See also Caesar 1979:
310, Lengle 1981, Polsby 1983, Wattenburg 1991, 1994, Patterson 1994, King 1997,
9
Kernell 1997: 56, West & Loomis 1999, Eisinger 2003: 8, Bates & Diamond 2004,
Campbell & Watson 2004: 75, Quirk & Nesmith. 2006: 508, Burns 2006: 4,
Dickinson 2006: 455, Milkis 2006: 341)
By engaging in such a ‘perpetual campaign’ with the mass public and employing
“public relations techniques similar to those used to publicize commercial products”
(Edwards III, Wattenburg & Lineberry 1998: 342), stretching the likes of George W.
Bush’s 2001 primetime address on embryonic stem cell research to his father’s more
simple public fondness of pork rinds (Warshaw 2000: 322, DiClerico 2000: 142,
Cohen 2001: 734, Cook 2002: 762, Mayer 2004: 622, Gregg II 2004, Tulis 2006: 83),
these public presidents have endeavoured to strategically advance their popular
support and image so as to essentially force legislators to reconsider the electoral
costs of opposition (Neustadt 1960: 64-65, Polsby 1978: 52, Kernell 1997: 24,
Laracey 2002: 9, Nelson 2006: 3).
Fervently driven to maximise these opportunities, presidents over the past half century
have thus increasingly incorporated advertising, campaign and communication
specialists into the highest levels of the White House (Gould 2003: 236-7). Reagan,
for example, invited former public relations specialist, Michael Deaver into his
‘troika’ establishment, Johnson had former advertising expert, Jack Valenti, as his
closest aide, and, most recently, George W. Bush ensured upon taking office that
crucial members of his campaign staff such as Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and Ari
Fleisher were granted prominent positions as advisors and aides (Edwards III &
Wayne 1999: 133-4, Cook 2002: 757, Edwards III 2002: 44, Burns 2006: 162).
10
Moreover, stemming from “the tenuous relationships between the presidency and
other institutions-specifically, Congress, political parties, and the media-that formally
served as conduits of public opinion” (Eisinger 2003: 1), Washington has witnessed
an extraordinary explosion of presidential polling since the 1930s, resulting in a
similar omnipresence of pollsters at the heart of the executive branch (Frankovic
1998, Traugott & Lavrakas 2000, Warshaw 2000: 322, Geer & Goorha 2003, Brace &
Hinckley 2003: 169). Hand in hand, these emerging public relations and polling
practices, which now provide the president with services such as focus-group
research, ‘media-buys’, direct-mail marketing and ‘image management’, are said to
have “spawned an immense industry for studying, manufacturing, organizing, and
manipulating [italics added] public voices” (Heclo 2003: 128). Accordingly, thus,
scholars of the American presidency have widely censured the implied consequences
of these advancements (Edwards III 1996, 2000a).
Samuel Kernell (1997: 3-4, 254), for example, has emphasised that by substituting
traditional exchange with “superfluous-fluff,” encouraging public posturing, usurping
the legitimacy of other politicians, and imposing upon them non-compliance costs
without matched compliance benefits, ‘going public’ wrecks the executive-legislative
bargaining environment and potentially taints policy outcomes (see also Polsby 1978:
52, Cohen & Dolan 2002: 174, Nelson 2006: 19). Likewise, critics of the permanent
campaign, labelling it “engineering of consent with a vengeance,” (Blumenthal 1980:
7) have stressed its discordance with real governing, condemning its immense
consumption of time, its fostering of distrust and its engendering of zero-sum politics
(Miroff 2000, Cook 2002: 763, Heclo 2003: 124, Tenpas 2003, Mayer 2004).
11
Alternatively, writings on the rise of the ‘rhetorical presidency,’ primarily focussing
upon recent patterns of presidential speechmaking, have widely asserted that
“bring[ing] decisions of government to the people makes more likely the continued
decay of political discourse” (Tulis 1996: 5. See also Tulis 1987: 27-8, Zarefsky 1990,
Windt 1990, Smith & Smith 1994, Dorsey 1995, Edwards 1996, 2000a: 52, Rozell
2003a: 135) and inevitably encourages public presidents, who principally hunt for
public approval, to abuse the monarchical symbols of the office at the cost of
substantive policy deliberation (Waterman et al. 1999:160, Brace & Hinckley 2003:
169, Gregg II 2004: 89).
More specifically, Bruce Miroff (2006: 257) has notably rebuked the
institutionalisation and augmentation of the ‘presidential spectacle,’ also known as
“the north pole of politics” (Gronbeck 1996: 37), claiming that today’s presidency is
presented as “a series of spectacles in which a larger-than-life main character and a
supporting team engage in emblematic bouts with immoral or dangerous adversaries.”
Reiterating the unease of Boorstin (1961:11-12) who originally stressed that such
‘pseudo-events’ fundamentally gnaw at the distinction between the real and the
image, Miroff (2006: 280) advises that this type of leadership ensures that executive
actions become only gestures, that facts are distorted and replaced by symbols and
that personal characteristics are strategically magnified, so as to imply a disturbing
development to American democratic values (Austin 1975, Gronbeck 1996, Hart &
Kendall 1996: 97; Heclo 2003: 129). Certainly, the shift in presidential polling
towards gathering the public’s non-policy ‘presidential character’ evaluations (Jacobs
& Burns 2004: 538) would reasonably suggest, as Gelderman (1997) stipulates, that
presidential speeches and appearances, now largely a construct of pollsters, will “no
12
longer aim primarily at objective reality. Their end is virtual reality-the public
presentation of an orchestrated perception” (cited in Waterman et al.1999: 122. See
also Warshaw 2000: 322).
As per these scholars, thus, Americans today are presented with an ‘image-iseverything-presidency’ (Waterman et al.1999: 3-4), that is, a chief executive
habitually engaged in far-reaching exploitative activities such as “leaks, trial
balloons, reaction stories, and staged appearances…that most of us hardly recognise
as ‘pseudo’ anymore” (Heclo 2003: 129). But what has the public actually made of
these strategic endeavours?
Frankly, contextual rationales, strategic opportunities, symbols, pollsters, and adroit
rhetoric aside, an in-depth investigation into the consequences of the public
presidency primarily requires an analysis into the effects of these labours (Edwards III
& Eshbaugh-Soha 2000: 4). And so begins this systematic examination into
presidential scope for leading public opinion, turning first to Chapter II, in which the
measured impacts of presidential speechmaking are thoroughly analysed.
