The Evolution of Political Rhetoric

The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research, Volume 6

Robert X. Browning

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781612496214
• eBook ISBN: 9781612496221
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Teaching Social Science
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Volume 6 of The Year in C-SPAN Archives Research series focuses on the rapidly changing rhetoric coloring American politics. An increasingly polarized electorate combined with advances in technology have led to a combative and pitched rhetoric through more and more outlets. Each chapter is interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on communication studies, political science, history, and other fields.

Using the extensive collection of the C-SPAN Video Library, chapters cover the highly visible Thomas and Kavanaugh judicial nomination hearings as well as the ongoing debate around impeachment. Other pieces focus on the rhetoric of the 2008 Wall Street crisis, presidential campaign announcements, White House press conferences, floor time by women in the House of Representatives, the use of Twitter by legislators, and the puzzle of zero population growth. Collectively, they paint a picture of how Congress and the president approach the broad topic of political rhetoric using C-SPAN video as the basis for their research.

The C-SPAN Video Library is unique because there is no other research collection that is based on video research of contemporary politics. Methodologically distinctive, much of the research uses new techniques to analyze video, text, and spoken words of political leaders. No other book examines such a wide range of topics—from immigration to climate change to race relations—using video as the basis for research.

PART 1

A Look at C-SPAN Programming With All Its “Madisonian Passion”

James A. McCann, Discussant

In any high school or college civics class in the United States, the first few lectures of a semester are sure to focus on the formal architecture of American governing institutions—how leaders are chosen, which branch has which particular rights and responsibilities, and how the three branches check and balance each other. No understanding of policymaking and representation in the United States would be complete without an appreciation of these powers and dynamics.

Introductory textbooks on American politics, however, tend at times to cover the guidelines of the U.S. Constitution as if one were detailing the workings of an assembly line or supply chain (… if the president has not signed a congressional bill within 10 days, excluding Sundays, it still becomes a law provided that Congress has not adjourned, but if Congress has adjourned, the bill has been pocket vetoed …). Such treatments can make the practice of politics seem formulaic and sterile, which, I suspect, leaves many students uninspired and unengaged.

But if one actually witnesses what checking and balancing looks like in “real life”—the polarizing reactions within Congress over various presidential actions, for example, or the rancorous disagreements over the qualifications of one or another nominee for the federal bench—one cannot help but be reminded of James Madison’s classic characterization of human nature in politics as laid out in Federalist No. 10. An individual’s reason was said to be inherently subjective and connected to his or her “self-love.” Opinions and passions consequently “will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.” With its complete and unedited coverage of congressional debates and presidential activities, C-SPAN programming can make politics come alive, with all of its “Madisonian passion” on display.

As political scientists, our task is to follow in Madison’s footsteps by considering how representative institutions perform, and what the central dimensions of conflict between the branches tell us about the health of American democracy. The three chapters in Part 1 all contribute important insights in this regard. The first two focus on Supreme Court confirmations: Nadia E. Brown, Sarah Gershon, and Lauren Hanson-Figueroa’s “More Than Partisans: The Role of Identity in the Justice Kavanaugh Hearings” and Joseph Sery’s “Competing and Recurring Narratives: Crafting Credibility in the Confirmation Hill-Thomas and Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings.” The third considers the dynamics of impeachment: Matthew L. Bergbower and Robert Van Sickel’s “Partisanship Over Principle: The ‘Logic’ of Congressional Impeachment Inquiries.”

In their analysis of the Senate hearings on the Kavanaugh nomination, Nadia Brown and her collaborators question the conventional wisdom about the behavior of senators. Conventional accounts hold that disagreements over Kavanaugh’s fitness for the Supreme Court were all about partisanship. The final vote on the floor of the Senate certainly demonstrated a deep partisan divide, with only one Democratic senator breaking ranks to support the nominee. Brown and colleagues do not question the salience of partisan identities in this context. But they suggest that partisanship was not the only relevant identity in play during the hearings.

