Presidential Rhetoric Research Articles

Presidential rhetoric of South Korea and the United States: the case of Lee and Obama

ABSTRACTThis study compares how the presidents of South Korea and the USA addressed their people. The speeches of Lee Myung-bak and Barack Obama were analyzed. As compared to Obama, Lee delivered considerably fewer speeches, tended to avoid controversial topics, and supported his topics with less informative descriptions. While Lee preferred authoritative expressions emphasizing his position and achievements, Obama frequently used metaphor and humor. Lee and several other Korean presidents appear to share some rhetorical traits that are rarely found in the speeches of US presidents. This study argues that there is a different presidential rhetoric outside the USA, and presidential speeches in other countries can reflect their respective rhetorical tendencies. We also found that both Lee and Obama frequently relied on moral values to persuade their citizens, making a moral appeal, a common persuasive rhetorical move, in their presidential speeches. Overall, the analysis method that we used included the modernized features of ethos, pathos, and logos and provided vivid and plausible information on how the two presidents use their means of persuasion.

Selling war, selling hope: presidential rhetoric, the news media, and US foreign policy since 9/11

Selling war, selling hope: presidential rhetoric, the news media, and US foreign policy since 9/11

Live from DC: Saturday Night Live political parody references in presidential rhetoric

ABSTRACTFrom content analyses to effects studies to rhetorical and critical analyses, we have a growing body of scholarship exploring political humor on United States late night television. The growing body of political humor scholarship reveals how late night comedy characterizes politics and politicians. What has not yet been explored, however, is how United States' politicians characterize late night television humor. Recognizing Saturday Night Live (SNL) as a unique type of late night television political humor in the USA, this essay turns to SNL mentions in United States' presidential remarks, including mentions by Presidents George Bush, George W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Bill Clinton. Directions for future scholarship in this area are also proposed.

Visualizing the Rhetorical Presidency: Barack Obama in the Situation Room

On the night of May 1, 2011, almost 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, President Obama announced on live television that Osama bin Laden was dead. The next day, the Situation Room photograph was released, revealing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how tense it was at the White House while the mission was underway. Building on previous scholarship about the rhetorical presidency and visual rhetoric, this essay analyzes how the photograph, combined with the context of Obama's speech the night of the raid, contributes to the increasingly visual aspect of the rhetorical presidency and creates an image of Obama as a strong commander in chief.

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy Stephen Schryer (bio) Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams by Anna Siomopoulos. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 166. $125.00 cloth. In her insightful new book Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal, Anna Siomopoulos explores how 1930s and 1940s US popular cinema mediates popular anxieties about the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the New Deal. Deftly moving between readings of Gabriel over the White House (1933), Bullets or Ballots (1936), Fury (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), The Emperor Jones (1933), Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and The Killers (1946) and expositions of welfare-state theory by 1930s intellectuals and public figures, her work offers a compelling and precisely contextualized account of how state policies shape cultural productions and vice versa. At the book’s heart is Siomopoulos’s careful delineation of a homology between New Deal presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema. On the one hand, much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s popularity rested on his use of melodrama to generate sympathy for the Great Depression’s victims and support for New Deal programs. This rhetoric helped “offset the advanced rationalization of new government bureaucracy and . . . justify the encroachment of the state into the private lives of U.S. citizens” (2). On the other hand, Depression-era films gave expression to public fears and fantasies about FDR’s policies; their melodramatic conclusions, [End Page 683] however, ultimately endorsed New Deal ideology. In particular, both FDR and 1930s and 1940s cinema used melodrama to affirm a conventionally liberal individualism in ways that helped undermine public support for more radically redistributive social policies. In developing this argument, Siomopoulos enters into a long-standing debate about the ideology of melodrama. For Lewis Mumford and other mass-culture critics of the 1930s, melodrama was a conservative form that reinforced existing social hierarchies. In the past forty years, beginning with the work of Peter Brooks, critics have challenged this assessment. Brooks highlighted melodrama’s origins in the French Revolution, describing it as a potentially revolutionary genre; more recently, critics like Linda Williams have argued that melodrama plays a crucial role in establishing sympathy for marginal social groups. Siomopoulos’s position more closely approximates Mumford’s than Brooks’s or Williams’s. Drawing her subtitle (“public daydreams”) from Mumford’s work, she argues that “Hollywood melodramas of the ’30s and ’40s maintained their resemblance to private daydreams— individual fantasies with no public valence—at the same time that the melodramatic conventions of these films consistently supported New Deal public policy” (4). For her, the politics of sympathy that Williams discovers in Hollywood melodrama is precisely the problem with these films; both presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema draw on the language of sympathy in order to perpetuate individualistic solutions to economic crisis. Both FDR and Hollywood melodrama focus on “private individuals rather than public movements and on private solutions to public problems” (5). In criticizing this politics of sympathy, Siomopoulos draws on Hannah Arendt; compassion, she complains, “is not a critical or rational enough emotion upon which to base social justice because it responds to suffering with simple, self-evident solutions” (66–67). Sympathy promotes individual acts of charity rather than systemic social change. Unlike Mumford, however, Siomopoulos carefully highlights the ideological contradictions that run through her chosen films. Her readings all follow a similar pattern; she shows how the films mediate Depression-era dissatisfaction with the New Deal but then affirm New Deal policies in their final, melodramatic scenes. Gabriel over the White House, for instance, released shortly after FDR’s first inauguration, registers public fears that FDR would expand the powers of the presidency for corrupt personal gain. The film draws a series of analogies between an ineffective president (Judd Hammond, played by Walter Huston) and [End Page 684] his archnemesis, a mafia crime boss; both are equally ruthless and equally dedicated to private consumption. However, after a Road-to-Damascus-style conversion, President Hammond learns to channel his gangster-like energies toward the public interest, morphing into a benevolent dictator who increasingly resembles FDR. Interestingly, Siomopoulos suggests that this filmic tension between critique and affirmation of New Deal ideology...

Environment and the State: New Views in American History

Environment and the State: New Views in American History Sterling Evans (bio) Otis L. Graham, Jr. Presidents and the American Environment. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 411 pp. Figures, notes, suggestions for further reading, and index. $39.95. Ian Tyrrell. Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xiv + 351 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $40.00. Jess Gilbert. Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015. xxiv + 341 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $45.00. Historians Otis Graham and Ian Tyrrell, and historical sociologist Jess Gilbert, collectively have provided powerful new contributions to help scholars understand the role of the State in U.S. environmental policy-making. Although that goal sounds like the stuff of political science (and assuredly it is), these authors team up here to give historical nuance, background, and analysis to the topic. Common themes of the books include natural resource use and conservation, agricultural, and environmental policy in U.S. government, and the shifting role of the State in legislating, enforcing, and disseminating to the public such policy. “Reform” and “progressive politics” may come to mind as possible ideological guideposts for presidents and policymakers in these types of policy studies, and the authors here deal with those concepts in different ways; but in the end, readers will likely make their own conclusions on just how reform-minded and effective or not different administrations were. A word about comparative scale and scope of each work: Graham’s Presidents and the American Environmentthinks big! Moving smoothly from the administrations of Benjamin Harrison to Barack Obama, Graham covers the conservation and environmental policies of every president in the time frame of 1891 to 2015. It is impressive coverage, with critical and sound analysis of every administration in those 124 years; although the fact that he did not draw from Tarla Rai Peterson’s Green Talk in the White House: The Rhetorical Presidency [End Page 603] Encounters Ecology(2004) is surprising and is a big omission. Graham’s title should have reflected that time period, however. The author or press should have insisted on a subtitle suggesting something like “From B. Harrison to B. Obama, 1891-2015”—without it, the book seems like it would be about the environmental record of everypresident. Even the press flyer for the book boldly asserts, “The First Narrative Account of Each President’s Environmental Policy,” which is inaccurate and misleading. I am not suggesting that this book should have dealt with every administration since Washington’s, but the focus in Graham’s book makes it sound as if there was no legislation that could be considered “environmental” in the first hundred years of U.S. history. Certainly there were important land and natural resource issues in the early Republic years—the frontier experience and westward expansion—and during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Mark Fiege, in his important work The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States(2012), asked us to consider many actions of government and society in environmental terms, even if not so identified at the time. Lisa Brady reminded us of the same for the Civil War. In her comprehensive War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War(2012), Brady analyzed environmental change resulting from wartime policies. Thus a different title, or adding a subtitle, to Graham’s book would have precluded all this criticism. While Graham’s Presidents and the American Environmentcould certainly be useful in an environmental history course (and I would recommend it for such), it definitely deals more with policy and the interworking of politics, statecraft, and presidential biography than it does with environmental history per se. I would not argue against this focus, but it risks making the book more attractive to political scientists than to historians. That would be unfortunate, for this book adds mightily to the historical understanding of presidential administrations, their beliefs and actions towards the natural environment (or lack thereof), and the resulting consequences. So why doesGraham begin with Benjamin Harrison? He argues that environmental...

National Identity, Crisis, and the Inaugural Genre: George W. Bush and 9/11

ABSTRACTPresidential crisis research typically focuses on crises that are rhetorically constructed in order to justify a preexisting policy. However, the research makes a clear exception for that tendency in the case of military attacks. I argue that in such cases presidential crisis rhetoric is formally and functionally different because it must take into account the state of the audience. Bush’s speech after 9/11 is just such a case. In the speech, Bush carefully addresses the state of the audience by tapping into the elements of the inaugural as a means to restore national identity through American Exceptionalism.

Islam and the White House

A reified Islam has been used to delineate the creed, the politics and the culture of about a fifth of the world population. While defining what ‘Islam’ is and is not, before and after the events of September 11, may be a necessary first step to understanding certain ‘facts’ about the theology, law and history of the world’s second largest religion, the semantics of official US government discourse about ‘Islam’ and terrorism have proved to be problematic. The purpose of this article is to provide an analytical survey of the thematics of American presidential public diplomacy. It also analyzes the construction of ideology in the context of the global war on terror, as it relates to Islam as a religion, the variants of political Islam and more broadly on the question of terrorism and the ‘Muslim world’. I begin with the Clinton presidency and continue to George Bush and end with Obama’s first term. This period of American political and public diplomatic history was selected because it clearly illustrates American presidential rhetoric on ‘Islam’ before and after al-Qaʿida’s second attacks on the World Trade Center and before the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ in late 2010.

Presidential Rhetoric and Supreme Court Decisions

Despite the centrality of speeches to the American presidency, no research has specifically investigated the frequency of presidential public commentary about Supreme Court decisions. We do so and also examine why presidents discuss Supreme Court cases in their public comments from the Eisenhower to Obama administrations. Our empirical findings support our theoretical expectations in two primary ways. First, presidents speak most frequently after cases have been decided. Second, the monthly volume of presidential remarks on Court cases is shaped to varying degrees by presidents’ desires to bolster their reelections, policy goals, and historical legacies. By shedding new light on why presidents comment publicly on Supreme Court cases, this research contributes to our understanding of presidential speechmaking, executive–judicial branch interactions, and how norms and institutions shape the behavior of political actors.

Citizen Havel and the Construction of Czech Presidentiality

Václav Havel had two eventful terms as the first democratic president of the Czech Republic. The documentary Citizen Havel is one rhetorical artifact that captures the way a new democracy and its attendant executive power is constructed consciously in real time in a political culture where such a tradition has largely not existed. Culled from ten years of fly-on-the-wall-style footage, Citizen Havel captures the tensions between the constitutional expectations of the Czech presidency and Havel's own extraconstitutional interpretations of executive power. Ultimately, this essay argues that Citizen Havel is one influential representation of how Czech “presidentiality” during the post-communist transition was built from the inventional resources of a range of rhetorical and historical materials, such as the Czechoslovakian interwar period, the long influence of totalitarianism and the dissident culture that challenged it, the examples of “Western” presidential rhetoric, and even European monarchical traditions.

Assessing the Relationship between Presidential Rhetorical Simplicity and Unilateral Action

Research from Shogan (2007) and Lim (2008) on the executive branch proposes that the American presidency has adopted an anti-intellectual approach to leadership, such that there is a concerted rejection of thoughtful political discourse from the president. This has been reflected by what appears to be a relative decline in both the linguistic and substantive complexity of presidential rhetoric. Shogan’s (2007) work, while focused on examining whether Republicans are more apt to employ anti-intellectual leadership than Democrats, raises an additional topic worthy of empirical examination: the potential relationship between anti-intellectual leadership and unilateral action from the president. If anti-intellectual leadership is a defiant form of leadership that opts to publicly demonstrate the rejection of external expertise, the usage of anti-intellectual rhetoric from the president might be able to predict the usage of unilateral action. On the other hand, anti-intellectual rhetoric might be used as a straightforward and quick means to explain unilateral action, such that change in the level of unilateral action can predict the usage of simplistic rhetoric. Unfortunately, no one has yet to empirically test whether rhetorical simplicity predicts unilateral action, unilateral action predicts rhetorical simplicity, or there is a multi-directional relationship present. This project makes an initial attempt to remedy this gap in the literature. The project contrasts the monthly average simplicity level of the presidential weekly public address with the monthly number of executive orders emanating from the executive branch, using information spanning between February 1993 and May 2015. The initial findings from the vector autoregression and moving average representation analyses suggest that prior change in rhetorical simplicity predicts the usage of executive orders, and that an increase in rhetorical simplicity helps produce an increase in the number of executive orders offered by the president.

Polarization and the presidency: from FDR to Barack Obama

Robert Smith and Richard Seltzer offer fresh insights on the decisive, and often surprising, role of presidents and presidential candidates in polarizing US politics. In a rich, multidimensional narrative, the authors show how presidential rhetoric and policies have served to divide voters along lines of class, party, race, and region. They also underscore the enduring consequences of George Wallace's, Barry Goldwater's, and George McGovern's failed presidential campaigns. Moving beyond the guns, God, and gays conventional wisdom, their distinctive contribution leads to an enhanced understanding of the political attitudes that have shaped today's polarized polity.

Presidential rhetoric from Wilson to Obama: constructing crises, fast and slow

Presidential rhetoric from Wilson to Obama: constructing crises, fast and slow

“The future of our history”: Rhetorics of Transformation and Power in Plutarco Elías Calles’ 1928 Informe

This essay uses the specter of Mexican presidential rhetoric (specifically, Plutarco Elías Calles’ 1928 informe) to remark on the nationalistic limitations of U.S. presidential rhetoric scholarship as a whole. Such limitations can lead to possible mis- and under-readings that can hinder the applicability of U.S. scholarship to other “American” places. These observations are then followed by a reading of Calles’ informe that argues for a wider hemispheric approach to our understanding of “American” presidential rhetoric. Such an approach aims to push our collective gaze beyond the territory of the United States to the point where the rhetorical histories of Latin America rub uncomfortably but productively against our own U.S.-centrism.

The World as the American Frontier: Racialized Presidential War Rhetoric

We use the frontier myth and the rhetoric of the Indian Wars as a heuristic for analyzing four racial valences in presidential rhetoric on the War on Terror. First, the naming of the enemy in both instances racializes and conflates identities, amplifying a potential threat and justifying a similarly amplified reaction. Second, the war zone is characterized by shifting borders and alliances, suggesting a racialized political hierarchy in which the United States wars against nonwhite tribal leaders. Third, presidents distinguish between savagery and civilization in war practices such that technology, specifically contrasted to trickery, is a marker of whiteness. Fourth, in both wars, the disciplining of nonwhite bodies is justified as the means to spreading and preserving democracy.

‘Fraternity in diversity’ or ‘feudal fanatics’? Representations of ethnicity in Rwandan presidential rhetoric

ABSTRACTBetween independence in 1962 and the genocide in 1994, only two presidents ruled Rwanda. In addition to the enormous economic and developmental challenges that faced Presidents Grégoire Kayibanda (1962–73) and Juvénal Habyarimana (1973–94), each had to manage the ethnic divisions that plagued the country. In this paper Mayersen explores how each president discussed the issue of ethnicity in presidential speeches, interviews and key policy documents. Ostensibly, Presidents Kayibanda and Habyarimana both promoted national unity and advocated allegiance to a unified Rwandan identity rather than a focus on ethnicity. President Kayibanda called for ‘tolerance and understanding between the ethnicities’, while Habyarimana entreated Rwandans to ‘love your countrymen without distinction of ethnic or regional origin’. Yet in the allusive and indirect communication style typical of Rwandan discourse, underneath the presidential promotion of unity was a more complex message. Mayersen argues that the way each president addressed the issue served to maintain a high level of consciousness regarding ethnicity, and contributed to ongoing ethnic disharmony.

Speaking with the People's Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion. By Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 195 pp.

Speaking with People's Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion. By Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014. 195 pp. Scholars who study discourse of America's contemporary presidents are familiar with rhetorical presidency, idea that presidents often circumvent Congress, instead appealing directly to public opinion to garner support for their vision. As Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury notes in his exhaustive review of extant literature on rhetorical presidency, academic scholarship frequently evaluates success based on persuasive to public opinion and subsequent changes in public opinion polls following communication event (p. 6). In Speaking with People's Voice, however, Drury argues that a complementary explanation for evaluating involves examining how presidential rhetoric might serve not only as of public opinion but also as by public in which public opinion is means of leadership (p. 9). His book, therefore, reframes conventional practice of studying how presidents outline their policy agendas through their rhetorical to public advancing case that scholars should explore how presidents exercise their through public opinion, which Drury defines as the rhetorical representation of beliefs and values of US citizens (p. 12). Scholars in communication, political science, and studies fields will find that this book does, in fact, provide new insight into how contemporary presidents exercise their leadership, even as they cast rhetorical presidency to fit present-day exigencies. After establishing requisite background justifying his study in first half of introductory chapter, Drury provides readers with a brief synopsis on argumentation theory and three argumentative patterns he employs in his study of modern rhetoric and invoked public opinion: bandwagon appeals, identity appeals, and contra populum appeals. Most argumentation theorists will already be familiar with bandwagon appeal. Drury describes identity appeal as a pattern in which president invokes a public opinion shared by his audience as a catalyst for further agreement while defining contra populum ploys as those appeals 'against people' [that] function to correct invoked public opinion by means of alternative decision-making criteria (p. 19). The book applies each appeal in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively, by examining nationally televised speeches from both Democratic and Republican presidents. Drury provides a well-articulated discussion of rhetorical situations that prompted presidents to address public via television (although readers familiar with speeches included in this analysis should revisit them, given innovative application of three argumentative patterns). …

What Happened to Educational Equality? Tracing the Demise of Presidential Rhetoric on Racial Inequality in Higher Education

This article asks why discussion of racial inequality in higher education is absent from presidential speeches, which helps us understand why it is absent from the public agenda. I find a decrease in presidential speech about race and education after the 1980 and 1984 elections. By analyzing Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan's rhetoric during those elections, we can see that Carter struggled to promote affirmative action and, instead, supported historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Reagan adopted Carter's arguments about HBCUs and used them to support his strategy to appeal to whites' and white ethnics' racial resentments. This dynamic led to a political stalemate: Democrats could not address educational inequality, distance themselves from Republicans, and appeal to majority whites. Therefore, presidents had no incentive to address inequality in higher education. While educational inequality still exists, it remains absent from presidential speeches.

Economic actors, economic behaviors, and presidential leadership: the constrained effects of rhetoric

Chapter 1: Presidential Rhetoric and the Economy Chapter 2: Ascertaining Presidential Influence with Economic Actors Chapter 3: Presidential Rhetoric and the Federal Reserve Chapter 4: Presidential Rhetoric and Public Perceptions Chapter 5: Congressional Actions as Preeminent Economic Leadership Chapter 6: Conclusions

Speaking with the People’s Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion

For well over two decades, a cross-disciplinary debate over the proper way of conceptualizing presidential rhetoric and its effects (or lack thereof) has raged sporadically, pitting humanists in communication and English departments against increasingly positivist political scientists. Rather than lurch toward resolution, however, the debate seems increasingly to be conducted across two ever-more distant tracks, as scholars in one camp misunderstand and misconstrue seminal work in the other and remain largely unaware of new developments outside their own fields. Scholars outside political science touch the bases as they reference work by Jeffrey Tulis, Samuel Kernell, and George Edwards in an often overreliant and myopic manner; political scientists often do the same with hurried references to now-classic works by David Zarefsky and Martin Medhurst but few others. Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury's Speaking with the People's Voice: How Presidents Invoke Public Opinion is at once an example of a continuation of this trend and a work those who seek to transcend it should read and consider seriously. Drury, a communication scholar and rhetorician, is particularly concerned with how modern American presidents have made reference to the preferences and values of the American people—what he calls “invoked public opinion”—as they have rhetorically communed with the nation.