13
Chapter II:
The President Takes the Mic, But is Anybody Listening?
“Public speech no longer attends the process of governing-it is governing”
(Hart 1987: 14)
Whether made in person to large groups of voters or over the television or radio to a
nationwide audience, presidential speeches are “the most obvious and visible
technique employed by presidents to lead public opinion” (Edwards III & Wayne
1999: 120). In this chapter, thus, following an examination into the presumed
strengths of the bully pulpit and the evolution of presidential speechmaking in recent
decades, the documented empirical data assessing the effects of presidential speeches
on American public opinion will be systematically analysed. As shall be revealed,
“the ability to address a nationwide audience is not the panacea for influencing public
opinion that early scholarship and conventional wisdom sometimes has portrayed”
(Welch 2003b: 872).
Trends in Presidential Speechmaking
Observing the frequency of presidential speechmaking between the Eisenhower and
Reagan administrations, as presented in Table 1 and Figure 1 below, it seems evident
that “during the past half century, trends in presidents going public… have moved
steadily upward… point[ing] towards a president today who is far more personally
involved in public relations than were his predecessors thirty and forty years ago”
(Kernell 1997: 123. See also Ragsdale 1998, Powell 1999).
14
Table 1: Frequency of Speechmaking (Eisenhower to Reagan)
President
Total Number
Of Speeches
“N” National addresses per
year on radio or television
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Ford
Carter
Reagan
925
771
1636
1035
1236
1322
1637
9.6
13.3
12.9
19.8
22.5
23.0
52.8
Source: Waterman, Wright & St. Clair 1999: 108-111
Figure 1: “N” National addresses per year on radio or television
60
50
40
"N”
30
"N"
20
10
0
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Ford
Carter
Reagan
President
Source: Waterman, Wright & St. Clair 1999: 108-111
Perhaps even more indicative of this development, and as shown in Figure 2 below,
has been the corresponding rising trend in presidential travel, particularly around the
United States (Warshaw 2000: 308):
15
Figure 2: Days of Travel by Presidents, 1919-1995 (Yearly Averages for First Three
Years of First Term)
Source: Kernell 1997: 122
Indeed, “days logged in domestic travel have no importance beyond the appearances
or addresses before non-Washington audiences they reflect and the telegenic news
spots they attract” (Kernell 1997: 119). Thus, whether speaking at an average
children’s day-care centre or engaging in lengthy travel schedules to address eleven
nationwide schools, as did George W. Bush during his 2001 educational reform
campaign (DiClerico 2000:148, Edwards III 2004: 45, Pika & Maltese 2004: 93),
“what these various activities have in common is that they are intended principally to
place the president and his messages before the American people in a way that
enhances his chances of success in Washington” (Kernell 1997: xi). By extension,
therefore, studying the subsequent effects of these speeches, in terms of ensuing
support for the incumbent president and his policies, represents a useful way of
analysing presidential successes in shaping public opinion and ‘going public.’
16
What is more, given the abundance of political commentary depicting an adversarial
relationship between the White House and the media (Brody 1991, Benson 1996: 51,
Gronbeck 1996: 31, Kurtz 1998, Patterson 1998, Cronkite 1998, Pfetsch 1998,
Manheim 1998, Underwood 1998, Jamieson & Cappella 1998, Edwards III & Wood
1999: 328, Rockman 2000: 284, Jamieson & Waldman 2003, Mayer 2004: 623,
Jacobs & Burns 2004: 554, Cohen 2004, Morris 2004: 78, Jacobs 2006), the fact that
such direct addresses allow the chief executive to speak “on virtually any topic he
chooses, for as long as he wants, and without any editing,” (DiClerico 2000: 148),
would reasonably suggest that they may, in actuality, offer a president the widest
possible opportunity for moving public sentiment.
Indeed, it is likely due to this implied potential that every administration since
President Truman has increasingly invested in “advice from experts on lighting,
makeup, stage settings, camera angles, clothing (Edwards III & Wayne 1999:120-1)
and has increasingly incorporated full-time, professional speechwriters into the White
House, who have quantitatively been shown to significantly gorge public speeches
with crafty symbols of unity, “bland reassurances and soaring platitudes” (Deering,
Sigelman & Saunders 2002: 82. See Hult & Walcott 2002: 57, Teten 2003: 342) and
who have, arguably, transformed “even such speeches as the State of Union address,
where presidents have generally laid out their policy agenda [into] pseudo-events
designed to promote a president’s popularity and image” (Waterman et al. 1999: 103).
But what have been the results of these strategic efforts and cunning presidential
rhetoric?
17
The Effects of Speaking Out
Categorically, the most striking and ironic observation persistent in the empirical data
is the indication that ever since presidents have sought to more regularly address the
mass public, the size of their audience has been steadily declining (Foote 1990, Baum
& Kernell 1999). Figure 3, for example, clearly shows the diminishing spectatorship
of prime-time, televised presidential addresses and largely explains the notable
tendency of presidential staffs to now plan State of Union addresses so as to “avoid
pre-empting prime time on the night that offers the current season’s most popular
shows” (Edwards III & Wayne 1999: 121):
Figure 3: Average Percentage of Households Watching Prime-Time Presidential TV
Appearances, 1969-98
Source: Baum & Kernell 1999: 100
Undoubtedly, Americans’ lack of political interest is not a novel idea. Previous
studies have infamously shown, for example, that whilst 75 percent of Americans in
the early 1990s could name George H. W. Bush’s least favourite vegetable (broccoli),
only few could hazard a guess at his stand on specific tax policy (see Edwards III,
Wattenburg & Lineberry 1998: 153, Bennett 1980: 44). In this context, however, the
18
public’s lack of attention fundamentally limits a president’s scope for leading public
sentiment. Simply put, it seems unreasonable to surmise that a president can
significantly influence mass public opinion if the majority of Americans are not
listening to him in the first place (Brace & Hinckley 1993: 387, Barrett 2005: 9,
Edwards III 2003a: 163).
Needless to say, this is not to automatically imply that a president cannot impact the
views of those individuals who are attentive to his addresses. On the contrary, these
“margins can be vital to a president’s success” (Edwards III 2003a: 165) and could,
theoretically, move the chief executive from a position of overall unpopularity to one
where he is commanding majority approval (Kernell 1997: 190). However, although
some earlier experimental studies, specifically those investigating public attitudes
towards President Carter’s Iran hostage crisis and towards President Reagan’s general
policy stances, did suggest that presidential support for an initiative could encourage
an attentive individual to favourably alter his or her opinion (Sigelman 1980, Conover
& Sigelman 1982 and Thomas & Sigelman 1985), subsequent research has widely
revealed critical constraints and conditions to effective presidential influence
(Edwards III 2000a: 49).
