See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/330638887

The Rhetorical Presidency Made Flesh: A Political Science Classic in the Age of
Donald Trump

Article  in  Critical Review · January 2019

DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2018.1567983

CITATIONS READS

3 164

1 author:

Charles Zug
Williams College
8 PUBLICATIONS   8 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Political Diagnosis View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Charles Zug on 25 January 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Charles U. Zug

THE RHETORICAL PRESIDENCY MADE FLESH:

A POLITICAL SCIENCE CLASSIC IN THE AGE OF
DONALD TRUMP

ABSTRACT: This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in

the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core
thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last
three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis
by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have per-
sisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought
revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, are emblematic of the political
culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic
of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science
world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies
sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit
and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency.
Keywords: American political development; constitutional theory; demagoguery; rhetorical presidency;
Jeffrey Tulis.

For an academic publication, Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency (;

new edition ) has remained exceedingly popular. After critical
acclaim when it first appeared in print (e.g., Barnes ; Will ;
Berns ; Didion ; Lepore ), it was the subject of two

Charles U. Zug, charleszug@utexas.edu, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Govern-

ment, University of Texas at Austin,  West st Street STOP A, Batts Hall .,
Austin, TX -, warmly thanks Jeffrey Tulis.
Critical Review – ISSN - print, - online
©  Critical Review Foundation https://doi.org/./..
 Critical Review

edited volumes in the first decade after its appearance (Medhurst ;
Ellis ) and two more after its second (Medhurst ; Friedman
and Friedman ). In recent years, it has won the American Political
Science Association’s Legacy Award and has been inducted into the Prin-
ceton Classics collection, alongside works by such authors as Rorty,
Wolin, Nussbaum, and Kantorowicz. It is no exaggeration to say that
Tulis’s work “has experienced a scholarly reception enjoyed by few
other works in presidency studies” (Crockett , ).
The Rhetorical Presidency owes its renown, in part, to the complexity of
its thesis, from which many different readers can derive different lessons
while still internalizing its basic point. Tulis renders what we all take for
granted about the American presidency complex and problematic, as if
we had never seen it before. As Jeffrey Friedman (, ) put it in a
special issue of this journal on the book,

Successful works of literature are said to estrange the reader by making the
familiar seem unfamiliar. By this standard (and others), The Rhetorical Presi-
dency is a smashing literary success. It underscores the strangeness of our
own political practices simply by showing that things used to be very differ-
ent—and by explaining why.

Tulis achieves this effect by starting from the standpoint of contemporary

readers and leading them dialectically to The Rhetorical Presidency’s core
claims. This works similarly for different contemporary audiences. Students
and practitioners of political communications are drawn to its treatment of
presidential speech and the different ways it can and has been used strategi-
cally in politics (e.g., DiIulio ; Medhurst  and ). Scholars of
American political development find in it an historical cross-sectioning
both of political discourse and of political institutions (e.g., Bimes and
Skowronek ; Orren and Skowronek ; Bimes and Mulroy
). And political and constitutional theorists encounter a probing analy-
sis of the long-term implications of the American polity’s core normative
and philosophical commitments (e.g., Garsten ; Pangle ; Friedman
and Friedman ). The Rhetorical Presidency has something for everyone
because it uses compressed, straightforward prose to advance a many-
layered argument whose inner truth becomes apparent only after long
reflection and robust engagement on the part of the reader.
The other side of this coin is that because certain aspects of Tulis’s book
stand out to different readers, some critics have seized on those aspects
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

which immediately concern them most, and conflated these with what
most concerns the book’s central argument. The Rhetorical Presidency’s
story has been one of fruitful scholarly debate, but also one of persistent
and recurring misunderstanding.
An article in Presidential Studies Quarterly by Ann C. Pluta—“Reasses-
sing the Assumptions behind the Evolution of Popular Presidential Com-
munication”—evinces many of the most persistent misunderstandings of
Tulis’s classic. It provides a good opportunity to revisit the book in light of
the election of Donald J. Trump. For Pluta’s critique of Tulis is a symptom
of the very pathologies in American politics that The Rhetorical Presidency
diagnoses, and that Trump embodies. Habits of thought revealed in
Pluta’s misunderstandings showcase a political culture amenable to the
simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presi-
dents. Elements of the political-science world expressed in Pluta’s article
are, in turn, symptomatic of pathologies generated and sustained by the
culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and study—a culture
shaped by the rhetorical presidency.

