Read an Excerpt
BREAKING THROUGH THE NOISE
PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP, PUBLIC OPINION, AND THE NEWS MEDIA
By Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha Jeffrey S. Peake
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7706-3
Chapter One
Introduction
CALLED THE "GREAT COMMUNICATOR" for his remarkable oratorical skill, President Ronald Reagan purportedly could sway the public to support him, using television to engage, motivate, and inspire the viewing audience. Decades after the end of his presidency, journalists recall with nostalgia Reagan's mystic ability to connect emotionally with and thus lead the American people by saying "a few simple things passionately" (Packer 2010; see also Cannon 2004; Hansen 2004). Reagan's alleged public relations prowess has become the standard to which subsequent presidents are compared. The expectation of effective presidential leadership is furthered by contemporary presidents who have marshaled an extensive White House public relations operation to lead the public and news media (Kumar 2007). A failure of leadership for contemporary presidents, therefore, is often reduced to a failure of communication. Despite this conventional understanding of presidential leadership that pervades Washington, D.C., systematic evidence of effective presidential leadership of the public proves illusive, even for the "great communicator" (Edwards 2003). In this book we are guided by the following puzzle: Why has presidential leadership of the public been unimpressive, even as the presidency retains substantial institutional tools to lead the public and news media?
The importance of this question is illustrated with two examples from both Reagan and Obama who, despite being perceived as powerful orators by their contemporaries, struggled in their efforts to lead the public. One of President Reagan's top policy priorities concerned relations with Central America. Reagan's public relations strategy centered on convincing the American people that the communist threat in Central America was real and that adequately funding the Nicaraguan Contras, an anticommunist guerilla force, was the best strategy to confront it. Reagan raised the issue many times with the American people, as he sought congressional support to fund the Contras who opposed the communist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. President Reagan spoke on aid to the Contras in twenty-five speeches in 1985 and thirty speeches in 1986, the peak of his attention to the issue (Edwards 2003, 132). In addition to mentioning the issue regularly in his public statements, Reagan delivered eight nationally televised addresses on Nicaragua and the Contras during his presidency (Edwards 2003, 30–31), with four of these occurring before the disclosure of the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986.
Despite the extent to which Reagan spoke publicly about Central America, public opinion did not move toward Reagan's position. According to numerous polls reviewed by Edwards (2003, 52–54), support for aid to the Contras ranged between 22 and 42 percent during the period 1985 through March 1988, with opposition always substantially outweighing support. Moreover, the country consistently viewed Reagan's handling of Central America negatively, averaging nearly 61 percent disapproval between 1983 and 1988 (Edwards 2003, 55). Most telling of all, President Reagan considered his public leadership efforts on aid to the Contras a significant failure of his presidency. In his memoirs, the president writes, "Time and again, I would speak on television, to a joint session of Congress, or to other audiences about the problems in Central America ... But the polls usually found that large numbers of Americans care little or not at all about what happened in Central America" (quoted in Edwards 2003, 53). Reagan believed his policy failed precisely because he was unable to lead the public on the issue.
Like Reagan, President Barack Obama used his speaking skills and the "bully pulpit" throughout his first year in office (see Goldstein 2009; Hornick 2008) and especially as part of his effort to pass comprehensive health care reform. From May 2009 through March 2010, the Obama White House marshaled the full resources of its communications operation to build public support for health care reform. To sell reform, the president held a prime-time televised press conference, delivered a nationally televised address before a joint session of Congress, conducted a nationally televised town hall meeting, and travelled extensively throughout the nation delivering campaign-style addresses. All in all, the president mentioned health care reform in over 200 speeches during his first year in office. In addition to the president's own efforts, members of the administration flooded news programs for months attempting to sell health care reform to the American people.