To start with, analysis undertaken by Welch (2003a: 347) into the level of public
‘receptiveness’ following Ronald Reagan’s legendary public addresses has
quantitatively revealed that successful message communication, or ‘recall,’ tends to
be group-specific, hinging on idiosyncratic factors such as the viewer’s educational
background (see also Mueller 1973, DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach’s 1989), thereby
19
implying that a “president has limited success in getting his message [equally] across
to the public.”
Even more imperatively, a plethora of systematic and empirical research has now
come to suggest that, even after successful ‘reception,’ the likelihood that a
presidential speech will result in a significant response from Americans, vis-à-vis
public opinion shifts, is only modest and severely contingent on exogenous factors
(Edwards III 2000a: 49). In particular, whilst Ragsdale (1984) initially claimed that a
televised presidential address could allegedly muster a short-term 3 percentage-points
jump in approval ratings, Brace & Hinckley’s (1992: 60) more recent refinement has
shown that the positive impacts of presidential speeches on subsequent approval
ratings were only apparent after ‘major’ speeches and only in a president’s first term
in office.
Equally discouraging have been the observations from Cohen and Hamman’s (2003:
412) research, which vitally concluded that economic policy and domestic policy
speeches, which by nature tend to contain bad news, “are ambiguous in that they
present a portrait of a president at once beleaguered but at the same time taking
action. Consequently, presidents should not be able to move public opinion by
speaking on such occasions” and should only expect to elicit a public response, if at
all, following more symbolic foreign policy speeches (Cohen 1997, Hill 1998,
Rockman 2006: 46). Once again, however, the overall degree of this limited potential
warrants further questioning given the fact that, historically, even superbly
magnificent foreign policy speeches, such as George H. W. Bush’s address declaring
20
American victory in the Gulf, will only initially be heard by approximately 43 percent
of the public (Kernell 1997: 131-2)
Moreover, most ostensible and affirmative from the systematic evidence, is the
verdict that public reactions from presidential speeches, on the off-chance they occur,
will generally work to only reinforce previous predispositions (Glaros & Miroff 1983,
Thomas & Sigelman 1985). Indeed, extensive quantitative examinations undertaken
by Page & Shapiro (1985, 1992), Wanta (1991) and Zaller (1992), for example, have
all paradoxically revealed that a president must already be enjoying high public
approval ratings prior to making a speech for it to potentially boost his popularity.
Evidently, even engagement in arduous domestic travel to directly target and allure
specific constituents, as illustrated by President Bush’s monthly polls from August
2005 through January 2006 (Cohen 2006: 549), will offer little antidote for this
critical constraint. Rather as suggested by Sigelman & Sigelman (1981), who found
that ‘disapprovers’ of an already unpopular president tend to exhibit stronger opinion
changes than those approving of his presidency, it may even be the case that
presidential speechmaking entails grave dangers, at times even resulting in an
aggregate negative effect on public support (see also Edwards III 2000a: 49).
Either way, what is crystal-clear from the systematic analysis is that a chief executive
is significantly restricted in his capability to fundamentally lead public opinion via
speechmaking (Simon & Ostrom 1989). Considering the fact that those Americans
most attentive to presidential appeals are significantly more likely to originate from a
more politically-orientated, better educated and firmly opinionated sector of society
(see Welch 2000), particularly given the conventional wisdom of social psychology
21
asserting that an individual must be interested in an issue yet not fully committed to
viewpoint for a speaker to exert some influence (Zaller 1994, Kiesler, Collins &
Miller 1969), it seems reasonable to conjecture that a president will inevitably, and in
most circumstances, be constrained by the unsusceptible nature of his audience (see
also Kuklinski, Metlay & Kay 1982, Zaller 1992, Edwards 2000a: 56). Certainly,
following deeper analysis into Reagan’s 10 televised addresses between 1981 and
1984, this time controlling for differences in the viewers’ age, gender, race, education,
and party affiliation so as to more accurately deduce real opinion changes, Welch
(2003b: 858) found that “when televised addresses did influence public opinion, they
frequently influenced opinion in just the opposite direction that the president would
have hoped! Of the five addresses that changed people’s approval of the
president…four of them worked to the detriment of the president’s approval ratings.”
So what does this all mean for a ‘public president’ heavily reliant on his ability to
shape public attitudes? Quite simply, presidents have “misperceive[d] the impact of
speeches on public opinion, overstating…the limited effect of going public” (Cohen
& Hamman 2003: 420).When analysed together, the brunt of empirical and
quantitative research into the effects of presidential speechmaking suggests that
presidents are severely limited in their ability to shape public opinion (Edwards 1987:
626). In stepping up to the bully pulpit, despite the unmediated and symbolic nature of
public addresses, and regardless of their image-enhancing and rhetoric strategies,
presidents can neither rely on facing an interested audience, nor can they expect
effective reception of their message. Even when they have overcome these obstacles,
opinion poll data indicates that a favourable public response will be significantly
conditional on exterior factors. All things considered, thus, it is clear that “the belief
22
in the bully pulpit’s power relies more on accumulated political folklore than on
systematic study of the influence of televised addresses on public opinion” (Welch
2003b: 854).
Rallies as Temporary Opportunities for Influence
Since Mueller’s (1973: 13) definition of a ‘rally event,’ there has been a wealth of
political literature assigned to analysing the temporary surges of presidential approval
that often follow times of national crisis (see Sigelman and Conover 1981, Zaller
1994). However, although ‘rally effects’ have been known to offer presidents
temporary political leverage and, thus, deserve to be acknowledged in this
examination (Lippmann 1949, Windt 1990, Edelman 1977, Rankin 2004: 65),
quantitative analysis has now widely confirmed that, as in normal times, Americans
“show little disposition toward rallying to support the president for its own
sake…Those who rally are those who have the lowest thresholds to overcome to
move to approval of the president” (Edwards III and Swenson 1997: 208-9. See Gould
2003: 230, Rockman 2006: 41).
