Presidents on Political Ground

Leaders in Action and What They Face

Bruce Miroff

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780700626489, 9780700622856
• eBook ISBN: 9780700622863
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How much power does a president really have? Theories and arguments abound—pointlessly, Bruce Miroff says, if we don’t understand the context in which presidents operate. Borrowing from Machiavelli, Miroff maps five fields of political struggle that presidents must traverse to make any headway: media, powerful economic interests, political coalitions, the high-risk politics of domestic policy, and the partisan politics of foreign policy.

The prince readying for war, Machiavelli writes, must “learn the nature of the terrain, and know how mountains slope, how valleys open, how plains lie, and understand the nature of rivers and swamps.” So it is with presidents navigating the political landscape. The variability of political ground, and of the conflicts fought on it, is a core proposition of this study. The swift collapse of the Soviet Union, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the financial crisis of 2008—recent history offers a quick lesson in fortune’s role in the careers of presidents. Taking a historical perspective, which opens on an array of cases, Miroff explores the various ways in which a president’s agenda is constrained or facilitated by political conditions on the ground. His book reveals how political identity is constructed and contested in the media through the ever-changing presidential spectacle; what happens when Democrats in the White House tangle with the titans of the economy; why presidents claiming to represent the entire nation have to manage political coalitions that direct rewards to their own followers; why domestic policy has become “tough terrain” for presidents; and how partisan polarization has reshaped presidential leadership in foreign policy, an area once considered “beyond politics.”

Providing a new perspective on why and how presidents succeed or fail in each of these areas, this book is an indispensable resource for understanding the forces that shape presidencies and the power of a president to fight on such fraught terrain.

1. Media and the Presidential Spectacle

Machiavelli depicts a prince who is a tough-minded warrior, astute in the calculated deployment of violence. Yet his prince is also a talented actor, skilled in the manipulation of appearances. While doing whatever it takes to gain and maintain power, the prince “should appear, upon seeing and hearing him, to be all mercy, all faithfulness, all integrity, all kindness, all religion. . . . [F]or ordinary people are always deceived by appearances and by the outcome of a thing.”¹ The politics of appearances is just as relevant for presidents as it once was for princes, but the critics of presidential performances today are now more likely to sniff out deception, even when it is not really there.

From the now numerous and scattered precincts of the American media, the observers of presidents’ performances speculate about their hidden motives and judge their visible talents. Presidents have had to cope with media coverage since the beginnings of the American republic. They have always used the media to communicate with the public and seek its support, and in turn they have provided rich fare for political partisans and commercial promoters alike. From the early days of a localized partisan press, through the emergence of a national web of magazines and leading newspapers, to the birth of electronic media with radio, presidents increasingly took center stage in a national political drama. But the full force of presidential performances did not emerge until the coming of television. Television brought the essential visual quality of a presidential persona into everyday sight. Ordinary citizens no longer had to imagine how presidents talked, moved, or emoted, how graceful or stiffly they acted, how intimate or how distant they seemed; all that was (or so it appeared) right before their eyes. Television, supplemented now by the Internet and social media, created a new political ground for presidents. It made possible, indeed necessary, what is the subject of this chapter: the presidential spectacle.

Although television became the ground for the presidential spectacles of modern times, that ground has been shifting in recent decades. At first, essentially from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, television was smooth ground, providing presidents with political advantages that their predecessors might well have envied. As Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell have written, this was the “golden age of presidential television.” Three national networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—dominated the new medium, capturing about 90 percent of the viewing audience (local channels accounted for the remainder). When the White House asked for prime air time for a major address, all three of the networks honored the request, setting aside their regular programming. With nothing else to watch while the president was speaking, even viewers with little interest in politics tended to stay tuned in.² During this period, George Edwards observes, “presidential speeches routinely attracted more than 80 percent of those watching television.”³ Not only did presidents command huge audiences on the occasions when they chose to address the general public, but they were regularly seen and heard on nightly network news programs that drew a large viewership. Snippets or “sound bites” from presidents’ minor addresses and press conferences averaged forty-two seconds in 1968 (a figure that would fall to fewer than seven seconds three decades later).⁴