These efforts notwithstanding, the public did not move to support the president's plans for reforming health care. After his national address on September 9, 2009, for example, Obama received just a one-point increase in the percentage of Americans who felt he had explained his position but no other bump in public support. Throughout the fall of 2009, as Obama went public on health care reform and the Senate debated it in committee and on the Senate floor, public support barely moved from a consistent baseline of 40 percent approval. At the same time, Obama's handling of health care reform continued to decline, dropping to 43 percent after his nationally televised State of the Union address in January 2010.
Given these failures to move public opinion, why did Presidents Reagan and Obama speak so frequently on these top policy priorities in the face of overwhelming evidence that their efforts were not paying dividends? Why have other presidents, such as Bill Clinton on health care reform in 1993 or George W. Bush on Social Security reform in 2005, devoted considerable communications resources to strategies that eventually failed? If the president's efforts in speaking are centered on moving public opinion, then the contemporary presidency is replete with anecdotes signifying that presidents are unwise to attempt to directly lead public opinion, whether or not these failures are a product of hubris (Edwards 2003, 5) or arrogance within the White House (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000). Indeed, the cost of public relations may be too high, given the low level of payoff that has resulted.
Failure to lead the public has not deterred the contemporary White House in its public relations efforts, of course. The White House communications operation, buttressed by a staff of several hundred to assist with public relations, devotes substantial resources to impart the president's message, after all, including facilitating the delivery of hundreds of speeches, dozens of interviews, and formal and informal exchanges with reporters annually (Kumar 2007, 5). With all of this effort, surely the White House has achieved some return on its investment in public leadership, despite the lack of clear direct opinion leadership.
To be sure, President Obama's public efforts on health care reform are a clear illustration of the benefits of public leadership even in the absence of an increase in public support for top policy priorities. First, news coverage of health care reform was extensive, occupying a sizeable percentage of the weekly news hole through much of the second half of 2009. Second, health care reform became a top priority of the American people, as a quarter of the public in September 2009 considered health care to be the most important problem facing the nation, up from just 9 percent in May (Jones 2009). Most importantly, the president scored a signature policy success when he signed health care reform into law on March 23, 2010.
Our discussion contends that if presidential speeches do not affect public opinion, then going public should provide other important benefits for the president. Given the strong link between the media's and public's policy agendas (McCombs 2004)-and in light of the difficulties presidents encounter attempting to lead the public directly-our efforts to explore this topic center on presidential leadership of the news media. We argue that presidential leadership of the public occurs through increased news coverage of the president's policies. By affecting the news media's policy agenda, presidents may then influence the public's policy agenda. However, as presidents lament their inability to penetrate the "filter" or overcome the "noise" of contemporary presidential news coverage in the recent media age, it remains unclear whether presidents and their massive communications operation can indeed lead news coverage.
With this in mind, our study explores simultaneously presidential leadership of both the media and public agendas. Despite the common assumption that presidents can influence the public's agenda, there is only limited evidence to support this claim (Cohen 1995; but see Young and Perkins 2005). More importantly, prior research leaves uncovered the effects of the media in the president's relationship with the public despite the strong impact that media have on public concerns (but see Baum and Groeling 2010). Although there exists a larger body of literature on presidential agenda setting of news coverage (see Edwards and Wood 1999), this research does not simultaneously model the public's agenda and its impact on the president-media relationship, despite the working assumption that media are vital to reaching the public. The media's importance to the public presidency (see Cohen 2008) requires a study that accounts for both the media and public simultaneously in a model of presidential leadership.
Given this backdrop, we offer a fresh theoretical and empirical look at presidential leadership of the media and public. First, we argue that presidents may be using their institutional resources primarily to communicate their policy priorities through news coverage. If presidents can lead the media, then this presents a promising opportunity for indirect leadership of the public given the strong interrelationship between the public and news media. Second, we conceptualize leadership in a manner that reflects both leadership and responsiveness (Burns 1978; Geer 1996; Pitkin 1967). We then consider leadership in a way that accounts for the impact that presidents may have on the public and news media and how the public and media may also affect the president. Third, the presidents' efforts at public leadership are not geared so much at changing public preferences, that is, moving public opinion, but rather at influencing the issues the public considers important, that is, agenda setting. We test our claims across three strategies of presidential leadership most common to modern presidencies: focused attention, whereby presidents address the nation on television; sustained attention, whereby presidents discuss their priorities through a series of major and minor addresses; and going local, whereby presidents use domestic travel to affect local news coverage and local public opinion. In addition, we explore how presidential leadership differs across foreign and economic policy, two key policy responsibilities of modern presidents.