Nonetheless, ‘rally effects’ are relevant because they introduce the idea of issue
salience as a critical force on presidential approval. Given that rallies, to some extent,
occur because “major international crises fundamentally change the context in which
the public views the president…[so that] rather than being judged on the basis of the
economy’s performance…their overall performance is judged primarily on the basis
of foreign policy” (Dimock 2004: 77), they evidently imply that the salience of certain
issues to the American public (and thus, the criteria for presidential approval ratings)
are vulnerable to external influence. In this manner, it seems reasonable to suppose
23
that a pragmatic public president may, in theory, be able to exploit the presence of
variable ‘issue salience’ in order to shape the public’s agenda and prime his own
popularity (see Druckman & Holmes 2004, Behr & Iyengar 1985, Aldrich, Griffin &
Rickershauser 2006: 232, Canes-Wrone 2004, 2005).
Whilst the analysis in this chapter has illustrated that a public president is
substantially limited in shaping how the public thinks, it has not yet tackled his
potential scope for influencing what the public think about. In need of deeper
investigation, however, the concept of ‘issue salience’ inevitably takes this analysis
into Chapter III: The Public Thinks for Itself.
24
Chapter III:
The Public Thinks for Itself
The Concept of Issue Salience: Why it Matters
Political scientists are well aware that, at any one time, members of the public will be
concerned with only a small selection of issues (see Converse 1964). Nonetheless, the
relative significance of these issues, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, evidently
seems subject to change (see also Edwards III, Wattenburg & Lineberry 1998: 344,
Canes-Wrone 2004, 2005). But what does this mean for a ‘public president’ seeking
to influence public opinion? In their time-series regression analysis of 25 national
opinion polls, Edwards III, Mitchell & Welch (1995: 108) studied precisely this
relationship between issue salience and presidential approval, formally showing that
the relative importance of issues may fluctuate and, more crucially, concluding that it
is the salience of an issue which will primarily determine its impact on presidential
evaluations. Simply put, “if foreign policy is especially salient and he ostensibly
handles foreign affairs well, his ratings will benefit. If economic policy is more
salient, however, even high ratings on foreign policy will not prevent him falling in
the polls if the economy sours” (Edwards III et al. 1995: 121-2).
Extrapolating from this, it would seem possible then that the presence of issue salience
could offer a president an alternative avenue for shaping public opinion. Specifically,
a chief executive may, theoretically, be able to strategically choose the issues with
which to engage the public, align the public’s agenda to his own and, thus, sculpt the
agenda of their representatives in Congress, arguably “one of the
president’s most important powers in the modern mediated environment” (Rankin
25
2004: 51. See also Moe & Teel 1970, Behr & Iyengar 1985, Edwards III 1980, 1989,
2000a: 36, Baumgartner & Jones 1993, Kingdon 1995, Flemming, Wood, and Bohte
1995, Edwards III & Wood 1999, Aldrich, Griffin & Rickershauser 2006: 232).
Indeed, such command over issue salience becomes an ever more enticing goal given
the wealth of systematic analysis and empirical evidence showing that Congressmen
will be significantly more likely to mull over the electoral consequences of their
legislative votes for policy of particularly salience to the public (see Schattschneider
1960, Miller & Stokes 1963, Cnudde & McCrone 1966, Matthews & Stimson 1970,
Mayhew 1974, Fiorina 1974, Kuklinski 1978, Rivers & Rose 1985, Brace & Hinckley
1992, Stimson, MacKuen, & Erikson 1994, 1995, Ringquist 1995, Hutchings 1998,
Quirk & Hinchliffe 1998, Kollman 1998, Brady, Canes-Wrone & Cogan 2000).
In other words, if a president can impact which issues are salient, not only could he
hypothetically tweak the criteria by which he is evaluated (Druckman & Holmes
2004, Canes-Wrone 2004, 2005), but his “popularity will translate into policy
influence” (Canes-Wrone & de Marchi 2002: 504. See also Collier & Sullivan 1995,
Covington & Kinney 1999, Cohen, Bond, Fleisher & Hamman 2000). But to what
extent can a president, in reality, take advantage of these possibilities?
With this question in mind, this chapter will analyse presidential scope for managing
issue salience and for deliberately framing issues or public debates so as to shape the
American public’s opinions and agenda. Following a brief examination into the nature
of public opinion, the chapter will present the underlying difficulties associated with
these strategies, including the problems of opinion interpretation and the persistent
prevalence of certain issues to the mass public. By making particular reference to the
26
challenges faced by both Bush I and Bush II, the chapter will proceed to show that, in
actuality, issue salience represents a further constraint to a chief executive’s ability to
shape public attitudes.
The Nature of Public Opinion
Psychologists have notoriously claimed that political socialization processes, through
which individuals form stable patterns of belief, judgement and values, “explaining
why some people value equality more than wealth, why others emphasize security and
authority over freedom” (Bennett 1980: 9) begin in early childhood (Edwards III,
Wattenburg & Lineberry 1998: 147). Accordingly, by defining public policy in ways
which fundamentally appeal to these embedded values, and in particular, by
connecting specific issues to a broader range of beliefs, rhetorical presidents and
speechwriters have frequently endeavoured to tactically use this feature of opinion
formation in moulding public attitudes toward certain policy (Lippmann 1949, Burke
1966, Barnet 1972, Edelman 1977: 44, Hart & Kendall 1996: 98). In 1979, for
example, President Carter emphasised the economic advantages of normalising U.S.
relations with China in hope of “increasing the salience of the action in the eyes of
many people who are more attentive to economic issues than to foreign policy
questions” (Bennett 1980: 18-9). Notwithstanding, however, framing debates in such
a way does have its setbacks.
Not only does ‘issue framing’ require heavy reliance on opinion polls, which tend to
be statistically hazardous and overtly sensitive to item marginals (Stimson 1999,
Traugott & Lavrakas 2000), but it also forces presidents to perilously depend on
27
pollsters to decompose and interpret their meaning (Kernell 1997: 224, Towle 2004).
Indeed, despite all his ‘issue framing’ attempts, more commonly remembered is
President Carter’s infamous 1977 energy crisis speech, in which he mistakenly relied
upon public opinion evaluations made by his private pollster, Cauddell and by many
other major national pollsters such as Louis Harris, advising him to “emphasise
conservation, sacrifice, and more modest economic expectations…[An] interpretation
of public mood [which] turned out to be much too simplistic, however, [as] the
majority feared economic cutbacks and restricted lifestyle even more strongly”
(Bennett 1980: 4. See also Skowronek 2006: 124-5). Consequentially, within a year of
the speech, Carter endured a near 20 percentage point drop in public approval ratings,
clearly illustrating both the dangers involved in strategic ‘issue framing’ (Phillips
1978: 11-2, Cohen & Dolan 2002, Quirk 2006: 139), and the limitations imposed by
an even more momentous obstacle to presidential influence: Americans’ enduring
concern about the national economy.