Over the last three decades, however, the “golden age of presidential television” has become only a memory. Regardless of their personalities, party, or media skills, presidents today no longer encounter visual media that favor their capacity to reach a mass audience on their own terms. Cable was the initial culprit in doing away with the “golden age,” providing television watchers with numerous alternatives to presidential addresses.⁵ According to Edwards, “by the late 1990s, the president was attracting less than a third of homes to watch even his State of the Union message.”⁶ But cable was only the beginning of a transformed media environment offering an enormous number of options not to watch a president. Today, television is a platform for viewing not only hundreds of channels but also DVDs or streaming videos, while laptops, tablets, and smart phones duplicate most of those choices while adding some of their own. Presidents no longer rely as much as in the past on major broadcast speeches because they know that their audience has shrunk. The remnant of the public that does tune in to a president appears to be composed of the most politically attentive citizens—and in an era of partisan polarization, a sizable share of that audience is already inclined to boo rather than to cheer.

The demise of the “golden age of presidential television” has been accompanied by the demise of what might be called the “golden age of presidential news coverage.” Through quantitative analysis, Jeffrey Cohen uncovers the shift in coverage of presidents from predominantly favorable to predominantly unfavorable. As a consequence of growing competition among diverse media, “soft news” about celebrities or human interest stories has increased at the expense of “hard news” about politics; excepting niche political shows or websites that generally attract small audiences, news media devote less space to presidents and their activities than they did decades ago. The tone of presidential coverage has become more negative; especially compared to how journalists wrote about presidents such as Eisenhower and Kennedy, today’s White House reporters are predisposed to be less deferential and more skeptical. Journalists’ stories are also a conduit for increasingly media-savvy opponents, who let almost no presidential message pass through to the public without disparagement.⁷ And the explosion of ways to reach the public outside of the “mainstream media” has presented adversaries of the president with vehicles for vehement critiques that would hardly have been heard when presidents commanded the airwaves.

So if presidents, like princes, have always had to act their parts, the number and nature of their critics have magnified the harshness of the reviews. Worse yet for an actor, journalists have found ways to go backstage and reveal presidents without the protection of their official costumes. An intrusive media is no longer inclined to cut presidents slack by staying silent about the secrets that presidents wish to conceal.⁸ Franklin D. Roosevelt could keep the extent of his physical handicap out of public photos; John F. Kennedy conducted his sexual affairs with only a wink from knowing reporters. That sphere of presidential privacy has shrunk. There is no parallel from the “golden age of presidential news coverage” to the sex scandal that left the Clinton presidency dead in the water for over a year amid a drumbeat of sensational media revelations leading to impeachment and trial.

Although presidents today have lost much of their earlier edge over the traditional media, they now derive some compensation from new social media. Through a rapidly proliferating array of channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, the White House can circumvent reporters in communicating its preferred messages and images. The Obama presidency has been a pioneer in the deployment of social media: as of 2015, a White House Office of Digital Strategy numbered fourteen young staffers, slightly exceeding the number of personnel in the Office of the Press Secretary at the beginning of the administration. In May 2015, Obama became the first president to Tweet (with the handle of @POTUS). Yet while social media offer presidents the chance to communicate free of criticisms from skeptical journalists or carping from partisan opponents, their reach is largely limited to existing supporters. Social media targets—and at times can energize—the president’s base, especially youthful followers, but it seldom reverberates among a wide audience. In the annals of presidential media, it is unlikely that Obama on Twitter will rank with FDR’s Fireside Chats or Kennedy’s press conferences.⁹

To map today’s rougher media terrain for contemporary presidential performances is not, however, to assume that the critics always occupy the commanding heights. Presidents have a large number of helpers in coping with the media: more members of the White House staff work directly or indirectly on public communications than on any other presidential function.¹⁰ Presidents play the lead role in the dramatic productions that each modern White House mounts, but these are complex productions that require many kinds of talents. Moreover, presidential drama is not limited to televised speeches or other public appearances. Much of what the modern presidency does, in fact, involves the projection of images whose purpose is to shape public understanding and garner public appreciation. Leadership in the modern presidency is often enacted as a spectacle.

THE PRESIDENCY AS SPECTACLE

Examination of the presidency as a spectacle involves asking how a president seeks to appear, but also what the public actually sees. We are accustomed to gauging the public’s responses to a president with polls that measure approval and disapproval of overall performance in office and effectiveness in managing the economy and foreign policy. Yet the pollsters’ categories say more about the kind of information that politicians, journalists, or academic researchers want than about the terms through which most members of a president’s audience judge the president. A public that is presented with presidential spectacles will not ignore questions of effectiveness, but its judgments will be colored by the terms of the spectacle.

