On the bully pulpit not being

artappraiser — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 06:12:33 +0000

In reply to SOTU: White House Promises "New Proposals" to Make U.S. a "Magnet for Jobs and Manufacturing"

On the bully pulpit not being all it's traditionally cracked up to be (temporary free access archive article)

The Unpersuaded: Who Listens to A President?

By Ezra Klein, The New Yorker, March 19, 2012

[....] In 1993, George Edwards, the director of the Center for Presidential Studies, at Texas A. & M. University, sponsored a program in Presidential rhetoric. The program led to a conference, and the organizers asked their patron to present a paper. [....]

Nearly twenty years later, Edwards still sounds offended. “They were talking about Presidential speeches as if they were doing literary criticism,” he says. “I just started underlining the claims that were faulty.” As a result, his conference presentation, “Presidential Rhetoric: What Difference Does It Make?,” was less a contribution to the research than a frontal assault on it. The paper consists largely of quotations from the other political scientists’ work, followed by comments such as “He is able to offer no systematic evidence,” and “We have no reason to accept such a conclusion,” and “Sometimes the authors’ assertions, implicit or explicit, are clearly wrong.” [....]

Edwards’s views are no longer considered radical in political-science circles, in part because he has marshalled so much evidence in support of them. In his book “On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit” (2003), he expanded the poll-based rigor that he applied to Reagan’s rhetorical influence to that of nearly every other President since the nineteen-thirties. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fireside chats are perhaps the most frequently cited example of Presidential persuasion. Cue Edwards: [....]

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On the bully pulpit not being