The Economy Speaks Louder than Words
Since John Mueller’s (1970) conclusion that the state of the economy and, in
particular, the level of unemployment, is the most critical determinant of presidential
evaluations, the supporting literature has burgeoned (e.g. Monroe 1978, MacKuen
1983, Ostrom and Simon 1985, Erikson 1989, Chappell 1991, Cohen 2001: 74). Now
widely agreeing that presidential performance ratings are primarily based on sociotropic rather than pocketbook attitudes towards the economy (Brace & Hinckley
2003: 171, Woessner 2005: 96, Cohen 2006), systematic research has evidently
implied that presidents' approval ratings and “fortunes are [inevitably] tied to their
success or sheer luck with the economy [even though] economic interdependence and
28
the emergence of the global economy have made [economic prosperity] less
obviously manipulatable” (Rockman 2006: 49). In this sense, thus, Americans’
economic perceptions may considerably (and unavoidably) constrain a public
president, whose political leverage is critically dependant upon his ability to maintain
popular support (Stimson 1976, Rozell 2003: 143, Jenkins-Smith, Silva & Waterman
2005, Quirk 2006: 157). Moreover, though Mueller's (1970) definitive research also
suggested that war and international events will bear some weight on presidential
evaluations, it takes only a brief glance into American history, typified by George H.
W. Bush's destiny, to illustrate the limited scope of attempting to overshadow
economic concerns with heroic foreign policy endeavors (Barnet 1972, Edelman
1977: 44, Carmines & Stimson 1980, Druckman & Holmes 2004).
To be sure, historian Stephen Graubard’s (1992: xi-8, 2004) criticisms of the elder
Bush’s exaggerated and manipulative rhetoric during his Gulf War escapade,
associating himself with “Winston Churchill, making Saddam Hussein out to be Adolf
Hitler…hoping he would be able to exhibit the resolve his public image so lacked,”
certainly did strike a chord with other political scholars (Ronell 1993:13-16, Campbell
1993, Pollock 1994, Maltese 2003: 157). However, whilst victory in the Gulf elevated
the “wimpyman” (Genovese 2003: 19) to unprecedented heights of public approval in
the short-run, within a year of the event, the stronger force of economic fear
inevitably nudged Bush down a forty-eight point drop in his approval ratings
(Burnham 1993: 21, Shogan 1999: 191, Dimock 2004: 81, Quirk 2006: 156). In spite
of his staged ‘grocery store tours’ and extensive local campaigns, Bush could not
create a ‘spectacle’ of a man in touch with the real woes of the American people
(Gould 2003: 206, Miroff 2006: 269) and his agenda, namely “keep[ing] the empire
29
going by constantly searching for very small enemies anywhere and everywhere”
(Vidal 1999: 72), could not be reflected onto the masses (see Farrar-Myers 2002).
Rather, Americans had firmly established their (economic) priorities and Bush could
simply not “use the bully pulpit effectively to reframe the debate” (Conley 2002:
104).
Thus, when “the hero from Kennebunkport, Texas was sent home” (Vidal 1999: 75)
in 1992, he manifestly illustrated the difficulties associated with managing issue
salience and framing the public agenda. Furthermore, he provided substantial support
for the prevalent belief among social psychologists that ‘structural issues’ such as the
economy, which are characterised by “opinions fairly stable and constrained”
(Bennett 1980: 114), will be incessantly important to the American public and will
therefore be largely insusceptible to strategic framing attempts (Stimson 1999, Jacobs
et al. 2003).
Applying this same logic, it would seem that President George W. Bush’s futile
attempt at rallying the public behind Social Security Reform in spring 2005, despite
totalling expenditures in the range of $100 million and engaging in a 60-day-60-stop
campaign in hope of arousing public support, was all but destined to fail (Ross 2007:
22). Indeed, using path dependence theory and emphasising the fact that Social
Security in the United States has followed a path of linear expansion and progressive
institutionalisation since its inception, now covering over 90 percent of Americans,
Ross (2007: 13) resolutely contends that “going public, an investment of political
capital, forceful allies and a very well funded promotional campaign…are inadequate
30
predictors of major change in salient and popular programmes” (See also Jacobs
2006: 299-301).
Thus, rather than offering alternative opportunities for influencing mass opinion, it
seems that the presence of issue salience further compounds the trials faced by
modern, public presidents. Though Canes-Wrone (2004: 480, 2005) defends the
power of the bully pulpit, arguing that, by rendering the “impact of an appeal much
more dependant upon citizens’ views of the initiative…than of the president himself,”
pre-established public concerns could, ironically, strengthen the hand of an unpopular
president by, hypothetically, enabling him to rely on an issue’s salience to enlist
public support, her analysis essentially implies that any president (popular or
unpopular) can only potentially succeed in ‘going public’ by pushing an already
accepted and well-liked policy. In actuality, thus, her studies imply that “going public
may be a viable and attractive strategy for only a small number of legislative
proposals each congressional session” (Barrett 2005: 9. See also Brace & Hinckley
1993: 387, Cohen 1997, Hill 1998). Even more significantly, they reveal a president’s
fundamental limit to managing the relative salience of issues. And whilst some
commentators assert that “flow[ing] with the moving current of public sentiment”
(Stimson 1999: 12) is essential for later rhetorical leverage, it seems necessary to
question whether this “double edged sword” (Warshaw 2000: 298) has now largely
become a case of the tail wagging the dog?
The President’s Predicament
Indeed, given the apparent obstacles to shaping public attitudes, it would seem
reasonable to expect that ‘pandering’ to Americans’ preferences and, in particular,
31
making “congruent statements on highly salient issues in order to claim credit for
responding to the public’s most urgent needs” (Rottinghaus 2006: 721-2. See Brace &
Hinckley 1992, Jacobs 1992, Geer 1996) would ultimately become the most viable
option for a public president seeking to enhance his prestige. It is thus not a
coincidence to observe the reality, as noted by Rottinghaus (2006: 729), that “the link
between public preferences and presidential rhetoric is fairly robust, edging towards
‘delegate’ representation,” with 70% of presidential statements made between the
presidencies of Eisenhower and Clinton, for example, representing a direct reflection
of preceding majority public opinion.