I. THE ORIGINAL CONTEXT OF THE RHETORICAL

PRESIDENCY

The Rhetorical Presidency appeared in , when presidential scholarship

was still dominated by Richard E. Neustadt’s Presidential Power (), a
book that some considered instrumental to the “imperial” presidencies
of Johnson and Nixon (Schlesinger ; Cronin ). According to
Neustadt, presidents derive their authority neither from the historical
development of the office nor, as Edward Corwin had maintained in
The President: Office and Powers -, from the Constitution under-
stood as the legal-formal basis of presidential authority. Neustadt advanced
the view that “formal authority promises presidents power it cannot
provide” (Tulis , ), maintaining therefore that “the president’s
[true] power is the power to persuade” (Neustadt , ). Neustadt’s
theory diminishes the importance of both history and the Constitution,
holding that the sine qua non of presidential success is the ability of individ-
ual office-holders to use persuasion and negotiation to realize their own
ambitions and policy objectives.
While subsequent presidency scholars modified Neustadt’s thesis on
various grounds, they largely accepted Neustadt’s central conviction
that, because formal presidential authority is hollow, real-life presidents
 Critical Review

need to lead by non-formal means. Thus, Fred I. Greenstone, in The

Hidden-Hand Presidency (), argued that President Eisenhower—
whom Neustadt (following Harry Truman’s judgment) had viewed as
too reliant on formal authority and insufficiently aware of its limits—
had actually, albeit discreetly, put Neustadt’s insight into practice. Simi-
larly, in Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership (),
Samuel Kernell criticized Neustadt for focusing too exclusively on the
president’s use of private persuasion and bargaining, ignoring the strategic
value of popular rhetorical appeals. Kernell thereby conceded both Neus-
tadt’s equation of presidential success with the achievement of presidential
policy objectives, and the need for non-formal popular rhetoric in achiev-
ing this type of success.
In The Rhetorical Presidency, Tulis recognized that while these presi-
dency scholars differed about the best means for advancing policy
objectives, they all myopically adopted modern presidents’ own
assumption of the legitimacy of these objectives. Thus, for them, the
president’s ability to advance his policy objectives was obviously the
measure of success: “The touchstone of almost all analyses of the pre-
sidency today is presidential ‘effectiveness,’ understood as the long-term
ability to accomplish whatever objectives presidents might have” (Tulis
, ). Tulis characterized this underlying consensus as “presidential
partisanship.” Scholars of American politics, like ordinary citizens, saw
politics from the perspective of the president; they evaluated the
success of the polity on the basis of the president’s success in getting
things done. Even when they disagree with a given president’s objec-
tives, they evaluate that president qua president on the basis of his
ability to realize those objectives.
Most important for Tulis, though, was that because presidential parti-
sans take efficacy for granted as the touchstone of the presidency, they
accept that it is legitimate for presidents to appeal directly to the people
by means of popular rhetoric and “moral suasion” (ibid., ) so as to
advance their own policy objectives—in short, that the presidency
should be “rhetorical.” Indeed, popular rhetorical leadership is under-
stood to be the very “heart” and “essence” of the modern presidency
(ibid., ), with the result that Americans castigate presidents who are
not rhetorical enough (ibid., , esp. n). By the same token, American citi-
zens take the rhetorical presidency for granted without questioning either
how it became rhetorical or whether it should be rhetorical in the first
place.
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

The Founding and the Constitutional Presidency

Turning to American political history, Tulis investigated the common
scholarly claim that twentieth-century presidents merely “speak to ‘the
people’ more than their nineteenth-century predecessors did” (ibid., -,
emph. added). Contemporary scholars looking at the presidency from
the standpoint of today accept this claim as true yet interpret it as a
natural and positive development: “The rhetorical presidency,” Tulis
observed, “is usually regarded as a logical development of the institution
rather than a fundamental transformation of it. On this common and
dominant view, the modern rhetorical presidency was writ small in the
founders’ original design” (ibid., ). By the same token, the “common
and dominant view” maintains that the advent of other aspects of the
modern presidency—such as the role presidents take in the legislative
agenda, the partisan use of presidential veto, the development and institu-
tionalization of the White House staff, and the development and use of
unilateral powers (ibid.)—are the true instances of fundamental change.
Tulis reversed this view. Drawing on Alexander Hamilton’s classic
arguments in the Federalist, as well as on Herbert Storing’s Hamiltonian
arguments in “The Problem of Big Government,” he suggested that
the institutional developments regarded by most scholars as fundamental
transformations were actually writ small in the Constitution’s logic
(Tulis , , , n). To borrow a formulation from Tulis’s coau-
thored  book, Legacies of Losing in American Politics, those develop-
ments are in fact features of the constitutional polity’s projected
architecture (Tulis and Mellow , , -, , -, ),
which gives government all the means necessary to meet the unforesee-
able exigencies of the future. The rise of the rhetorical presidency, by con-
trast, was a fundamental transformation. Today we take for granted the
legitimacy of presidents pressuring the legislature by speaking to popular
audiences about specific policy proposals before Congress. In stark con-
trast to contemporary practice, Tulis contends, nineteenth-century presi-
dents overwhelmingly did not use policy-oriented rhetorical campaigns in
order to apply such pressure. Rather, the original constitutional design
limited presidents to advising Congress about future legislation, while
leaving the actual formulation of policy up to legislators. Thus, instead
of authorizing presidents to coerce Congress from the outside by means
of popular pressure stimulated by presidential rhetoric, what Tulis dubs
 Critical Review

the Old Way saw presidents interacting directly with Congress through
sustained and persuasive argumentation meant to weigh the advantages
and disadvantages of proposed policies (Tulis ; Ewing and Zug
). Within this framework, the president’s legislative role was to
initiate and facilitate Congressional “deliberation”—i.e., reasoning collec-
tively on the merits of public policy (Tulis , -; Tulis ;
Bessette )—while leaving the precise formulation of bills to Congress,
whose institutional design better equips it to generate thoughtful, moder-
ate legislation. By the same token, the president’s task in the Old Way was
not what it has become today: namely, formulating elaborate legislative
proposals and then using rhetorical policy campaigns to stampede Con-
gress into passing them. The constitutional logic of the old way held
that popular leadership on the part of presidents would be disruptive to
the legislative process of deliberation as well as dangerous in itself, in
that it would likely degenerate into demagoguery. Rhetorical leadership
by presidents was therefore “proscribed” in the design of the
constitutional order conceived at the American founding (Tulis ,
-, -).
Using archival records of nineteenth-century presidential speech, Tulis
demonstrated that the logic of the Old Way was manifested empirically
in the rhetorical practices of nineteenth-century presidents. Tulis grouped
public utterances by presidents according to their purposes—ranging
from greetings and “thank you” remarks to attacks and defenses of legisla-
tive proposals before popular audiences. He showed that “the more policy-
oriented a speech, the less likely it was to be given in the nineteenth
century” (ibid., ). When presidents did articulate policy-oriented propo-
sals, they almost always directed them to Congress, and frequently in
writing, not in person (even Andrew Jackson: ibid., -). Tulis’s research
revealed that while the presidency of the Old Way was designed to be a
powerful office—sanctioning, for example, an augmented White House
bureaucracy if the need arose—it was not designed to be a popular one.

The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency

Tulis contends that the truly fundamental change in the presidency—from
“constitutional” (Old Way) to “rhetorical” (New Way)—was initiated by
Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the twentieth century (ibid., -
). Roosevelt found the practices of the rhetorically constrained presi-
dency to be inadequate to the great exigency of his presidential tenure:
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

preventing class warfare provoked by the industrial revolution. In Tulis’s

account, Roosevelt believed that class tensions engendered by unregu-
lated railroads in the early twentieth century threatened to devolve into
all-out civil war (ibid., -). In response to this crisis, he consciously
broke from the “common law” of the Old Way (ibid., ) by taking his
campaign for the Hepburn Act—which expanded the power of the Inter-
state Commerce Commission to regulate railroads—directly to the
people. However, he did so on the quintessentially Hamiltonian
premise that this departure from doctrine or “common law” was war-
ranted by an exigency—his perception of impending civil war—and
that a return to the Old Way would follow once the crisis had been suc-
cessfully met. Tulis thus dubs Roosevelt’s moderated departure from the
“constitutional” presidency the “Middle Way” (see also ibid., ).
The return to the Old Way that Roosevelt envisioned never took
place, however, because within a few short years Woodrow Wilson
made TR’s departure from doctrinal practice into a new doctrine that
has been taken for granted ever since. Wilson regarded the main structural
features of the Constitution, especially its two-chambered legislature, as
inadequate to realizing the polity’s fundamental goals (ibid., -).
His response was to untether the presidency from its previous consti-
tutional moorings so as better to realize the desiderata of the Constitution
itself. He believed that a newly conceived presidency—one that enabled
the president to “interpret” the will of the people at large through robust
popular leadership (ibid., -), and then translate that will directly into
policy by means of a streamlined legislative process—was necessary to
remedy the Constitution’s structural defects. On the basis of the logic
of the Constitution itself, then—that government must be adequate to
any challenge the future may bring—Wilson retooled the presidency
without a formal amendment (ibid., ). Thus, he legitimized what
Tulis calls the “New Way”: a doctrine of the presidency that not only
legitimates but obliges presidents to speak directly to the people and
invoke mass popular support in pursuit of substantive policy objectives.
Wilson’s achievement was a deeply ambiguous one, however. Tulis
acknowledges that “the Wilsonian critique, for all its problems, reveals
flaws in our original Constitution” (ibid., ). The Old Way did constrain
presidents from exercising the kind of leadership that a true moment of
crisis warrants. Accordingly, Hamilton’s logic, of constitutional ends
versus means, warranted departure from the Old Way through the use
of popular leadership during times of genuine crisis. However, Wilson’s
 Critical Review

innovation was to go beyond Roosevelt in authorizing crisis-mode lea-

dership at all times, even (or perhaps especially) during non-crisis politics.
The long-term consequences of Wilson’s transformation of the presi-
dency—consequences for political discourse and deliberation—were
immense. Random samples of  presidential speeches from the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries revealed  presidential speeches to Con-
gress and  to the people in the nineteenth-century collection, versus 
to Congress and  to the people in the twentieth-century collection
(ibid., Table .). Tulis found  written messages to Congress and no
popular speeches in the nineteenth-century sample, versus  written
messages to Congress and  popular speeches in the twentieth-
century sample (ibid., Table .). Finally, in a comparison of inaugural
and State of the Union addresses, the nineteenth-century sample
included  developed arguments and no “lists of points,” whereas the
twentieth-century sample included  developed arguments and  lists
of points (ibid., Table .). In sum, starting with Roosevelt, the president
directed more rhetorical attention to the public than to Congress; the
rhetoric to Congress tended to be delivered orally rather than in
writing—diminishing the opportunity for deliberation in response—and
the content of the rhetoric was in the nature of demands for action, not
reasons for it.
More difficult to quantify is the fact that rhetorical presidents are incen-
tivized to treat everything as if it is a crisis, since this is likely to mobilize
the public to pressure Congress to act. Everyday politics is sensationalized,
and its political discourse and culture come to reflect this change. As Tulis
illustrates through two case studies—Lyndon Johnson’s “War on
Poverty” and Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the “Star Wars” defense
system—the language of crisis and war is trivialized through overuse; by
the same token, sustained argument is replaced by rhetoric that is ever-
more-simplified and hyperbolic in nature (ibid., -).
Through his analysis of this transformation and its effects, Tulis seeks to
establish the criteria for a “diagnosis” of political and constitutional decay
(Muirhead , xi, xiii-xiv; Zug ), and thereby articulate the signs
and requisites of constitutional health (Tulis , , -; Bell
). Tulis (, ) calls this perspective on politics a “systemic
posture, a view of what constitutes the essential character of a polity.”
Elsewhere, in discussing the American founders, Tulis distinguishes this
diagnostic or “systemic” way of thinking from other ways of thinking
about politics:
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

One could call [this] approach a constitutional frame of mind or a consti-

tutional way of thinking. Thinking constitutionally meant () identifying
which decisions embedded in the Constitution were core and which
were peripheral or ancillary; () elucidating the philosophic or normative
presuppositions behind the core commitments; and () detailing the insti-
tutional, policy, and cultural implications of the core commitments. (Tulis
and Mellow , ; see also Tulis , )

From this elevated standpoint, the unhesitating endorsement of popular

presidential rhetoric authorized by the New Way is revealed as a pathol-
ogy in American constitutional politics. Commitment to a popular, rhe-
torical presidency, and to a presidency-centered system of government,
blinds presidential partisans to the destructive effects of popular leadership
at the presidential level. In addition, it blinds partisans to the other dimen-
sions of the American constitutional order, of which the presidency is only
one.

II. PRESIDENTIAL STUDIES SINCE THE RHETORICAL

PRESIDENCY

Presidency scholarship today retains some of the core features of the scho-
larship Tulis originally set out to critique, even as it also reflects the impact
of Tulis’s diagnosis. Scholars following in the direct line of Neustadt, for
example, have felt compelled to use quantitative analysis to evaluate his
core claims about persuasion and bargaining (e.g., Edwards ; Bond
and Fleischer ). Other scholars have more directly appropriated fea-
tures of the framework erected in The Rhetorical Presidency. Scholars of
American political development (“APD”) reflect Tulis’s approach in
their attention to longitudinal changes and sources of permanence in
the presidency, aspects largely abstracted from by Neustadt and his heirs
(e.g., Skowronek  and ; Crockett ; Nichols ). Thus,
Stephen Skowronek concentrates on the historical and contextual
factors that constrain or increase presidential authority over time.
Depending on their place in “political time,” he argues, presidents are
either the founders and subsequent beneficiaries of a mandate for govern-
ing authority, or upholders of that mandate as it is challenged by a new
one. Skowronek conceives of political time as a cyclical process that
repeats with each “durable shift in governing authority” that takes place
over the course of history (Orren and Skowronek , ). By contrast,
“secular time” is a non-cyclical, longue-durée process by which successive
 Critical Review

presidents are constrained in their actions by institutional “thickening,”

i.e., the progressive buildup of bureaucracy and protocol. Like Tulis,
Skowronek uses historical cross-sections of the presidency to reveal the
sources of, and reasons for, its endurance and change.
By contrast, scholars of what has come to be called the “unilateral” pre-
sidency abstract from historical development and focus instead on the
constitutional and institutional resources embedded in the executive
office itself—an aspect of the presidency that Neustadt held to be irrele-
vant, but that Tulis, through his examination of constitutional design,
came to regard as foundational (see, e.g., Mayer ; Cooper ;
Caruson and Farrar-Myers ; Rottinghaus and Maier ; Moe
; Bailey and Rottinghaus ). Specifically, the unilateral model
analyzes the presidency in relation to such constitutional and institutional
factors as the executive order, recess appointments (Bell ), and presi-
dential relations with Congress. By focusing on such embedded resources,
the unilateral model builds on Tulis’s distinction between “official” and
“unofficial” presidential rhetoric, as well as his account of the importance
of ex post facto presidential command in the Old Way, particularly as excer-
cised by Lincoln (Tulis , -). As Jordan Cash observes, the unilat-
eral presidency “presents a radically different presidency than that
proposed by Neustadt” (, ).

Pluta’s Critique of Tulis

Unsurprisingly, The Rhetorical Presidency has also generated protracted and
heated controversy, both in political science and in the fields of communi-
cation and rhetoric. Numerous works have challenged parts as well as the
whole of Tulis’s thesis. Anne Pluta’s Presidential Studies Quarterly article is
not the first attempt at a wholesale refutation of Tulis’s book. What makes
her critique particularly worth examining is the way it synthesizes the cri-
ticisms—as well as the misunderstandings—of The Rhetorical Presidency that
have persisted for the thirty years since its original publication.
Pluta presents some useful new data on nineteenth-century presidential
communication, and prepares the groundwork for several new research
projects in the field of presidential studies. Her critique of Tulis’s book,
however, ignores basic features of its argument and incorrectly attributes
to Tulis a narrowly causal, Woodrow Wilson-centered view. And it is
questionable whether Pluta’s findings refute even her version of Tulis’s
argument, let alone his actual position.
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

Pluta attributes to Tulis, and then criticizes, a series of hypotheses

that Tulis himself never actually articulated. First, in Pluta’s telling,
Tulis denies that presidents before Woodrow Wilson engaged in
what Pluta calls “spoken popular presidential communication” (or
“SPPC”) while claiming that presidents spoke exclusively to Congress
(Pluta , ). Second, according to Pluta, Tulis posits the existence
of a constitutional norm forbidding presidents from engaging in SPPC
(ibid., ). Third, Tulis contends that Wilson’s “ideas” were the
exogenous cause that actually gave rise to SPPC by breaking down
the constitutional norm that forbade it (ibid., , ). Pluta denies
these three positions, and accordingly proposes three alternatives.
First, pre-Wilsonian presidents did engage in SPPC. Here Pluta con-
tends that, because the Richardson Papers left out around ,
instances of SPPC, Tulis drastically underestimated the amount of
pre-Wilson SPPC (Pluta , -; ; Pluta ). In addition,
Pluta contends, presidents after Wilson were just as likely to address
Congress as they were to address popular audiences, demonstrating
that post-Wilson presidents did not replace Congress with the
people at large as their audience (ibid., ). Second, she holds that
there had been no constitutional norm against SPPC. This can be
glimpsed, she argues, in the fact that there was no significant reaction
on the part of newspapers to Wilson’s delivering his State of the
Union address in person, rather than as a written message (ibid., ).
Third, she contends that technological advancements and other “politi-
cal opportunities and incentives,” not Wilson’s rejection of the anti-
SPPC constitutional norm, are more likely to have caused presidents
to engage in SPPC (ibid., , , -).
Broadly speaking, then, Pluta criticizes The Rhetorical Presidency on
the grounds that historical data reveals there to have been “a funda-
mental relationship between the president and the people from the
inception of the institution” (ibid., ): the institution of the presi-
dency, in short, has always been a popular one. Thus, in Pluta’s
view, Tulis mistakenly sees a simple and decisive cause for increased
popular presidential communication—namely Wilson’s “ideational”
revolution (ibid., , )—where there was in fact a complex and pro-
tracted one: the new communications technologies increasingly avail-
able to presidents.
 Critical Review

The Frequency of Popular Appeals

Pluta distorts Tulis’s account of nineteenth-century presidential rhetoric
in three ways. Let me begin with the most obvious of these, which is
also the most easily rectified. Pluta states that “Tulis’s main source of evi-
dence [regarding nineteenth century SPPC] was the official record that he
obtained from the Richardson papers” (Pluta , ). Pluta goes on to
note that she has, in the course of her own research, discovered “,
instances of SPPC” that went uncounted in the Richardson papers, and
which Tulis must therefore have missed (ibid., ). Pluta is simply mista-
ken. Tulis found the roughly one-thousand instances of SPPC cited and
used in The Rhetorical Presidency in sources apart from the Richardson
Papers. As he says in chapter :

