Rethinking the Rhetorical Presidency

Jeffrey Friedman, Shterna Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135755911
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In The Rhetorical Presidency, Jeffrey Tulis argues that the president's relationship to the public has changed dramatically since the Constitution was enacted: while previously the president avoided any discussions of public policy so as to avoid demagoguery, the president is now expected to go directly to the public, using all the tools of rhetoric to influence public policy. This has effectively created a "second" Constitution that has been layered over, and in part contradicts, the original one. In our volume, scholars from different subfields of political science extend Tulis's perspective to the judiciary and Congress; locate the origins of the constitutional change in the Progressive Era; highlight the role of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the mass media in transforming the presidency; discuss the nature of demagoguery and whether, in fact, rhetoric is undesirable; and relate the rhetorical presidency to the public's ignorance of the workings of a government more complex than the Founders imagined.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society.

The Practical Origins of the Rhetorical Presidency

Terri Bimes

Terri Bimes, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, [email protected], thanks Stephen Skowronek, Richard Ellis, and Bruce Miroff for their helpful suggestions.

ABSTRACT: As readers of The Rhetorical Presidency might expect, the Framers’ remarks at the Constitutional Convention revealed a deep concern about popular political ignorance—and a desire to shield the new government from it. However, when it came to designing the presidency, the Founders seem to have been less intent on insulating sitting presidents from the mass public than on guarding the presidents’ selection itself against elite factions that might take advantage of the public’s ignorance. The resulting constitutional structure left the actual relationship between the president and the public open-ended. In short order, even the most restrained, patrician presidents took advantage of the opportunity to invoke, and to shape, public opinion—setting the stage for Andrew Jackson’s, and his Democratic successors’, more aggressive presidential populism.

Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency revolutionized our understanding of the American presidency. According to Tulis, the modern presidency is at odds with its own founding principles; and by assuming a leading, demagogic role in national politics, modern presidents have wrought a fundamental transformation in the polity itself.

The Founders’ constitution, in Tulis’s view, provided the theoretical basis of presidential practice stretching from George Washington to William McKinley. Presidents were to avoid rhetoric meant to appeal to the masses on matters of public policy. Presidents were therefore, at first, “public” figures mainly in the sense of making ceremonial speeches, producing inaugural addresses, and submitting annual messages to Congress; but they were not “popular” leaders (Ceaser et al. 1982, 238) in the sense of leading, following, or claiming to follow public opinion.

Woodrow Wilson, according to Tulis, articulated a theory of presidential leadership that broke sharply with the original understanding of the president’s constitutional role. The new, Wilsonian view “prescribed” popular leadership by the president as strongly as the first constitution had “proscribed” it (Tulis 1987, 5). Wilson’s theory fundamentally transformed the constitutional order. Yet since the original, formal constitutional structure has remained in place, the result, in Tulis’s view, has been the uneasy coexistence of opposing theories of the president’s place in the political system.

The idea that the current order embodies dueling conceptions of appropriate presidential leadership captures an important feature of contemporary American politics. The expectation that the president will routinely attempt to rally the public behind his policies is coupled with discomfort when the president fails to stay above the political fray. The concept of dual constitutional orders has also served as a motivating example in other scholarship, such as Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek’s (2004) treatment of institutional change, in which collisions among inconsistent political orders drive political development.

From the start, however, presidential practice highlighted the difficulties in preventing presidents from engaging in popular leadership, regardless of the original theory of the president’s public role. Even the earliest presidents took actions that opened the door to the later populist rhetoric of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, James Polk, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, and other nineteenth-century Democrats. While, in the twentieth century, Wilson did much to lay out the theoretical foundations for popular presidential leadership, he drew upon an understanding of the Constitution that had been given shape by more than a hundred years of prior presidential behavior.

Founding Fears of an Ignorant Public

The spirit of the first constitution, according to Tulis, was opposed to public appeals on the part of the president. No specific article of the Constitution spells out this doctrine; rather, it is to be gleaned primarily from the way the Framers designed the executive branch, as well as the general suspicion of popular leadership that is found in the Federalist Papers.

One of the key tenets of Tulis’s argument is that the Framers rejected both popular and congressional election of the president because such mechanisms would have made the president too dependent on public opinion. Instead, with the creation of the Electoral College, the Framers sought a presidency that, like the constitutional system as a whole, would be able to “‘withstand the temporary delusions’ of public opinion” (Tulis 1987, 39). The Electoral College plan, in this regard, was a keystone of the Framers’ design to close the door to presidential demagoguery. (Tulis [1987, 33-35] also cites the four-year presidential term, the extended republic, and the act of founding itself as forces reining in demagoguery.) By placing presidential selection outside the direct control of the general public, the Framers hoped to insulate the president from public opinion once he took office. Presidential candidates, in turn, would have a difficult time wooing a temporary body of electors who were of high standing in the community.

