Download or read book The Rhetorical Presidency of George H W Bush written by Martin J. Medhurst and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the contributors suggest how embracing the art of rhetoric might have allowed Bush to respond more successfully to the challenges of his presidency. Drawing on the resources of the Bush Presidential library and interviews with some of his White House aides, they explore such issues as the first Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin wall, Bush's environmental stance, and the 1992 re-election campaign.
Download or read book Presidential Speechwriting written by Kurt Ritter and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation. The chapters in this book (two by former White House speechwriters) give insight into the process of presidential speechwriting, from Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration to Ronald Reagan's.
Download or read book The Rhetorical Presidency written by Jeffrey K. Tulis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern presidents regularly appeal over the heads of Congress to the people at large to generate support for public policies. The Rhetorical Presidency makes the case that this development, born at the outset of the twentieth century, is the product of conscious political choices that fundamentally transformed the presidency and the meaning of American governance. Now with a new foreword by Russell Muirhead and a new afterword by the author, this landmark work probes political pathologies and analyzes the dilemmas of presidential statecraft. Extending a tradition of American political writing that begins with The Federalist and continues with Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government, The Rhetorical Presidency remains a pivotal work in its field.
Download or read book The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership written by Leroy G. Dorsey and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-26 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Successful presidential leadership depends upon words as well as deeds. In this multifaceted look at rhetorical leadership, twelve leading scholars in three different disciplines provide in-depth studies of how words have served or disserved American presidents. At the heart of rhetorical leadership lies the classical concept of prudence, practical wisdom that combines good sense with good character. From their disparate treatments of a range of presidencies, an underlying agreement emerges among the historians, political scientists, and communication scholars included in the volume. To be effective, they find, presidents must be able to articulate the common good in a particular situation and they must be credible on the basis of their own character. Who they are and what they can do are thus twin pillars of successful rhetorical leadership. Leroy G. Dorsey introduces these themes, and David Zarefsky picks them up in looking at the historical development of rhetorical leadership within the office of the presidency. Each succeeding chapter then examines the rhetorical leadership of a particular president, often within the context of a specific incident or challenge that marked his term in office. Chapters dealing with George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton offer the specifics for a clearer understanding of how rhetoric serves leadership in the American presidency. This book provides an indispensable addition to the literature on the presidency and in leadership studies.
Download or read book The Anti Intellectual Presidency written by Elvin T. Lim and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-16 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has it been so long since an American president has effectively and consistently presented well-crafted, intellectually substantive arguments to the American public? Why have presidential utterances fallen from the rousing speeches of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, and FDR to a series of robotic repetitions of talking points and sixty-second soundbites, largely designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate? In The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin Lim draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents' ability to communicate with the public. Lim argues that the ever-increasing pressure for presidents to manage public opinion and perception has created a "pathology of vacuous rhetoric and imagery" where gesture and appearance matter more than accomplishment and fact. Lim tracks the campaign to simplify presidential discourse through presidential and speechwriting decisions made from the Truman to the present administration, explaining how and why presidents have embraced anti-intellectualism and vague platitudes as a public relations strategy. Lim sees this anti-intellectual stance as a deliberate choice rather than a reflection of presidents' intellectual limitations. Only the smart, he suggests, know how to dumb down. The result, he shows, is a dangerous debasement of our political discourse and a quality of rhetoric which has been described, charitably, as "a linguistic struggle" and, perhaps more accurately, as "dogs barking idiotically through endless nights." Sharply written and incisively argued, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency sheds new light on the murky depths of presidential oratory, illuminating both the causes and consequences of this substantive impoverishment.
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations written by Justin S. Vaughn and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Campaign rhetoric helps candidates to get elected, but its effects last well beyond the counting of the ballots; this was perhaps never truer than in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Did Obama create such high expectations that they actually hindered his ability to enact his agenda? Should we judge his performance by the scale of the expectations his rhetoric generated, or against some other standard? The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency grapples with these and other important questions. Barack Obama’s election seemed to many to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the “long arc of the moral universe . . . bending toward justice.” And after the terrorism, war, and economic downturn of the previous decade, candidate Obama’s rhetoric cast broad visions of a change in the direction of American life. In these and other ways, the election of 2008 presented an especially strong example of creating expectations that would shape the public’s views of the incoming administration. The public’s high expectations, in turn, become a part of any president’s burden upon assuming office. The interdisciplinary scholars who have contributed to this volume focus their analysis upon three kinds of presidential burdens: institutional burdens (specific to the office of the presidency); contextual burdens (specific to the historical moment within which the president assumes office); and personal burdens (specific to the individual who becomes president).