Because nineteenth century presidents might have appealed to the people

unofficially in support of policy initiatives … inspection of “unofficial”
nineteenth-century speech is necessary to determine its extent, its salient
characteristics, and its principal purposes … Yet if unofficial, where is this
speech to be found? There are no official collections of unofficial speech. I canvassed
three major sources for manuscripts or references to speeches: () the Library of
Congress collections of nineteenth-century presidential papers, () the
private “unofficial” compilations of presidential speeches and addresses
published in the nineteenth century, and () biographies of each of the
nineteenth-century presidents … I discovered approximately one thou-
sand “unofficial” popular speeches delivered by nineteenth-century presi-
dents. (Tulis , , my emphasis; see also ibid., )

It is difficult to imagine how a reader of The Rhetorical Presidency could miss

such a statement.
Pluta then attributes an argument to Tulis that he simply did not make.
According to Pluta, Tulis contended that pre-Wilson presidents never
engaged in what she classifies as “SPPC”: spoken communication of any
kind to an audience other than Congress. If correct, this would mean
that, according to Tulis, pre-Wilson presidents gave no public speeches,
and that they spoke only to Congress. Tulis, however, argued only that
nineteenth-century presidents refrained from a particular kind of public
speech, which he defines as “rhetorical leadership” (see, e.g., Tulis
, ), or, more specifically, as “rhetorical campaigns to secure
passage of legislation” (e.g., ibid., ; ). “SPPC” and rhetorical leader-
ship, Tulis accordingly explains, are crucially different:
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

Although presidents made relatively few popular addresses in the nineteenth

century compared to presidents in our century, taken together they did
give a considerable number of speeches—about one thousand of them.
… These speeches looked very different from speeches today and per-
formed very different political functions—that is one of my central
claims. (Ibid., )

Having failed to register that Tulis did not assert that nineteenth-
century presidents did not make public speeches, Pluta (, ) belabors
the point that “a number of Wilson’s predecessors averaged more speeches
per year than Wilson”—a fact that Tulis neither denies nor tries to
conceal, for a reason that should be obvious to anyone who has read
The Rhetorical Presidency: “speeches” per se do not necessarily constitute
“rhetorical leadership.” Again, to quote Tulis: “[t]he activity of [nine-
teenth century] presidents was fundamentally similar to that of their pre-
decessors and fundamentally different from twentieth century practice
after Woodrow Wilson” (, ; see also ibid., ). Thus, he acknowl-
edges that “some [nineteenth-century] presidents (such as Hayes, Benja-
min Harrison, and McKinley) appeared in public quite often” (, ;
see also Tulis ). Nevertheless, he points out, these “presidents could
have made speeches that looked very similar to those made today, but
they did not. They spoke and acted very differently than they could
have done” (Tulis , ).
Having distorted Tulis’s empirical evidence, as well as mischaracterized
his definition of rhetorical leadership, Pluta leaves out any mention of
Tulis’s lengthy discussion of the two nineteenth-century presidents who
did engage in rhetorical campaigns—the exceptions that prove the
rule. Tulis (, -) spends seven pages of chapter three—“The
Great Exception”—discussing the meaning and importance of Andrew
Johnson’s  popular rhetorical campaign: the infamous “swing
around the circle” that got him impeached. And chapter  is entirely
devoted to a detailed account of Theodore Roosevelt’s - rhe-
torical policy-campaign for the Hepburn Act (ibid., -). In failing
to discuss Tulis’s account of Roosevelt, in particular, Pluta ignores the
core of his diagnosis of the rhetorical presidency and its development.
Roosevelt was fundamental to this development, in that his choice to
wage a popular rhetorical campaign for the Hepburn Act, and his experi-
ence in so doing, demonstrated that presidents could tap into hitherto
unused legislative and policy-making powers by “going public” to
 Critical Review

pressure Congress. Roosevelt thus paved the way for Wilson, who capi-
talized on Roosevelt’s choice by articulating as well as practicing a new
constitutional doctrine that legitimated new rhetorical practice: “Wilson
justified Roosevelt’s practice with a new theory that made popular leader-
ship routine” (ibid., ).
Thus, Tulis by no means contended that pre-Wilson presidents gave
no public speeches, or refrained entirely from SPPC. Rather, he argued
that when they did speak publicly, they by and large confined themselves
to articulating constitutional principle and republican sentiment; and, by
the same token, that they avoided the kind of speech characteristic of their
twentieth-century counterparts, namely “rhetorical campaigns to secure
passage of legislation.”

