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

Chapter 3: Hail (to) the People

ChAPTer 3 | hail (to) the People Can authority be more amiable and respectable when it descends from accidents or institutions established in remote antiquity than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people? For it is the people only that are represented. It is their power and majesty that is reflected, and only for their good, in every legitimate government, under whatever form it may appear. —John Adams, Inaugural Address Both physically and symbolically the president of the United States represents the ideals of an entire nation. He speaks for and with the voice of the people, maintaining the identity and heritage of the nation through his rhetorical choices,whether depicting his constituency as residents of a shining city on a hill,a thousand points of light,lovers of freedom,or some other rendering.He may be addressing an international audience:“To the ears of the world,” President Gerald Ford advised, “the President speaks for the Nation.”1 But he also invites individual citizens to see themselves as part of the collective “people.” Surely the president’s ability to advance viable images of the US citizenry before a multifaceted audience is a component of presidential leadership.2 In the epigraph, John Adams observes that presidents derive authority from the“hearts”and“judgments”of the people—from their esteemed virtues and their grounded beliefs.3 Invoked public opinion helps modern presidents establish the national identity.Scholars have studied how presidential rhetoric definesAmericans by means of demographic or behavioral characteristics that represent who they are.4 This chapter, however, contributes to research on presidential rhetoric and national identity by considering argumentative statements that define Americans by what they believe or value. To accomplish this, I focus on a second argumentative pattern that uses invoked public opinion , a pattern I label “identity appeals.” Whereas the bandwagon appeals considered in the previous chapter use the invoked opinion of one public to persuade another, identity appeals address the people who hold the in- hail (to) the People • 67 vokedpublicopinion.DouglasWaltonexplainsthatinvokedpublicopinion often will “appeal to common values that they all share, thereby getting them whipped up into such a state of enthusiasm that they will go on to accept some proposition that [the speaker] wants them to come to accept.”5 Modern presidents’identity appeals represent the audience’s fundamental values and use those values to legitimize a subsequent conclusion. At first glance the appeal to values might seem to fall outside the scope of “public opinion.” However, from the standpoint of argument theory, public opinion emerges not only from individual assessments of particular policies (concrete opinions) but also from general orientations to those policies rooted in core values (abstract opinions).6 Public-opinion scholar Everett Carll Ladd,recognizing this distinction within the broader category of public opinion,claims that although the public is“strikingly inattentive to the details of even the most consequential and controversial policies,” there is a “persisting structure to American opinion” evident in the stable nature of the public’s“underlying attitudes and values.”7 Moreover,Walton has noted that this appeal to the values and prejudices of the assembled mob is the most prominent type of ad populum argument featured in argumentation textbooks and historically has underwritten concerns about political demagoguery.8 In the context of presidential rhetoric,then,renditions of national values relate to public opinion when presidents attribute those values to the US people as a starting premise for identity appeals. This chapter elaborates on the features and functions of identity appeals in modern presidential rhetoric.After exploring presidential metavalues, or statements about the value of values in governance, I turn to three functions of identity appeals—constitution, association, and amplification —that support the president’s rhetorical leadership. Metavalues, like metaopinions, often serve as implied warrants for identity appeals that enable the connection between audience values and concrete political conclusions. Near the end of this chapter I explore President Jimmy Carter’s response to the 1979 energy crisis to demonstrate how modern presidents use identity appeals to represent the ideals of the people and, at the same time, to promote consistency between audience opinions and presidential conclusions. Framing Identity: Presidential Metavalues as Argumentative Warrants Discussions of US national identity often define “Americans” in relation not to birthright or citizenship status but to the acceptance of particular 68 • Chapter 3 values.9 Presidential metavalues reinforce this mentality by bringing the importance...