Download or read book Presidents Creating the Presidency written by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-05 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that “the presidency” is not defined by the Constitution—which doesn’t use the term—but by what presidents say and how they say it, Deeds Done in Words has been the definitive book on presidential rhetoric for more than a decade. In Presidents Creating the Presidency, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson expand and recast their classic work for the YouTube era, revealing how our media-saturated age has transformed the ever-evolving rhetorical strategies that presidents use to increase and sustain the executive branch’s powers. Identifying the primary genres of presidential oratory, Campbell and Jamieson add new analyses of signing statements and national eulogies to their explorations of inaugural addresses, veto messages, and war rhetoric, among other types. They explain that in some of these genres, such as farewell addresses intended to leave an individual legacy, the president acts alone; in others, such as State of the Union speeches that urge a legislative agenda, the executive solicits reaction from the other branches. Updating their coverage through the current administration, the authors contend that many of these rhetorical acts extend over time: George W. Bush’s post-September 11 statements, for example, culminated in a speech at the National Cathedral and became a touchstone for his subsequent address to Congress. For two centuries, presidential discourse has both succeeded brilliantly and failed miserably at satisfying the demands of audience, occasion, and institution—and in the process, it has increased and depleted political capital by enhancing presidential authority or ceding it to the other branches. Illuminating the reasons behind each outcome, Campbell and Jamieson draw an authoritative picture of how presidents have used rhetoric to shape the presidency—and how they continue to re-create it.
Download or read book Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency written by Martin J. Medhurst and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the American presidency underwent many profound changes. Chief among those was a radical evolution in the interaction of the president with the general public. Divided into three sections, the ten essays of this volume focus on that evolution and offer thought-provoking analyses concerning the role of presidential rhetoric in passing policy, generating support, and promoting public discourse. In Part I, Jeffrey Tulis, who introduced the concept of the rhetorical presidency more than a decade ago, considers how the dilemmas he envisioned as part of that concept change just as the political arena changes. Glen E. Thurow reflects on private virtue and public duty as aspects of presidential character. Bruce E. Gronbeck argues that the electronic age has fundamentally changed the nature and impact of presidential rhetoric and, indeed, the presidency itself, while Thomas W. Benson contemplates whether politics is even possible in the environment of current computer-mediated communications. Part II turns from theoretical and metatheoretical explorations to practical criticism in a series of case studies. Roderick P. Hart and Kathleen Kendall evaluate the significance of a single telephone conversation about civil rights between Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Theodore Sorenson in June, 1963. Using Richard Nixon's rhetoric as the example from which to draw general themes and issues, Edwin Black considers the complex moral economy that supports presidential self-invention. G. Thomas Goodnight uses the debate over Ronald Reagan's policy toward Central America to study "rhetorical history . . . contested memory and the uses of time in the service of power." Robert L. Ivie examines Graubard's critique of presidential war rhetoric in the context of the Persian Gulf action. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell presents a framework for understanding the public views of the First Lady, focusing on Hillary Rodham Clinton but drawing historical parallels. Finally, Part III of this volume offers a social scientific assessment of the theoretical and interpretive research on presidential rhetoric from one of the nation's leading scholars of the presidency, George Edwards. An introduction and afterword by series editor Martin J. Medhurst seek to clarify the nature and status of the debate about the rhetorical presidency. Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency offers scholars with an interest in speech communication and political science a volume that reexamines the place and significance of presidential rhetoric.
