Commentary: Do the Write Thing: Politics, Prose, and the Presidency

1. The Rhetorical Presidency

During the last 100 years, as the presidency has become more imperial, it has become more rhetorical. Throughout the nineteenth century, Jeffrey Tulis has demonstrated, the president's power to command—and his popularity—did not depend all that much on his powers of persuasion. Expected to fend off the "temporary delusions" of public opinion, presidents rarely used the bully pulpit to drum up support from American voters for their initiatives (Tulis 39). When they traveled around the country, presidents sought to see and be seen, making hortatory comments or none at all. Democracies, Alexis de Tocqueville declared, needed to erect barriers between the government and the governed "to hold back the one while the other has time to take its bearings" (qtd. in Tulis 59).

American citizens learned about their presidents from political pamphlets and, increasingly, from newspapers. By 1840, the annus mirabilis of popular democracy, when eight of every ten eligible voters cast ballots, administration and opposition dailies and weeklies, subsidized by the government through cheap postal rates, flourished. Widely distributed and intensely partisan, they sought to gin up interest in politics, printing presidential addresses and legislative proceedings verbatim, and exhorting men to vote.

In the twentieth century, presidents began to act on the notion that forming mass opinion was the essence of the art of democratic politics. Theodore Roosevelt took "swings around the circle" to defend his "Square Deal" (Tulis 64). Persuasion, Woodrow Wilson argued, was accomplished by "creeping into the confidence of those you would lead" (215). Presidents' arguments must be simple and direct, Wilson wrote, their moral claims "large and obvious," their policies "purged of all subtlety." Whereas only 7% of the official statements of nineteenth-century presidents had been addressed to the people, almost 40% were so directed by the time Franklin Roosevelt (who was dubbed the nation's "only moral trumpet") delivered his "Fireside Chats" (Tulis 129-30).

These days, texts, spoken and written—and disseminated 24/7 by newspapers, network and cable TV news, the Internet, and the blogosphere—are essential tools of presidential campaigns, governance, and the legacy wars that follow every departure from the White House. As Stephanie Li and Gordon Hutner note, the rhetoric can be (and often is) dismissed as self-serving special pleading, "compromised by the most obvious of political agendas." We must understand its evolving role, however, if we are to assess (and perhaps revise) the "celebrification" of the presidency and the ways in which our nation's ideals and policy options are constructed, marketed, debated, deconstructed, and dumbed-down.

2. Hagiographic Hackers

As Li and Hutner remind us, campaign biographies littered the landscape in the nineteenth century. The Life, Public Services, and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), by James Q. Howard, was typical of the genre's emphasis on the character of the candidate. "Square built," Howard wrote, Hayes exhibited "Lincoln-like soundness of judgment" (163). Attentive to the "sacredness of family and the holiness of home," Mrs. Hayes represented "all that is best and most elevated in our social life" (164).

By the mid-twentieth century, presidential candidates were introducing themselves to voters in television ads, debates, and news "sound bites." Amidst an obsession in American culture with intimacy and authenticity, the campaign autobiography emerged as a supplementary form of direct address. As Sidonie Smith suggests, "the narrating 'I' promises to draw the reader into a zone of familiarity, identification, and affective attachment, thereby overcoming, if only for a moment and illusorily, the sense of remoteness between voter and candidate."

Although candidates sometimes seek to satisfy curiosity about their personality and personal lives in their autobiographies, character remains a central theme. Faith of My Fathers (1999) and Worth the Fighting For (2002) recount John McCain's years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and his subsequent career in the US House of Representatives and Senate, burnishing his reputation for manly vigor and straight talk by making clear that glory comes to those who are dedicated to causes greater than themselves. Modeled on John F. Kennedy's...