Broadly supported by alternative research undertaken by Canes-Wrone & Shotts
(2004: 701), which illustrated that whilst presidents may occasionally be able to
reveal their personal views for non-salient issues such as foreign aid, they will
unavoidably end up following public opinion on issues “highly familiar to voters in
their everyday lives,” the existing data certainly seems to refute the widespread
concerns that the distinct incentives of modern, public presidents to manipulate public
opinion have presumably resulted in a decline in ‘democratic responsiveness’ (Jacobs
& Shapiro 2000). Rather, empirical evidence yet again illustrates that public
presidents are substantially restricted in their abilities to exploit public sentiment
(Geer 1996).
All in all, thus, it seems that modern public presidents are far from promised an easy
ride by ‘going public.’ As has been illustrated so far, American chief executives are
considerably deficient in their abilities to shape both how Americans think about an
issue and essentially what issues they will think about. Though a president may, to
32
some extent, successfully operate as ‘facilitator of change,’ keeping in line with preexisting public views and concerns, he will almost certainly fail to be a ‘director’ of
public opinion (Edwards III & Wayne 1999: 95, Edwards III 2003a: 159). Moreover,
as shall be shown in the following chapter, this conclusion can be extended to explain
even the avant-garde “liberal winds of the 1960s” (Stimson 1999: 69) and the ‘Reagan
Revolution’ of the 1980s. Contrary to popular belief, they too were a product of
compatible, pre-existing mood and not an upshot of enlivening presidential leadership
(Davis 1992; Mayer 1992; Edwards III 1996, 2000a: 51-3, Welch 2003b). On this
note, however, the study must move into Chapter IV: The Underlying Forces of
Public Opinion.
33
Chapter IV:
The Underlying Forces of Public Opinion
Following an examination into Ronald Reagan’s infamous public relations efforts and
alleged success in masterfully leading public opinion, this chapter seeks to examine
the presence of underlying forces within American society; that is, factors beyond
executive control which fundamentally mould public attitudes. As will be shown,
whilst Ronald Reagan benefited from a complementary ‘national mood’ in 1980, the
existence of deep-seated public preferences, paradoxical expectations and adverse
levels of political trust, inevitably reflected in Americans’ political views, will, by
nature, work to curb presidential scope for shaping public opinion. The overall
analysis in this chapter, therefore, provides further evidence of the significant
challenges to effectively influencing public attitudes and thus, of the core limitation to
the public presidency.
Ronald Reagan: The Real Secret Behind the Charm
Pundits, analysts and journalists alike have long labelled Ronald Reagan ‘the Great
Communicator,’ the “most persuasive political speaker of our time” (Erickson 1985:
1) and the initiator of the 1980s conservative revolution which engulfed the minds of
the American public (Greenstein 1983, Denton 1988, Ritter & Henry 1992: 93, Ritter
1994: 2, Black 1996: 113, Troy 2002: 141, Welch 2003b: 871, Graubard 2004: 547,
Tulis 2006: 80). Utilising his previous Hollywood experience, Reagan certainly
sought to strategically lead the nation through a series of spectacles, frequently
presenting Americans with a president who, “even though in his seventies, rode
horses and exercised vigorously, a president who liked to quote (and thereby identify
34
himself with) movie tough guys such as Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone”
(Miroff 2006: 262). Produced “with as much care as an Academy Award show”
(Gould 2003: 195), Reagan’s symbol-laden speeches and public addresses are
believed to have been particularly influential on public attitudes (Henry 1991: 74,
Smith & Smith 1994: 233). Cunningly composed, “the villains in [his] tales ranged
from Washington bureaucrats to Marxist dictators, the heroes…turned out to resemble
Reagan himself” (Miroff 2006: 262), often creating “the illusion of having caused
great events to happen” (Graubard 1992: 28-9). Accordingly, thus, Reagan’s
appearances and speeches have repeatedly been broken down, analysed, criticised and
glorified by commentators of the public presidency, who have primarily sought to
expose his ingenious attempts at strategically charming the nation (Edwards III 1987,
1996, 2000a, Goodnight 1996: 122-4). But “in all this, they assumed Reagan
influenced public opinion” (Welch 2003b: 871).
Indeed, whilst pioneering an investigation into the presence of a collective American
‘national mood’, Stimson (1999: 69-70) rather contrastingly arrived at the conclusion
(as illustrated in Figure 4) that:
“the increasing conservatism of American life began in the mid-1970s, grew steadily,
and was fully in place before the election of Ronald Reagan…Reagan was
beneficiary of a conservative mood, not due any credit for creating it…the Great
Communicator’s talents at moving public opinion have been considerably oversold.
The ‘revolution’ that bears his name produced a more liberal public than the one that
elected him.”
35
Figure 4: Estimated Policy Mood, 1956-1996: Original and Smoothed
Source: Stimson 1999: 68
Buttressing a plethora of more discrete examinations into the policy preferences of the
late-1970s American public (see Smith 1981, 1990, Page & Shapiro 1992: 136, Davis
1992; Mayer 1992, Edwards III 1996, Gould 2003: 197), Stimson’s analysis thereby
provides crucial evidence that, rather than effectively “unify[ing] most Americans”
(Smith & Smith 1994: 233) through his charisma and crafty rhetoric (as is commonly
assumed in the literature), Ronald Reagan, in 1980, “was the agent around which
already existing conservative thought coalesced and rallied” (Edwards 2000a: 51). In
fact, as is also evident in figure 4, more detailed observation of available poll data
considering the shifts in Americans’ specific policy preferences during the course of
Reagan’s presidency, ironically uncovers that mass public opinion, regarding both
domestic and foreign policy, moved counter to Reagan’s own position during the
36
1980s (for example Schneider 1985, Wattenburg 1991: 95-101). Extrapolating, it
seems most likely for this reason that Welch (2003b: 858), after examining viewers’
‘responses’ to Reagan’s televised addresses (as mentioned in Chapter II), found that
“of the five addresses that changed people’s approval of the president…four of them
worked to the detriment of the president’s approval ratings.” Indeed, contrary to
popular belief amongst critics of the rhetorical presidency, the empirical evidence
analysing the effects of Reagan’s rhetoric would clearly illustrate that “whatever
Ronald Reagan’s skills as a communicator, one ability he clearly did not possess was
the capacity to induce lasting changes in American policy preferences” (Mayer 1992:
127). Rather, the public was again thinking for itself (King & Schudson 1995: 149).
Underlying Cycles of ‘National Mood’
Aside from refuting claims that Reagan successfully moulded Americans’ attitudes,
Stimson’s (1999: xx) analysis has proven even more critical for the study of
presidential influence over public opinion. The presence of a non-malleable,
underlying national mood, strong enough to force ‘global reversals’ of public
preferences, undoubtedly indicates a critical and inescapable limitation for any public
president seeking to shape mass opinion (see also Cronin & Genovese 2004: 19).