Constitutional Norms
In addition to denying what she misconstrues as Tulis’s account of presi-
dential rhetoric, Pluta advances a wholesale rejection of his understanding
of nineteenth-century constitutional constraints. First, she contends,
George Washington and John Adams delivered spoken addresses to Con-
gress, during the “Old Way” period, when presidents were supposedly
forbidden from speaking. Second, when Wilson revived the practice of
delivering a spoken address, early twentieth-century newspapers praised
rather than buried him (, -). Together, argues Pluta, these
facts demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the absence of an Old
Way constitutional norm; for if there had been such a norm, the first
two presidents would not have delivered spoken addresses, and Wilson
would have met with criticism for his departure from doctrine.
Again, three basic problems undermine Pluta’s claim. First, as I have
already argued, she fundamentally distorts Tulis’s thesis in claiming that
he posits a constitutional norm against presidents giving speeches of any
kind. Rather, he contends that the “Old Way” constitutional doctrine
constrained the kind of speech presidents could engage in, not whether
they could make speeches at all. Accordingly, Tulis’s chapter  discusses
at length the types of speeches Washington and Adams delivered for
their spoken Annual Addresses (, -). There he indicates how
these speeches manifestly conformed to Old Way doctrine. In content,
they were limited to articulating republican sentiment and constitutional
principle. As for their form, in receiving “replies” from Congress, and
giving replies in turn, Washington and Adams fostered archetypal “Old
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

Way” presidential-congressional deliberation (Tulis , ; see also

Tulis , Bessette , and Ewing and Zug ). Wilson, in contrast,
refused to reinstate the Old Way deliberative practice of “reply” (Tulis
, n; see also Kraig ,  and Ewing and Zug ).
Second, in citing contemporary newspaper articles that approved of
Wilson’s decision, Pluta radically oversimplifies what turns out to be a
very complicated story. Presidential historian Robert Alexander Kraig
(, -) explains that Wilson’s  announcement that he
“intended to break a -year precedent by delivering the customary
message opening the special session in person rather than in writing …
stunned official Washington.”

Overturning a deeply entrenched tradition, Wilson made his first appear-

ance before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, April , . …
[M]any in Washington refused to believe that a president would break Jef-
ferson’s admonition against personal orational presentation. According to
The Washington Post, senators and representatives were “too astonished
over what some regard as a startling move to give any coherent expression
to their views.” … The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that the announce-
ment “stirred Congress as few things have done in recent times,” and Sec-
retary of Agriculture David Houston later recalled that even “some
members of the Cabinet seemed to be a trifle shaky about the venture.”
… These musings were more than journalistic license. The historic symbo-
lism of the event impressed almost all commentators.

Other sources confirm this account. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, for instance,
reported that “Congress is still astonished at Wilson’s determination …
Most of the members do not know exactly what to say.” This, of
course, is by no means to deny the obvious truth of a limited version of
Pluta’s argument, namely that many contemporaneous reactions to
Wilson’s decision were, in fact, positive—something Tulis does not
deny. How else, he argues, would Wilson have managed to change the
reigning constitutional norm unless he had accurately diagnosed “the
inadequacies of the more constrained presidency” and presented a power-
fully persuasive case for a New Way?
The third problem is that Pluta ignores the mountains of historical evi-
dence that Tulis, in his first three chapters, amasses in support of his
hypothesis for a nineteenth-century constitutional norm against presiden-
tial popular leadership. Instead of a crude recapitulation of the evidence,
let me instead direct the reader to four of Tulis’s cases that I find particu-
larly informative: Daniel Webster’s chastisement of Andrew Jackson for
 Critical Review

attempting “to appeal to the people through Congress” (Tulis , -
); Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to discuss his Civil War policies while on
tour (ibid., -); Andrew Johnson’s impeachment proceedings (ibid.,
-); and (most entertaining of all) President Martin Van Buren’s
public censure by three New York towns—including the “city of his
adoption,” Hudson—for his popular rhetoric (, -).

Technological Change
Finally, Pluta distorts Tulis’s argument regarding the role of technological
change in the development of the rhetorical presidency—or rather, she
neglects to mention that Tulis has such an argument. Yet The Rhetorical
Presidency contains a sustained anticipatory rebuttal to precisely the
thesis that Pluta advances regarding technological advancement. Tulis
(, -) writes:

The greatest difficulty that faces one who would give great weight to the
technical development of the mass media as determinant of the rhetorical
presidency is the fact that presidents had much less technological difficulty
in going to “the people” in the past than one might think. … Presidents
could have made speeches that looked very similar to those made today,
but they did not. They spoke and acted very differently than they could
have done within the limits of available technology.

