The Presidency and Political Leadership

452 Rhetoric & Public Affairs The Presidency and Political Leadership Mary E. Stuckey Political leadership is difficult to talk about, because it is difficult to define. It can mean different things to different audiences. It can mean the constitutive elements of rhetorical praxis; it can be the electoral elements of campaigns; it can mean the public elements of presidential politics. For this occasion, I am going to stick closely to my political science roots, and talk about the future of the presidency in terms of policy leadership, which we political scientists understand as coalitionbuilding , and which is, of course, a communicative phenomenon. There are two kinds of coalition building that interest us as political scientists: electoral coalitions and governing coalitions. Electoral coalitions are determined by the peculiar logic of the primary processes and the Electoral College. They require would-be presidents to craft an amalgamation of racial, ethnic, geographic, and age-based interests. In this sense, presidential candidates, through the vehicles of the political parties, are powerful forces uniting the mass public—powerful voices determining national identity. This process of forging a single national voice capable of uniting enough of the public to earn a victory in the Electoral College has become increasingly difficult, and is likely to become more so. Admittedly, when Franklin Pierce had to unite the various factions that vied for power in the 1850s, he faced no easy task. The calculus of electoral politics has never been easy. But among the problems the Democrats faced in the 1850s, they did not have to contend with the black vote, or the women's vote, or the Hispanic vote. Members of these groups had been silenced as they had been disenfranchised. And even in places where there was say, black suffrage, the "black vote," as such, did not exist. Franklin Pierce could have gone to Bob Jones University, and could have done so without a qualm and without the public apology George W Bush felt compelled to make. Franklin Pierce could have been aggressively anti-Catholic. Franklin Pierce did not have to worry about losing votes to the Reform Party—he did, however, have the Know Nothings, so perhaps we can call that one even. My point is that while it is becoming ever more trite to say "we have always been a multicultural nation," it is also true that in many ways we have not had to deal with that multiculturalness in the ways that candidates are now doing, and that Mary E. Stuckey is associate professor of communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. © Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 3, No. 3, 2000, pp. 452-54 ISSN 1094-8392 Forum on the Future of the Presidency 453 future presidents will have to do. By this I mean that those who are now included as a matter of course in our national politics have been, until very recently, consistently voiceless. Dwight Eisenhower took California in the 1950s by appealing to a broad spectrum of white, middle class suburban voters. Ronald Reagan took the state just 30 years later with a coalition based on a combination of disaffected white Democrats, urban Hispanics, and members of the traditional Republican bloc. One can no more imagine Ike running around the state saying, "Ya Basta!" than one can imagine a contemporary presidential candidate winning in the key states of California, Texas, and Florida without mobilizing the Hispanic vote. And, incidentally, mobilizing "the" Hispanic vote is not as easy as it sounds. We use the labels "Hispanic" or "Latino/Latina" to describe a great variety of people from a great variety of nations; in so doing, we subsume a miscellany of class, gender, ethnic , and political differences. The more wary we become about describing "the" Hispanic, "the" black, "the" women's, or any single community, however, the more difficult it will become to articulate a vision of "the" American community. And without such a vision, presidential campaigns generally founder. So political leadership in a campaign context is about crafting a political coalition large enough, diverse enough, geographically varied enough to earn a nomination and insure a majority in the Electoral College. But political leadership, at the presidential level, also involves crafting coalitions within...