Download or read book Deeds Done in Words written by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-06-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Deeds Done in Words is an impressive piece of work. It is the first attempt to identify and assess the principal genres of rhetoric, and to interpret the panoply of those genres in terms of the needs of, and the needs for, ritual in American politics."—Jeffrey Tulis, author of The Rhetorical Presidency "Deeds Done in Words is a thoughtful survey of how a democracy uses language to transact its business. Based on an enlivened understanding of genre theory and on numerous pieces of original criticism, Campbell and Jamieson vividly show how central public discourse has become the lifeblood of the American polity."—Roderick Hart, author of The Sound of Leadership "The rhetoric that issues from the White House is becoming an ever more salient part of what the presidency means and does. This acute inquiry provides a great many insights into the forms, meanings, and functions of presidential discourse. It is an enlightening contribution to our understanding of American politics."—Murray Edelman, author of Constructing the Political Spectacle
Download or read book Demagogue for President written by Jennifer Mercieca and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, Bronze, 2020 Foreword Indies, Political and Social Sciences Winner, 2021 PROSE Award for Government & Politics "Deserves a place alongside George Orwell’s 'Politics and the English Language'. . . . one of the most important political books of this perilous summer."—The Washington Post "A must-read"—Salon "Highly recommended"—Jack Shafer, Politico Featured in "The Best New Books to Read This Summer" and "Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020"—Literary Hub Historic levels of polarization, a disaffected and frustrated electorate, and widespread distrust of government, the news media, and traditional political leadership set the stage in 2016 for an unexpected, unlikely, and unprecedented presidential contest. Donald Trump’s campaign speeches and other rhetoric seemed on the surface to be simplistic, repetitive, and disorganized to many. As Demagogue for President shows, Trump’s campaign strategy was anything but simple. Political communication expert Jennifer Mercieca shows how the Trump campaign expertly used the common rhetorical techniques of a demagogue, a word with two contradictory definitions—“a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power” or “a leader championing the cause of the common people in ancient times” (Merriam-Webster, 2019). These strategies, in conjunction with post-rhetorical public relations techniques, were meant to appeal to a segment of an already distrustful electorate. It was an effective tactic. Mercieca analyzes rhetorical strategies such as argument ad hominem, argument ad baculum, argument ad populum, reification, paralipsis, and more to reveal a campaign that was morally repugnant to some but to others a brilliant appeal to American exceptionalism. By all accounts, it fundamentally changed the discourse of the American public sphere.
Download or read book Political Rhetoric Social Media and American Presidential Campaigns written by Janet Johnson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Rhetoric, Social Media, and American Presidential Campaigns explores how social media influenced presidential campaign rhetoric. The author discusses media use in American presidential campaigns as well as social media campaigns for Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. This book addresses how presidential candidates adapted their rhetorical performances for newspapers, radios, television, and the Internet. Scholars of rhetoric and political communication will find this book particularly useful.
Download or read book Donald Trump and the Kayfabe Presidency written by Shannon Bow O'Brien and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Donald Trump's longstanding connections to professional wrestling in relation to how he uses and exploits language, and the ways in which he has weaponized going public never before seen in previous administrations. Trump utilizes the language of wrestling to make rhetorical appeals and draws upon its theatrical tactics to redefine expectations of spaces to fundamentally change the nature of political expectations and expression. Wrestling is almost always about stories within a confined space, and Donald Trump inculcated many of its techniques to command an audience with rhetoric. The emotional performance supersedes truth or accuracy; factual exactness matters less than your presentation of the material. As Donald Trump blends performance and public service, social confusion over boundaries has occurred. Theatrical norms, when applied to daily life, generate vastly different reactions than within the artificial confines of an arena. It is not simply a muddling of public and private, but rather a jumbling of theatrical and generalized social standards. This book examines these aspects and explores how Donald Trump has also utilized well-established presidential tools in completely new ways in an attempt to build the strongest executive branch in American history.
Download or read book Truman s Whistle stop Campaign written by Steven R. Goldzwig and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-26 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with the likely loss of the 1948 presidential elections, Harry S. Truman decided to do what he did best: talk straight. When Truman boarded the train to head west in June 1948, he and his campaign advisors decided to shift from prepared text to extemporaneous stump speeches. The “new Truman” emerged as a feisty, engaged speaker, brimming with ideas on policies and programs important to the common citizen. Steven R. Goldzwig engagingly chronicles the origins of Truman’s “give ‘em hell” image and the honing of his rhetorical delivery during his ostensibly nonpolitical train trip west, which came to be known as his “whistle-stop tour.” At the time, Truman was both applauded and derided by the public, but his speeches delivered at each stop helped win him the presidency. Goldzwig’s detailed look at the background of the campaign, Truman’s preparations and goals, the train trip itself, and the text and tone of the speeches helps us better understand how Truman carried the 1948 election and came to represent the plainspoken “man of the people” who returns from behind to win, against all odds.
