Content Type: Journal Article / Journal: Critical Review / Topic: Government

Author:: Terri Bimes
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: As readers of The Rhetorical Presidency might expect, the Framers\' remarks at the Constitutional Convention revealed a deep concern about popular political ignorance—and a desire to shield the new government from it. However, when it came to designing the presidency, the Founders seem to have been less intent on insulating sitting presidents from the mass public than on guarding the presidents\' selection itself against elite factions that might take advantage of the public\'s ignorance. The resulting constitutional structure left the actual relationship between the president and the public open-ended. In short order, even the most restrained, patrician presidents took advantage of the opportunity to invoke, and to shape, public opinion—setting the stage for Andrew Jackson\'s, and his Democratic successors\', more aggressive presidential populism.
Topic:: Government

Author:: Bryan Garsten
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency should not be read as a tale of decline. It is not a call for an “un-rhetorical” presidency so much as an exploration of the fundamentally uneasy place that popular rhetoric occupies in constitutional governments. Popular rhetoric is one way that executives exercise their prerogative power, and the dilemmas about rhetoric that Tulis exposes arise from a fundamental fact about prerogative power that all presidents must confront: Strong constitutional governments seem almost necessarily to grant their chief executives more discretionary authority than is consistent with the idea of constitutional government. Whatever rhetorical style or strategy a president adopts, he must respond in one way or another to this fact.
Topic:: Government

Author:: Nicole Mellow
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: The rise of a partisan Congress can aggravate some of the pathologies of the rhetorical presidency identified by Jeffrey Tulis: reckless policy production, and the resulting public disillusionment with an overpromising government. In some cases, such as the debate over the invasion of Iraq, the unified ranks of the president's party amplify the president's simplistic rhetoric, reducing policy deliberation and aggravating public disappointment when reality turns out to be more complex. When combined with divided government, however, partisanship can work to produce deliberative compromises that mitigate these pathologies, as exemplified by the welfare-reform legislation enacted by a Republican Congress under a Democratic president in 1996.
Topic:: Government

Author:: Diane Rubenstein
Publication Date:: 01-2007
Content Type:: Journal Article
Journal:: Critical Review
Institution:: Critical Review Foundation
Abstract:: Jeffrey Tulis's The Rhetorical Presidency is deceptively titled. It is not about rhetoric or political symbolism or even about the American presidency as such, as were many postmodern studies produced in the Reagan era. Rather, Tulis re-situates rhetoric: a minor theme in a story about the presidency becomes an important avenue into profound questions of political order and republican governance. Like Tulis, I approach my thesis obliquely; I distinguish his from other, seemingly similar, works (and realign him with other rhetorical readers, such as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida) to underscore what I see as the book's lasting legacy: its explication of the double binds and central paradoxes of republican governance (seen, for example, in presidential prerogative), and its articulation of the role of rhetoric in institutional transformation.
Topic:: Government and Governance
Political Geography:: America

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