Projecting Presidential Personas on the Radio: An Addendum on the Bushes

Abstract

In our recent exploration of the personality, stylistic, and substantive dimensions of Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's Saturday rooming radio broadcasts (Sigelman and Whissell 2002), we ignored Reagan's immediate successor and Clinton's immediate predecessor, George H. W. Bush, because we mistakenly believed that Bush had not followed Reagan's lead in addressing the nation via radio on Saturday mornings. Our error came to light in the very same issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly in which our study appeared. Writing about Reagan's broadcasts, Rowland and Jones (2002) noted that all three of his successors, including the first President Bush, had carried on his practice of Saturday morning radio broadcasts. As we subsequently determined, after delivering no such broadcasts during his first two years in office, Bush spoke to the nation via radio on seventeen Saturday mornings during the last two years of his term. Here we correct our oversight by augmenting our original results to encompass the first President Bush's Saturday radio addresses. Moreover, because the second President Bush has carried on with Reagan's and Clinton's practice of delivering Saturday radio addresses every week rather than only occasionally as his father did, we include data from his first year in office as well. Data and Method With the addition of George H. W. Bush's 17 Saturday morning broadcasts and the first 51 of George W. Bush's, we present results for 734 addresses (including 326 by Reagan and 340 by Clinton). (1) We employ the same measures as in our original analysis. Personality. As we did for Reagan and Clinton, we derived two indicators of the personalities that the two Bushes projected in their broadcasts by applying Whissell's (1994) Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL) computer program to machine-readable versions of their broadcasts. The higher the score on one of these scales, the greater the preponderance of positive over negative language (positivity) or of active over passive language (activity). Style. Two of our four stylistic measures gauge garrulousness: the total number of words in a broadcast and the mean length of the sentences. To tap plainspokenness, we used the DAL program to score the broadcasts in terms of reliance on common words on a scale ranging from 0 (if the president relied exclusively on rare words like exegesis) to 17,000 (if the president did nothing but repeat the word the over and over). Again using the DAL program, we scored broadcasts for the preponderance of highly concrete language over highly abstract language (concreteness). Substance. We distinguished between four possible foci of a broadcast: domestic issues, international issues, a combination of domestic and international issues, and special occasions (typically civil or religious holidays). Results Table 1 shows the proportion or mean for each president on each measure just described, and Table 2 expands our original multivariate analysis to include all four presidents. Because we reported the results for Reagan and Clinton in considerable detail in our original study, we focus here primarily on Bush pere and fils. Notwithstanding some differences between them, the rhetorical similarity of the two Bushes stands out clearly in these data. Both used their Saturday morning broadcasts primarily to talk about domestic issues, though after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the younger Bush began to devote a larger portion of his broadcasts to international affairs. Perhaps reflecting discomfort in front of the microphone, both kept their broadcasts short. Both recited scripts composed of relatively brief, simple sentences. And the scores that one Bush registered on the concreteness, activity, and positivity scales all fell close to the other Bush's scores. Not only did the two Bushes display similar rhetorical profiles in their Saturday morning broadcasts but, no less strikingly, their profiles also contrasted sharply with those of Presidents Reagan and Clinton. …