Download or read book The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric written by Martin J. Medhurst and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-17 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culminating a decade of conferences that have explored presidential speech, The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric assesses progress and suggests directions for both the practice of presidential speech and its study. In Part One, following an analytic review of the field by Martin Medhurst, contributors address the state of the art in their own areas of expertise. Roderick P. Hart then summarizes their work in the course of his rebuttal of an argument made by political scientist George Edwards: that presidential rhetoric lacks political impact. Part Two of the volume consists of the forward-looking reports of six task forces, comprising more than forty scholars, charged with outlining the likely future course of presidential rhetoric, as well as the major questions scholars should ask about it and the tools at their disposal. The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric will serve as a pivotal work for students and scholars of public discourse and the presidency who seek to understand the shifting landscape of American political leadership.
Download or read book President s Speech written by C. Edwin Vilade and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With vivid insight and rousing examples, The President’s Speech takes apart America’s most important presidential addresses, phrase by phrase, and examines the pivotal, often familiar, and always potent language that presidents past used to mold public opinion. Author and speechwriter Edwin Vilade provides the framework for each speech, both within the context of its era and also as a point on a timeline of our country’s long history. Starting at George Washington’s Farewell Address and ending with George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil State of the Union speech, Vilade reveals the varied and often conflicting points of view that shaped the final famous words. Color facsimiles show actual edits, deletions, additions, and handwritten notes to illustrate how remarkable and forceful language was crafted, sometimes at the last minute, into enduring words made famous by their timing, context, delivery, and power, from the 1823 Monroe Doctrine to Ronald Reagan’s “tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev” speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, revealing political and social currents that frame these words for modern times.
Download or read book Woodrow Wilson s Western Tour written by J. Michael Hogan and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On September 3, 1919, Woodrow Wilson embarked upon one of the most ambitious and controversial speaking tours in the history of American politics: a grueling 8,000-mile, twenty-two-day tour across the Midwest and Far West in support of the League of Nations. Historians still debate Wilson’s motivations for touring in the first place, but most agree with Thomas Bailey that the tour proved a disastrous blunder. Not only did Wilson collapse before completing his swing around the circle, but the treaty likely would have been defeated even if the tour had succeeded beyond all expectations. Most agree that Wilson’s decision to tour was misguidedthe product of an exaggerated sense of his own persuasiveness, a martyr complex, or even mental illness. In this masterful work, J. Michael Hogan offers the first detailed analysis of Wilsons speeches on the tour, including the most celebrated speech of the campaign, his famous address in Pueblo, Colorado. Assessing the tour in light of Wilsons own scholarly writings about civic discourse and democratic deliberation, Hogan provides new insight into Wilsons failure and a new understanding of this watershed event in the history of American public address. Over the course of the tour, Hogan argues, Wilson abandoned his own principles of oratorical statesmanship and increasingly resorted to the techniques of the propagandist and the demagogue. In the process, he subverted what he himself called the common counsel of public deliberation and foreshadowed some of the worst tendencies of the modern rhetorical presidency.
Download or read book Centrist Rhetoric written by Antonio de Velasco and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is happening when politicians evoke a center space beyond partisan politics to advance what are unmistakably political arguments? Drawing from an analysis of pivotal speeches surrounding Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and first term in office, Centrist Rhetoric: The Production of Political Transcendence in the Clinton Presidency takes an extended look at this question by showing how the possibility of political transcendence takes form in the rhetoric of the political center. Faced with a divided and shrinking party, and later with a pitched battle against a resurgent conservative movement, Clinton used the image of a political center, a 'third way' beyond liberal and conservative orthodoxies, to advance his strategic goals, define his adversaries, and overcome key political challenges. As appeals to the center helped Clinton to achieve these advantages in specific cases, however, they also served to define the means, ends, and very essence of democracy in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Touching on controversies from the early 1990s over the future of the Democratic Party, racial identity in American politics, the threat of rightwing extremism, and the role of government, Antonio de Velasco show how centrist rhetoric's call to transcendence weaved together forms of identification and division, insight and blindness, so as to defy the conventional assessments of both Clinton's supporters and his detractors. Centrist Rhetoric thus offers general insight into the workings of political rhetoric, and a specific appreciation of Clinton's attempts to define and adjust to the political exigencies of a critical period in history of the Democratic Party and politics in the United States.