However, the debates at the Convention over the presidential selection process reveal that the Framers did not address the question of presidential demagoguery directly. This is not to say that they weren’t worried about the capacity of the public to make informed judgments about presidential candidates. George Mason held that leaving “the choice of a proper character for a chief magistrate to the people would be as unnatural as to refer a trial of colors to a blind man,” and his view was not anomalous (Madison [1787] 1987, vol. 1, 368). Elbridge Gerry asserted that the “people were uninformed” (ibid., 388). Roger Sherman also worried that the people would “never be sufficiently informed of characters” (ibid., 365-66). And earlier in the Convention, Madison had contended that “the people immediately should have as little to do as may be about the Government” (ibid., 78).

But when it came to the presidency, what most troubled the Framers about the public’s political ignorance was that groups of opportunists could take advantage of it, getting the people to elect a factional candidate posing as one concerned with the general welfare. Distrust of popular election arose less from the fear that presidents would capitalize on public ignorance, or that they would be captives of public opinion than, that manipulation of the elections by factions might distort the presidential selection process itself.

Thus, Gerry declared popular election a “radically vicious” plan because “the ignorance of the people would put it in the power of some one set of men dispersed through the Union and acting in concert to delude them into any appointment” (Madison [1787] 1987, vol. 2, 433). Charles Pinckney, a delegate from South Carolina, feared that “a group of active and designing men” from “the most populous States, by combining in favor of the same individual,” would exercise undue influence in a popular election (ibid., vol. 1, 366-67). Gouverneur Morris contended that the rich would take advantage of people who had no property by buying their votes from them (ibid., 288).

Popular election of the president faced several other problems at the Convention. It disadvantaged the smaller states; it did not allow slaves to contribute to the electoral strength of Southern states; and it did not guarantee that one candidate would gain a majority, given the parochial nature of voters (Madison [1787] 1987, vol. 1, 388; vol. 2, 430). These issues bore even less directly on the relationship between the public and presidential governing practices than did the Framers’ worries that public ignorance would enable elite groups to control presidential elections.

Some alternative to popular election was probably guaranteed, but the final version of the Electoral College (it was proposed in at least five different forms) was particularly suited to sidestepping cleavages based on state size and slavery. The argument that the Electoral College was a way to refine public opinion through deliberation, or to distance the president from the public, was never made at the Constitutional Convention (Ellis 1999; Nichols 1998).

If the Framers had been primarily concerned with setting up institutional boundaries between the president and the public, having the president elected by the national legislature would have likely been the best method. But congressional selection failed to provide the president an independent base of authority, which proved a decisive stumbling block. The Electoral College addressed this problem, without committing the Framers to a particular relationship between the president and the people. Indeed, the decision to allow state legislatures to direct the manner in which electors are appointed provided scant protection against a populist presidency, and in setting the rules for choosing electors for the first presidential election (1788), the state legislatures displayed a slight tendency toward popular selection. Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts opted for variants of the direct popular election of electors, while Connecticut, Georgia, New Jersey, and South Carolina used legislative appointment of electors. By 1832, direct popular election of electors became the preferred method, with only South Carolina retaining the legislative appointment of electors (Rusk 2001, 131).

The Framers’ decision to leave the selection of presidential electors to the states by no means suggests that they intended the selection system to foster presidents who led, or were led by, the public. The concept of a plebiscitary presidency, or, more generally, of a president heavily dependent on public opinion, would have run directly counter to their fears of public ignorance. Even the two main supporters of a popularly elected presidency, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson, did not suggest that the president should reflect, let alone shape, public opinion. Morris described the presidency in these terms at the Constitutional Convention:

The executive Magistrate should be the guardian of the people, even of the lower classes, agst. Legislative tyranny, against the Great & the Wealthy who in the course of things will necessarily compose—the Legislative body. The Executive ought to be so constituted as the great protector of the Mass of the people. (Madison [1787] 1987, vol. 1, 383)

The words guardian and protector suggest not popular or plebiscitary democracy, but a trustee-like version of leadership, where the president exercises his own independent judgment about the public good. Morris seems to have thought that the president should serve much the same role as a monarch: a virtual representative of the public’s interests, rather than a direct representative of their opinions. The president would balance the interests of the “great and wealthy” and the “Mass of the people.” Similarly, James Wilson, who thought that the mode of election would induce the president to style himself as “MAN OF THE PEOPLE,” did not mean “leader or servant of public opinion.” Instead, Wilson’s presidents would be similar to Morris’s: they would supervise the people’s governance with “paternal care and affection” (Ellis 1999, 149).

Going Out

Even though they feared an ignorant public, then, the Framers did not provide clear guidelines about how to navigate between popular legitimacy and leadership—nor, indeed, about how presidents should affect, or be affected by, public opinion at all. These issues were left to Washington and his successors to deal with. The presidency and its relationship with the public would be a work in progress, defined by practice more than by doctrine emanating from the Constitutional Convention. And, indeed, a quasi-monarchical model of the presidency soon emerged—and, almost as quickly, began to disintegrate.

Faced early on with the need to make many decisions about the proper protocol for the nation’s first chief executive, Washington chose restrained and patrician practices across many facets of the presidency, including his relationship with the public. Ralph Ketcham (1984, 4) shows that in these respects, Washington based his presidency on Bolingbroke’s model of the patriot king.

According to Bolingbroke, the patriot king derived his authority from his own character and virtue, and hence did not need to be overly receptive to, or formative of, public opinion. He was a popular leader only in a very limited sense. He enjoyed the respect and good will of the people at large, but did not actively try to gain popular support for his policies, nor to justify his decisions by the public’s approval of them. These practices had their roots in the English monarchy—and were often criticized on just those grounds.

The dilemma for early Chief Executives was to figure out a way to reinterpret these “monarchical” actions as democratic ones rooted in the authority of the people. And they did find ways to do so, departing repeatedly from the strictures of patriot kingship and edging towards a more aggressive political and popular role. Through these cracks in patrician leadership, one sees hints of the Jacksonian model of the presidency, in which the president claims to be the best spokesperson for the national will—an instrument of public opinion.

Although Washington came close to enacting the model of the patriot king, he was aware that establishing a strong presidency required gestures to underscore the president’s ties to the people, even as he tried to maintain the respect and awe normally reserved for a distanced king (Washington [1789] 1939, vol. 30, 319-21). In a letter to John Adams, he inquired:

1^st Whether a line of conduct, equally distant from an association with all kinds of company on the one hand and from a total seclusion from Society on the other ought to be adopted by him [the President]? And, in that case, how is it to be done? (Washington [1789] 1993, vol. 2, 245)

Washington’s presidency was marked by attempts to find the right balance between seclusion and accessibility. For example, Washington held levees in which those who were “respectably dressed” could see him (Washington [1789] 1993, vol. 2, 247-48; see MacDonald 1994, 214); but these gatherings were formal and stiff affairs, lasting just a single hour each Tuesday. One contemporary observer described how Washington stood at the fireplace and greeted each visitor with a bow. After he talked very briefly to all of the visitors, Washington resumed his place in front of the fireplace and each citizen proceeded to bow to the president as he or she left the room (Elkins and McKitrick 1993, 49-50). By holding levees, Washington acknowledged that it was important to be accessible to the public. At the same time, the regal choreography maintained distance between the president and the people. Indeed, the levees were frequently criticized in the Republican press for being suggestive of monarchy (Ellis 2006, 14-15).

Washington also sought to maintain this balance on his two major tours of the country, one through New England in 1789, and the other through the South in 1791. Unsure about the propriety of such tours, Washington first consulted with James Madison, Henry Knox, Alexander Hamilton, and Chief Justice John Jay. All four advisers gave their approval, believing that the tour would create goodwill toward the newly formed national government, as well as permitting Washington to gauge public opinion (Washington [1789-1790] 1993, 163n3). Like the levees, however, these events were scripted and formal in nature. Washington’s remarks were ceremonial in substance and avoided any detailed discussion of public policy. Along the tour, Washington talked with elite community leaders about policies such as the excise tax on liquor, but these discussions were out of the earshot of the general public.

The criticism most often lodged against these highly choreographed ceremonies, too, was that they were more fitting for a king than for a democratically elected president. Yet they laid important groundwork for Jacksonian practices, and helped citizens who often identified themselves with their states or localities to think of themselves as members of a unified American peo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: A “Weapon in the Hands of the People”: The Rhetorical Presidency in Historical and Conceptual Context
• 1. The Practical Origins of the Rhetorical Presidency
• 2. Demagoguery, Statesmanship, and the American Presidency
• 3. The Layered Rhetorical Presidency
• 4. The Hyper-Rhetorical Presidency
• 5. The Idea of an Un-Rhetorical Presidency
• 6. The Rhetorical Presidency and the Contemporary Media Environment
• 7. A Rhetorical Judiciary, Too?
• 8. Presidents’ Party Affiliations and their Communication Strategies
• 9. The Rhetorical Presidency and the Partisan Echo Chamber
• 10. The Rhetorical and Administrative Presidencies
• 11. The Puzzle of The Rhetorical Presidency
• 12. Presidential Rhetoric from Wilson to “W”: Popular Politics Meets Recalcitrant Reality
• 13. When the President Speaks, How Do the People Respond?
• 14. Allegories of Reading Tulis
• 15. “Publicity” and the Progressive-Era Origins of Modern Politics
• Conclusion: The Rhetorical Presidency in Retrospect
• Index