Moreover, the markedly cyclical nature of this national mood, as noted by Stimson
(1999: 34) and explained by the fact that political “regimes are always perceived to
fail in the long-term…Even if policy A works brilliantly to solve problem A, the mass
electorate will ultimately reject the regime because it fails to perform on some other
problem B,” by extension suggests a further constraint on a president’s ability to enlist
public support and, thus, successfully ‘go public.’ That is, that Americans will tend to
37
exhibit paradoxical and irrational expectations so as to inevitably grow disapproving
of political leaders over time (DiClerico (2000:126). But to what extent does this
affect the opportunities of today’s public president?
The Inevitable Decline in Support I:
The Expectations Gap and Presidential Decay Curves
Today, the ‘presidential dilemma,’ as Genovese (2003: 2) argues, is that “we expect
and demand that presidents perform like Superheroes…but constitutionally and
politically they rarely resemble heroes but are more likely to be Gullivers enchained.”
By expecting the impossible, we “inevitably shall be disappointed” (Brownlow 1969:
35) and in turn, should anticipate a gradual deterioration in presidential evaluations
over time (see Nelson 2006: 12, Rockman 2006: 40, Sinclair 2000: 70).
Formally, by observing quantitative analysis investigating the ‘expectationsperceptions differential,’ such as that undertaken by Waterman, Jenkins-Smith &
Silva (1999) which statistically concluded that an expectations gap will hamper a
president’s public standing (see also Jenkins-Smith, Silva & Waterman 2005,
Tatalovich & Engeman 2002: 218), together with systematic studies, such as those by
Stimson (1976) and Raichur & Waterman (1993), which indicated that the
presidential expectations gap widens over the course of each term, it would seem a
rational surmise that presidential approval is likely to plummet over the course of
each presidency. Sure enough, the empirical evidence, as portrayed in Figure 5 below,
which registers the public approval ratings for presidents Eisenhower through George
38
H. W. Bush upon assuming and upon leaving office, manifestly shows a notable
pattern of decline in presidential approval over each president’s tenure in office
(DiClerico 2000: 127):
Figure 5: Presidential Public Approval Ratings
90
80
70
Approval Rating
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Ford
Carter
Reagan
Bush
President
Support Upon
Assuming Office
Support Upon Leaving
Office
Source of Data: DiClerico 2000: 127
Of the eight presidents considered, only Reagan and Bush left the Oval Office with a
higher approval rating than at the start of their presidencies, but as DiClerico
(2000:126) points out, given the fact that they both entered with approval ratings of
51 percent (a rating below that of any chief executive serving from 1953 to 1993) and
taking into account that their average approval in the final year was still five points
and twenty-four points below their first year ratings, respectively, this seems far from
worthy of praise. Rather, it signals an underlying restriction upon a public president,
who will ultimately lose his capacity to get things done as his ratings wither away
39
(Cronin 1974, Hess 1976: 43, Buchanan 1978, Light 1983, Moe 1985, Waterman
1993, Rose 1997).
What is more, given the unyielding nature of public expectations, it would seem that a
president will, once again, be largely unable to take action and lessen the severity of
this constraint. Indeed, besides the presidential prototype and social psychology
literature, which brands the expectations gap an unavoidable product of embedded
early-childhood images of an ideal president (see Bem & McConnell 1970, Kinder &
Fiske 1986, Jenkins-Smith, Silva & Waterman 2005), the widely documented holding
of mutually exclusive expectations and policy preferences amongst the ill-informed
American public, has made it all but impossible for presidents to be appropriately
evaluated in light of their complex political surroundings (Edwards III 1983,
Gronbeck 1996: 44, Waterman, Wright & St. Clair 1999: 65, Dimock 2004: 71,
Nelson 2006: 12).
In particular, considering the level of diversity in American society, which guarantees
that most policy decisions will likely hurt some segment of the nation (Cohen 2006:
549), and given the outcomes of substantive systematic research showing that
presidential approval begin to suffer as soon as a voter notices deviation between his
preferences and implemented legislation (Zaller 1992, 2004), it is somewhat
unsurprising that most presidents will fall prey to the presidential ‘decay curve’ and
“watch helplessly as their public support levels decline” (Towle 2004: 112. See Bond
& Fleisher 1990, Brace & Hinckley 2003: 170).
40
Not to be mistaken, whilst the ‘overpromising syndrome’ and the generally exalted
spirit of recent presidential rhetoric (Shogan 1999: 2, Laracey 2002: 163, Gould 2003:
205, Jenkins-Smith, Silva & Waterman 2005, Rockman 2006: 40, Burns 2006: 154),
has, at times, accelerated these plunges and must therefore bear some of the blame for
“lofty” public expectations (Jones 1994: 281), empirical data evidently confirms that
“the decline itself appears to be inevitable” DiClerico (2000: 126). In this sense, thus,
paradoxical public expectations present an inescapable and central challenge to
presidential scope in cultivating popular support and thus, in effectively ‘going
public.’ And this is not all. For also apparent in aggregate poll data measuring
presidential evaluations since the 1960s is a notable long-run, president-to-president
decline in public approval, inevitably implying that each incoming president must
begin his individual plummet in the polls from an increasingly unfavourable position
(Bond & Fleisher 1990: 179, Orren 1997).
The Inevitable Decline in Support II:
Diminishing Political Trust
Indeed, the sense that “manipulation is repugnant in a representative democracy is an
important check on contemporary presidents and one that haunts the public
presidency” (Jacobs & Burns 2004: 554). Over the past four decades, American
federal government has routinely over-asserted its ability to solve the nation’s social
problems, declaring but subsequently losing “‘wars’ against poverty, racism, inflation,
stagflation, illegal drugs, and cancer” (Hetherington & Globetti 2006: 239).
Correspondingly, since the mid-1960s, when approximately three-quarters of the
public exhibited trust towards the government, the degree of political confidence has
nose-dived to levels as low as 25 percent, rarely hitting even the 40 percent mark, and
41
having particularly grim consequences for the modern public president (Citrin 1974,
Citrin & Green 1986, Nye, Zelikow & King 1997, Mansbridge 1997, Aberbach &
Rockman 1999, Jenkins-Smith, Silva & Waterman 2005).