A spectacle is a kind of symbolic event, one in which particular details stand for broader and deeper meanings. What differentiates a spectacle from other kinds of symbolic events is the centrality of character and action. A spectacle presents intriguing and often dominating characters not in static poses but through actions that establish their public identities.

Spectacle implies a clear division between actors and spectators. As Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have noted, a spectacle possesses “a narrowness of focus, a limited set of appropriate responses, and . . . a minimal level of interaction. What there is to see is very clearly exhibited; spectacle implies a distinction between the roles of performers and audience.”¹¹ A spectacle does not permit the audience to interrupt the action and redirect its meaning. Spectators can become absorbed in a spectacle or can find it unconvincing, but they cannot become performers. A spectacle is not designed for mass participation; it is not a democratic event.

Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of a spectacle is that the actions that constitute it are meaningful not for what they achieve but for what they signify. Actions in a spectacle are gestures rather than means to an end. What is important is that they be understandable and impressive to the spectators. Roland Barthes illustrates this distinction between gestures and means in his classic discussion of professional wrestling as a spectacle. Barthes shows that professional wrestling is completely unlike professional boxing. Boxing is a form of competition, a contest of skill in a situation of uncertainty. What matters is the outcome, and because that is in doubt, we can wager on it. But in professional wrestling, the outcome is preordained; it would be senseless to bet on who is going to win. What matters in professional wrestling are the gestures made during the match, gestures by performers portraying distinctive characters, gestures that carry moral significance. In a typical match, an evil character threatens a good character, knocks him down on the canvas, abuses him with dirty tricks, but ultimately loses when the good character rises up to exact a just revenge.¹²

It may seem odd to approach the presidency through an analogy with boxing and wrestling—but let us pursue it for a moment. Much of what presidents do is analogous to what boxers do: they engage in contests of power and policy with other political actors, contests in which the outcomes are uncertain. But a growing amount of presidential activity is akin to pro wrestling. The contemporary presidency is presented by the White House 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.

Facilitated by the emergence of visual media, spectacle has also been fostered by the president’s rise to primacy in the American political system. A political order originally centered on institutions has given way, especially in the public mind, to a political order that centers on the person of the president. Theodore Lowi wrote, “Since the president has become the embodiment of government, it seems perfectly normal for millions upon millions of Americans to concentrate their hopes and fears directly and personally upon him.”¹³ The “personal president” that Lowi describes is the object of popular expectations that are both excessive and contradictory.¹⁴ The president must attempt to satisfy the public by delivering tangible benefits, such as economic growth, but these will almost never be enough. Not surprisingly, then, presidents turn to the gestures of the spectacle to satisfy their audience.

To understand the modern presidency as a form of spectacle, we must consider the presentation of presidents as spectacular characters, the role of their teams as supporting performers, and the arrangement of gestures that convey the meaning of their actions to the audience.

A contemporary president is, to borrow a phrase from Guy Debord, “the spectacular representation of a living human being.”¹⁵ An enormous amount of attention is paid to the president as a public character; every deed, quality, and even foible is regarded as fascinating and important. The American public may not learn the details of policy formulation, but they know that Gerald Ford bumps his head on helicopter door frames, that Ronald Reagan likes jellybeans, and that Bill Clinton enjoys hanging out with Hollywood celebrities. In a spectacle, a president’s character possesses intrinsic as well as symbolic value; it is to be appreciated for its own sake. The spectators do not press presidents to specify what economic or social benefits they are providing; nor do they closely inquire into the truthfulness of the claims presidents make. (To the extent that they do evaluate the president in such terms, they step outside the terms of the spectacle.) The president’s featured qualities are presented as benefits in themselves. Thus John Kennedy’s glamour casts his whole era in a romanticized glow, and Reagan’s amiability relieves the grim national mood that had developed under his predecessors.

The president’s character must be not only appealing in itself but also magnified by the spectacle. The spectacle makes the president appear exceptionally decisive, tough, courageous, prescient, or prudent. Whether the president is in fact all or any of these things is obscured. What matters is that he or she is presented as having these qualities, in magnitudes far beyond what ordinary ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Media and the Presidential Spectacle
• 2. Presidents and Economic Royalists
• 3. Presidents and Coalition Politics
• 4. Tough Terrain: Making Domestic Policy
• 5. Foreign Policy Making on Partisan Ground
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover