User:10Adrian/The Rhetorical Presidency

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History
The development of the rhetorical presidency started in 1898 with William McKinley's (25th U.S president) fall tour. Other presidents following in McKinley's footsteps was, Zachary Taylor, James Monroe and Abraham Lincoln who was the last known of the premodern presidents.

Zachary Taylor did a 6 week speaking-tour in 1949 that mainly went through New York and Pennsylvania. On this tour he was not shy on speaking about public matters as slavery and war.

Abraham Lincoln who took over the presidential role in 1961 tried to be careful with what he said, but he still made an average on over 19 speeches a year that addressed political matters in that time.

The term "rhetorical presidency" was introduced by political scientists James Ceaser, Glen E. Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Joseph Bessette in 1981. Tulis wrote the foundational book on the subject entitled The Rhetorical Presidency, in 1987. Tulis' book spurred engaged debate on the history and evolution of presidential rhetoric by many professors and professionals, with Tulis himself later revising positions taken, in his book "The Rhetorical Presidency in Retrospect." released in 2007.

By relying less on the traditional methods of communication with Congress, presidents rely more on the approval of the people as a means of governance. Presidents hope the people put pressure on their members of Congress to side with the president.

The paradigm is typically used to describe presidents pre Clinton and the Ubiquitous Presidency paradigm has been developed to describe digital age presidencies.

Progressive era
Further information: Progressive Era

Many progressive presidential candidates campaigned on the rhetoric of righteousness to motivate their Protestant supporters, especially Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan. Thus Roosevelt's rhetoric was characterized by an intense moralism of personal righteousness. The tone was typified by his denunciation of "predatory wealth" in a message he sent Congress in January 1908 calling for passage of new labor laws:"Predatory wealth--of the wealth accumulated on a giant scale by all forms of iniquity, ranging from the oppression of wageworkers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing out competition, and to defrauding the public by stock jobbing and the manipulation of securities. Certain wealthy men of this stamp, whose conduct should be abhorrent to every man of ordinarily decent conscience, and who commit the hideous wrong of teaching our young men that phenomenal business success must ordinarily be based on dishonesty, have during the last few months made it apparent that they have banded together to work for a reaction. Their endeavor is to overthrow and discredit all who honestly administer the law, to prevent any additional legislation which would check and restrain them, and to secure if possible a freedom from all restraint which will permit every unscrupulous wrongdoer to do what he wishes unchecked provided he has enough money....The methods by which the Standard Oil people and those engaged in the other combinations of which I have spoken above have achieved great fortunes can only be justified by the advocacy of a system of morality which would also justify every form of criminality on the part of a labor union, and every form of violence, corruption, and fraud, from murder to bribery and ballot box stuffing in politics."

Concepts
The Rhetorical Presidency entails with four key concepts. First, the president communicates via a mass medium like a national TV or radio broadcast and typically uses national addresses to do so. Second, the president addresses the American audience as a whole with a common purpose during his addresses. National addresses and state of the union addresses typically are examples of these addresses. Third, the president along with his staff control the message and content that is being presented in the address. Fourth, the president goes “public” with his opinion in order to sway public opinion on issues and to gain support for his policies.

Since the dawn of the new mediums of communication, such as radio and television, the president and his staff have utilized them to address the American audience. Along with the president focusing their attention to mass media, mass media also turned their focus to the president and gave the president more media coverage than ever.

Presidents under the Rhetorical Presidency paradigm commonly speak to the American population by using language that makes them seem as one of "them." The president uses language like, "My fellow Americans" to inflict familiar and comfortable feelings in the audience so they are willing to hear the message the president wants to display.

Presidents seek to control the message and policy they want to put out in the US, so the administrations works to present the message and content in ways that will make the policy more willing to be accepted by the Americans. They alter language, leak information, and send narrow messages so more and more Americans to understand what the President is talking about.

The President will a lot of times "go public" with their opinion in order to sway the public into supporting the policy and messages they are promoting. This is done sometimes to go around Congress and the legislative branch who could be at gridlock with the President on opinion and to possibly push them to get pieces of policy through.