The Geo-Social Presidency: Lest We Forget

Abstract

As one who has done a considerable amount of research over the years with large data sets, I am delighted with Coe and Neumann's (2011) theoretical ambitions. The epistemological problem they address--that researchers have been grabbing at different portions of the presidential elephant and calling it the same thing--results in at least three unfortunate outcomes: (1) it lets all researchers be correct about everything, because their very choice of a text can determine what they find within it; (2) it lets scholars' conventional wisdom about which texts are worth studying suppress a broader range of questions that might have been asked ifa more randomized approach had been used; and (3) it lets idiosyncratic texts hide rhetorical regularities that would have been discovered if a large and representative sample of messages had been selected for examination. As an intellectual experiment, it would be interesting for scholars to restrict themselves to Coe and Neumann's text base to see if what they think they know about presidential discourse remains true when viewed through a more restricted aperture. Noble though it is, however, I must excuse myself from that experiment, although I feel sure that Coe and Neumann's (2011) approach will please scholars from many disciplines. For example, by restricting their text base to controlled, national addresses, the authors emphasize the issue orientation prized by political scientists. Too, by including spoken remarks addressed to the American people en masse, the authors feature the engaged arguments that have long been studied by communication scholars. Finally, Coe and Neumann's topical selectivity assures historians that the most relevant issues confronting the nation during the past 80 years will be duly represented in forthcoming studies. But what about Ohio? Only one of Coe and Neumann's (2011) addresses was given in that state--by George W. Bush in October of 2002--and the remaining 49 states play only bit parts as well (collectively they amount to 7% of Coe and Neumann's audiences). Why should that matter? the authors might ask. Nothing happens in Ohio anyway, they would argue, except on crisp, Saturday afternoons in the Fall. In the District of Columbia, on the other hand, the world itself happens each day and brings with it a bouillabaisse of issues--nuclear disarmament, the Arab uprising, environmental degradation, refugees in Somalia, a menacing Chinese economy. To speak of Ohio is to speak of trivialities, Coe and Neumann might assert, its issues are always already discussed in the nation's capital--more definitively and more programmatically. Ohio, in contrast, offers nothing but campaign stops for avaricious candidates, photo opportunities with union workers in Toledo, preachers in Dayton, farmers in Lima, and the State Fair queen in Columbus. You dare speak of Ohio when we are putting serious intellectual issues on the table here? Coe and Neumann would thunder. Ashamed is what I should be; ashamed is what I am. But I am not too ashamed to note, as I did some years earlier (Hart 1987) and as others have since affirmed (Cohen 2009), that Ohio is the birthplace of considerable presidential rhetoric. Every four years, presidents and would-be presidents make pilgrimages to that place, addressing the American people in all their unkempt glory. They go elsewhere as well--to Memphis, to Albuquerque--but never as often as to Cleveland and Cincinnati. They go to Ohio because they are craven but also because they are Americans and because nowhere is more American than Ohio. Ohio is a state within a nation within a state, with its blue-collar, city-based workers regularly repudiating the politics of its farmers and small town shopkeepers. As a result, its political hall of fame is robust, ranging from the thunderous William Jennings Bryant to the irrepressible Dennis Kucinich, from the politely Democratic John Glenn to the politely Republican John Kasich. …