With the #MeToo movement in the backdrop, the chapter contends that gender identities were also key to understanding the discourse and positioning surrounding the hearings. As the authors state, “cultural meanings were not lost on the Senators.” A systematic compilation of comments raised at the hearings shows that Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to bring up issues of character and credibility when commenting on Brett Kavanaugh. For their part, Republican senators were much more inclined to write off criticism of Kavanaugh as “just politics,” while being careful not to indict—at least not directly—the character of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused the judge of sexual assault when they were both teenagers. Democrats were also much more likely than Republicans to bring up specific facts, particularly the events recalled from that encounter that had taken place several decades earlier.

Overall, the authors posit that the hearings gave senators an opportunity to advance certain representational styles that are linked to gender identities. Democrats supported Blasey Ford and opposed Kavanaugh. This is not front-page news. What this chapter shows is that the ways in which opposition or support was given spoke to longstanding identity groupings within the major parties. A natural extension of this work would be to compare the communication styles and representational roles that were on display during the Kavanaugh hearings to similarly divisive Senate confirmation hearings from the pre-#MeToo era. The most relevant point of comparison would be the 1991 confirmation hearing for Clarence Thomas. The thesis that Brown and her colleagues put forward would lead us to expect significant differences in the way senators referred to gender during their debates.

In his chapter on crafting credibility, Joseph Sery offers this sort of comparison between the Thomas and Kavanaugh hearings, though without focusing on the kinds of gendered roles and identifications that Brown, Gershon, and Hanson-Figueroa consider. Sery instead examines the dynamics of self-presentation for the main protagonists: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, Brett Kavanaugh, and Christine Blasey Ford. The theoretical grounding for this piece is the narrative paradigm, which holds that individuals who are exposed to complex scenarios with crosscutting themes actively seek to construct a coherent storyline. We are storytellers at heart, Sery writes. In both 1991 and 2018, there were dueling narratives—Hill versus Thomas, and Blasey Ford versus Kavanaugh. To be compelling, the details of a narrative need to fit together well (what Sery refers to as “narrative probability”), and the narrative should resonate with the everyday experiences of the audience receiving these messages (which Sery labels “narrative fidelity”).

Drawing from C-SPAN coverage of the Thomas hearings, Sery notes that Anita Hill portrayed herself as a responsible civil servant subjected to inappropriate sexually charged comments and overtures. Defenders of Thomas in the Senate pushed back against this narrative, questioning the credibility of Hill’s recollections. This, Sery suggests, was sufficient to advance Thomas’s narrative—that is, that he was being targeted unfairly by activists and was subject to a “high-tech lynching” through the mass media.

Sery then sees history repeating itself in the contrasting narratives that Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh presented 27 years later. Without overtly charging that Blasey Ford was lying, several Republican senators questioned her version of events, poking holes in the narrative. Kavanaugh’s narrative—that the events Blasey Ford described never happened—was a cleaner storyline. Sery credits the Republican senators who rose to his defense as being instrumental in solidifying this narrative, while at the same time not being perceived as demeaning Blasey Ford, since an independent (female) attorney questioned her recollections in a respectful manner.

“Competing and Recurring Narratives” offers an engaging and persuasive case about the importance of narratives in political settings, where many competing considerations and values are in play and the stakes are high. Sery provides much thick description of these two monumentally significant confirmation hearings. Future research could fruitfully build on the approach that Sery takes, assessing dueling narratives in other highly contentious areas—for example, Senate hearings on controversial cabinet appointments. Ultimately, as more cases of crafting credibility are considered, one might approach a general theory of narrative dynamics.

The third chapter, Matthew Bergbower and Robert Van Sickel’s “Partisanship Over Principle,” examines another key dimension of interbranch checking and balancing—the evolution of congressional efforts to impeach President Trump. Focusing in particular on hearings and debates within the House Judiciary Committee, the authors examine not only successful cases of congressional impeachment—Nixon and Clinton—but also attempts to forward a bill of impeachment bill against Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, two chief executives who are not often brought up when impeachments are discussed.

The authors rightfully note that the Constitution is extraordinarily vague on the grounds for impeachment. This means that lawmakers have very wide discretion to interpret what is or is not an impeachable offense. Through a systematic inventory of statements from the Judiciary Committee, the chapter shows how growing partisan polarization in recent decades has shifted the standards for impeachment. In the 1970s when the impeachment of Richard Nixon was under consideration, there was an appreciable level of bipartisanship. Fast-forward to the Clinton years, and the authors find little to no bipartisanship. Impeachment has seemingly become, in short, less of tool that the legislative branch can employ to discipline an executive who has violated his oath of office and the public trust, and more of a display of partisanship.

This trend brings with it sobering implications for governance. In the final section of the chapter, Bergbower and Van Sickel discuss the implications of their findings for the Trump administration. At the time of their writing, the trial of Donald Trump in the Senate had just begun. In retrospect, the authors’ central thesis was well borne out in this case. President Trump was fully acquitted on an all-but-uniform party-line vote, with little fresh evidence being presented at the Senate trial, and even less deliberation. Much further work is needed to examine whether partisanship within Congress has truly undermined the original rationale for impeachment proceedings. If partisanship within the Senate now trumps more impartial judgments about what constitutes “high crimes and misdemeanors,” then it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the requisite supermajority to convict in the Senate could ever be attained. Might this turn of events make an imperial presidency even more imperial?

CHAPTER 1

MORE THAN PARTISANS

The Role of Identity in the Justice Kavanaugh Hearings

Nadia E. Brown, Sarah Gershon, and Lauren Hanson-Figueroa

During the #MeToo era,¹ claims against Judge Brett Kavanaugh were taken more seriously than those against Judge Clarence Thomas in 1991. However, the outcome remained the same. Two men who were publicly accused of sexual harassment and misconduct are currently sitting on the highest bench in the land. Both justices were nominated to the Court by Republican presidents and confirmed by a majority of Republican senators. During the nomination, Professor Christine Blasey Ford accused a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her at a drunken house party in 1982 when she was 15, whereas Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of repeated sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior while she worked for him in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division in the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in the early 1980s. Similarly, despite a span of almost 30 years, the GOP senators who questioned both Anita Hill and Blasey Ford consisted only of men.

However, unlike 1991, there were noticeable gendered differences in Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. In Blasey Ford’s case, the Senate Judiciary Committee includes four women—all of whom are Democrats in part because of the backlash to the all-male 1991 panel. Sex crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was hired by the Republican majority Judiciary Committee to cross-examine Blasey Ford. Political elites are aware of this legitimizing impact of having women in the room. As such, attorney Mitchell conducted the questioning of Blasey Ford for the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee. Having a woman address issues of sexual harassment and assault helped to legitimize the procedural process of the Kavanaugh hearing for the majority.

We argue that these cultural meanings were not lost on the senators who questioned Kavanaugh. While women are not the only victims of sexual assault, the issue is often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) connected with gender. For example, in her opening remarks during Blasey Ford’s testimony, Senator Feinstein (D-CA; Figure 1.1) stated:

There’s been a great deal of public discussion about the #MeToo movement today versus the Year of the Woman almost 27 years ago. But while young women are standing up and saying “No more,” our institutions have not progressed in how they treat women who come forward. Too often, women’s memories and credibility come under assault. In essence, they are put on trial and forced to defend themselves, and often revictimized in the process. (CSPAN, 2018, 0:19:27)

As Senator Feinstein’s statement illustrates, this debate was perceived as speaking to a broader discussion in the U.S. about women’s experiences.

While much of what we know about public opinion and sexual harassment is focused on voters, our study explores the differences among political elites’ view of sexual harassment and misconduct through the lens of the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings. While a great deal of research in gender politics focuses on whether women represent women’s interests in their congressional behavior, only four female senators—all Democrats—participated in this inquiry. As such, this event allows us to examine the representational styles of these (primarily male) senators on an issue associated with women against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement. In this context, the Democrats and Republicans were likely facing different gendered constraints. The Democrats—long associated with women and women’s issues—must illustrate their expertise and sensitivity on this issue and their commitment to ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• Part 1: A Look at C-Span Programming With all its “Madisonian Passion”
• Part 2: Portraits of Policy Discourse On C-Span
• Part 3: Looking Forward and Looking Back at Analysis of Communication Impacts
• About the Contributors
• Index