Explicitly, as has been formally shown in the research of Hetherington & Globetti
(2006: 245), “political trust measured in one year has a statistically significant effect
on feelings about the incumbent president in a later year.” In this way, thus, the
consistently lower baseline of political trust since the 1960s, has, quite predictably
and unavoidably, manifested itself in individual presidential evaluations, propelling
the notable long-term decline in presidential approval ratings over this time and thus,
implying a further underlying obstacle to preserving popular support (Jenkins-Smith,
Silva & Waterman 2005. See also Hart & Kendall 1996: 100-1, Aberbach &
Rockman 1999).
Furthermore, given that individuals “engaging in information processing are cognitive
misers” (Stimson 1999: 25), significantly dependant on the ‘source’ of a message as
the major signal of its credibility (see Zaller 1991: 1217, Druckman 2001, Woessner
2005), it would be reasonable to conjecture that this pattern of sinking political trust
approval will likely lessen the potential impact of presidential rhetoric (Hovland, Janis
& Kelly 1953, Druckman 1998, Thurow 2004: 15). Certainly, it could very well be for
this reason that, as discussed in Chapter II, an unpopular president is unlikely to be
able to use the bully pulpit to elicit a positive public response (Stimson & Stimson
1981, Page & Shapiro 1992).
42
Diminishing political trust, by inevitably gravitating presidential approval ratings and
restraining presidential capacity for leading the American public, therefore represents
an auxiliary impediment to the public presidency. Combined with the presence of an
evidently sovereign ‘national mood’ and contradictory public expectations, it signals
one of a number of underlying forces in American society, which, by nature, sculpt
public attitudes and presidential appraisals at their very root. In this way, thus, these
inescapable factors, once again, identify the fundamental limitation to the public or
rhetorical presidency; the limited extent to which the American president can
effectively lead public opinion.
43
Chapter V: Concluding Remarks
The Fallacy Revealed
“Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single
force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him”
(Woodrow Wilson, cited in Brace & Hinckley 2003: 168)
The need to build bridges to the mass public has long been a central objective of the
American president. Certainly, “without public support for their programs, presidents
will inevitably falter in office and fail to be re-elected” (Warshaw 2000: 296). But
observed in an age when “‘being presidential’ is about more than pure substance and
action…it is about style and symbolism, image and imagination...the photo, the
connection made with the public” (Gregg II 2004: 89), Wilson’s words evidently
relate more than just conventional democratic wisdom. Rather, according to many
scholars of the modern American presidency, they epitomise the ominous tale of
today’s ‘public’ president who, armed with a mighty entourage of pollsters,
speechwriters and advertising gurus, is said to be, in effect, merging “power-aspersuasion inside Washington with power-as-public opinion manipulation outside
Washington” (Heclo 2003: 128).
But by wholly emphasising presidential efforts at strategically shaping public opinion,
critics of the public presidency, calling it “demagoguery in its worst guises” (Tulis
1987: 114) have inevitably “made numerous inferences regarding the impact of
presidential rhetoric on public opinion… virtually never provid[ing] evidence for their
inferences” (Edwards & Eshbaugh-Soha 2000: 4). As imperatively shown throughout
44
this study, on the other hand, deeper analysis into the effects of presidential rhetoric
and the tangible scope for opinion leadership, confirms significant “limits to which
public opinion can be manipulated through rhetoric and symbolism alone” (Bennett
1980: 4).
For one thing, “no matter how effective presidents may be as a speaker, or how well
their speeches are written, they must still contend with the receptivity of the audience”
(Edwards III 2003a: 163). Yet an examination into the quantitative and empirical data,
assessing the measured impact of presidential speechmaking on public opinion,
clearly reveals that public presidents are severely hindered in this respect. In reality,
when taking the microphone and stepping onto the bully pulpit, modern presidents
face an increasingly disinterested audience and, in actuality, only a minority of the
national public. Moreover, detailed observations of opinion ‘reactions,’ following
even the most crafty and spectacular presidential speeches, evidently show that these
few attentive viewers will, on the whole, only ‘respond’ to a strict subset of public
appeals and (in the good fortune they do) will typically be moved in line with their
previous dispositions.
Indeed, even when undertaking the more modest task of influencing what the public
think about, that is, by framing the public debate and strategically raising the salience
of certain issues so as to mould the policy agenda and prime their own evaluations, it
would largely appear that American chief executives are operationally confined to
acting as facilitators of existing opinion and not as leaders of public sentiment
(Edwards III 2003a: 159). Quite simply, “people think about politics. Not often. Not
systematically. But they do” (Stimson 1999: 1) and the structural issues of prime
45
concern to the American public, particularly the state of the national economy, which
inevitably provide the foundations of presidential evaluations (despite often lying
beyond the scope of practicable manageability), clearly cannot be easily eclipsed or
manoeuvred. Unable to truly command public opinion and momentously “constrained
by the norms and institutional rules” implied by the ‘going public’ game (Jacobs &
Burns 2004: 554), it is for this very reason that presidents have often ‘pandered’ to
Americans’ pre-established views.
Certainly, more detailed analysis into the marked shifts in public attitudes during the,
misguidedly termed, ‘Reagan Revolution’, supports this conclusion, uncovering a
president who, in spite of mammoth “public relations efforts, polling, focus groups,
media manipulation, and other attempts at image control” (Waterman, Wright & St.
Clair 1999: 53) was fundamentally unable to move public opinion-at least in his
favour, that is. Rather, investigation into the aggregate, long-term trends of mass
sentiment exposes the presence of an underlying, autonomous ‘national mood,’ which
based upon paradoxical public preferences and expectations, has implied, as
Schlesinger (1986) claims, that “disappointment is the universal modern malady”
(cited in Stimson 1999: 35). Exacerbated by the general erosion of political trust since
the 1960s, these deep-seated, contradictory preferences and expectations have
principally worked to thwart presidential approval ratings and limit the potential for
public acquiescence. In other words, they provide substantial evidence of the
fundamental and inevitable challenges to shaping public attitudes, an ability upon
which the fate of a ‘rhetorical’ president ultimately hangs.
46
Evidently, thus, it seems quite clear that “although presidents may be expected to
engage in public relations, and, depending upon one’s dispositions, even forgiven for
doing so, they will succeed neither in the country nor in Washington if they pursue
their public image to the neglect of active problem solving” (Kernell 1997: 142).
Why? Because, in reality, the American president is significantly restricted in his
scope for stirring the “sleeping giant of public opinion” (Edwards III, Wattenburg &
Lineberry 1998: 153). And this, no doubt, is the fallacy of ‘going public.’
47
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