In this book, we ask the following questions: How successful are presidents as they attempt to lead the media and public agendas? Do presidents lead the media agenda, and does this leadership translate into indirect leadership of the public? Does simultaneously accounting for leadership and responsiveness alter our expectations and conclusions concerning presidential leadership of the public? How does this play out across different leadership strategies and policy areas? Although our focus is not on how presidential leadership affects legislation, presidents ultimately hope to make major changes in public policy, and their speeches are often geared to pressure Congress (Beckmann 2010; Kernell 1997). Thus, we conclude the book with a discussion of the implications of our results on the prospects for going public and legislative victory.
THE PUZZLE OF PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP
Presidents speak more today than they have at any time in the modern presidency, an observation made by a number of scholars (including Hager and Sullivan 1994; Lammers 1982; Powell 1999). According to Ragsdale (2009), presidential speeches have increased noticeably since the Truman administration. Despite some variation, including Gerald Ford's extraordinary speech making during his election campaign of 1976, there is a clear upward trajectory in the number of presidential speeches over time, with presidents delivering over 400 speeches per year throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s. This is up substantially from the 1950s and 1960s, when presidents averaged 154 speeches per year. More recently, from 1974 to 2009, presidents average 351 yearly speeches. Without question, presidents engage frequently in public speaking to communicate their policy agendas to interested political actors and lead the national policy agenda (Barrett 2004; Eshbaugh-Soha 2006b; Kernell 1997; Whitford and Yates 2003, 2009).
The president's greatest institutional means to lead the policy agenda is through public relations. Behind these efforts at public leadership are considerable White House resources. Buttressed by a competent and flexible staff, the White House Office of Communications and the Press Office assist the president's efforts to communicate with the Washington media, regional and local media, and the American public (Hult and Walcott 2004; Kumar 2003, 2007; Maltese 1994; Walcott and Hult 1995). As Kumar (2007) shows, the president's communications operations are central to this development and potential effectiveness of presidential speeches. The Office of Communications (OOC) has become an indispensable part of presidential public relations strategy (Kumar 2007; Maltese 1994) and has grown along with the increase in presidential speeches since the 1970s. According to Kumar's (2007, 157-164) counts, the staff resources devoted specifically to the OOC have risen alongside the president's tendency to deliver more speeches.
Establishing the policy agenda is one of the primary tasks of the contemporary White House and is of particular purview of the communications office (Kumar 2007; Maltese 1994). The OOC acts as a liaison with non-Washington-based media, a coordinator of information flows from the White House, and a "political tool for generating public support for administration initiatives" (Maltese 1994, 118). Its staff advocates for the president, defends his actions, coordinates publicity, and explains the president's many decisions (Kumar 2007, 6-32). Not to be outdone, the Press Office provides the official record of the president and is geared toward influencing (or at least communicating with) the Washington press corps. Kumar (2007, 199) identifies three roles for the press secretary: information conduit, constituencies' representative, and manager of the Press Office. Each of these roles is crucial as presidents seek to manage press operations to lead not only the news media but also the public. Whereas presidents undoubtedly hope to do much more with these offices than simply begin a conversation on policy-presidents also desire to build public support and sign legislation that they prefer-affecting the priorities of others in and outside of government is a critical and necessary focus of presidential leadership.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BREAKING THROUGH THE NOISE by Matthew Eshbaugh-Soha Jeffrey S. Peake Copyright © 2011 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
