During the last 100 years, as the presidency has become more imperial, it has become more rhetorical. Throughout the nineteenth century, Jeffrey Tulis has demonstrated, the president’s power to command—and his popularity—did not depend all that much on his powers of persuasion. Expected to fend off the “temporary delusions” of public opinion, presidents rarely used the bully pulpit to drum up support from American voters for their initiatives (Tulis 39). When they traveled around the country, presidents sought to see and be seen, making hortatory comments or none at all. Democracies, Alexis de Tocqueville declared, needed to erect barriers between the government and the governed “to hold back the one while the other has time to take its bearings” (qtd. in Tulis 59). American citizens learned about their presidents from political pamphlets and, increasingly, from newspapers. By 1840, the annus mirabilis of popular democracy, when eight of every ten eligible voters cast ballots, administration and opposition dailies and weeklies, subsidized by the government through cheap postal rates, flourished. Widely distributed and intensely partisan, they sought to gin up interest in politics, printing presidential addresses and legislative proceedings verbatim, and exhorting men to vote. In the twentieth century, presidents began to act on the notion that forming mass opinion was the essence of the art of democratic politics. Theodore Roosevelt took “swings around the