Tulis proceeds to show that many of the early presidents embarked on

speaking tours around the country—“seeing and being seen,” as they
put it, adopting Washington’s usage (ibid., ). While on tour, presidents
delivered numerous speeches (see, e.g., ibid., ). In the nineteenth
century, they used the railroad to make these tours, as Tulis points out
in his discussion of Lincoln (ibid., , -). And they took full advantage
of the mass reach of newspapers (ibid., , ; see also Bimes and Mulroy
; Laracey  and ; Ellis ; and cf. Crockett ). Thus,
they used nineteenth-century technologies—but did not exploit them
for the sake of “rhetorical leadership.” Technology and other “changing
opportunities” therefore cannot be identified as the sole cause of the rhe-
torical presidency. Tulis points out that “the last three presidencies in the
nineteenth century … neither lacked physical opportunity nor technical
means to conduct new political practices.” (ibid., ). And yet, with
rare exceptions, nineteenth-century presidents refrained from practicing
“rhetorical leadership.”
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

III. THE RHETORICAL PRESIDENCY IN PRESENT AND

FUTURE PERSPECTIVE

Although Pluta tries to eschew normative language, her way of thinking

about politics manifests an implicit and unwitting normative commitment
to the very pathology in American politics that Tulis diagnoses. The view
of American political development on which Pluta bases her critique of
Tulis has the consequence of normalizing, even legitimizing, the demago-
gic extremes of the rhetorical presidency—extremes exemplified by Pre-
sident Trump.
In the political and historical landscape Pluta depicts, the presidency
looks like an essentially passive, plastic institution, powerless to resist
advances in communications technology. Such advances determine the
presidency from the outside, so to speak, gradually transforming it from
a less into a more rhetorical institution. Accordingly, individual presidents
uniformly and unhesitatingly let themselves be transformed into rhetorical
beings, without showing any signs of autonomy or awareness of consti-
tutional forms and constraints. Since presidential exploitation of the
media is inevitable, to condemn or hold accountable an individual presi-
dent for the way he has used the media would—in Pluta’s perspective—
be to endow him with a freedom of thought and action that the empirical
study of history debunks. Pluta’s presuppositions thus prevent her from
even questioning the presidential use of mass communication, leading
her instead to take for granted that increased and expanding use of mass
communication by presidents is historically determined and therefore
inevitable. On the one hand, presidents in American political history
have not resisted the opportunity to exploit communications technology
to engage in rhetorical leadership. This must mean that the principled
refusal to exploit rhetorical communication—such as was exercised by
Lincoln during the Civil War (Tulis , , )—is impossible. On the
other hand, it can be taken for granted that present and future presidents
will unhesitatingly seek an ever-increasing audience by ever-more-direct
technological means, and there is, in Pluta’s perspective, no conceivable
reason for presidents not to keep in perfect step with those advances.
Pluta’s argument has the effect of rendering presidential exploitation of
the media inevitable and therefore acceptable. Why would you object to
such exploitation as it is practiced today—say, on Twitter—if it has always
been going on, and will continue to increase whether you like it or not?
By the same token, Pluta takes it as given that presidents will seek to
 Critical Review

maximize their rhetorical purchase through the media in all its forms. As
Tulis puts it,

If the rhetorical presidency was invented to enable the president to speak

“over the heads” of Congress to the people directly, Twitter enables the
president to deliver messages in his own unfiltered words “over the
heads” of the mainstream media. Twitter gives the president more
control of his message. From the president’s perspective, it seems to
enhance his power. (, )

Thus, extending Pluta’s argument to contemporary politics, we might

well conclude that Donald Trump’s unrestrained and demagogic use of
Twitter proves that presidents and their audiences are unable and unwill-
ing to resist advances in communication. By the same token, Pluta’s argu-
ment would seem to render Trump’s practices excusable, and therefore
acceptable, on the grounds that since previous presidents have kept in
step with advancing communications technology, why should Trump
not, as well?
This way of thinking is in many ways emblematic of contemporary
American political culture, which shows itself to be increasingly
unaware of the purpose, significance, and substance of constitutional
forms. On this score, some commentators have diminished the gravity
of Trump’s norm erosions on the grounds that they are laughable and
will have no serious consequences for the polity:

The Trump alarmists thought that a brittle democratic culture and set of
institutions were about to encounter a man representing a dire, determined
threat to their integrity; instead, a robust democratic culture and set of
institutions encountered the guy sitting down at the end of the bar
yelling at the TV. (Lowry )

Others have diminished the importance of constitutional forms

altogether. Both views are rooted in a political and discursive culture
that affirms the inevitability and irresistibility of media exploitation on
the part of presidents, thereby dismissing as futile and illegitimate any
attempt at restraining such exploitation through constitutional norms.
What is more, it fails to question whether presidents should seek to
exploit media to the furthest extent in the first place. In so doing, it
implicitly denies the possibility of alternative, moderate, non-exploitative
uses of presidential rhetoric.
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

Pluta’s argument thus showcases just the sort of political and discursive
culture that is most amenable to the simplistic, demagogic, yet politically
effective appeals characteristic of Trump.
Perhaps no event in American history has made the consequences of
Wilson’s “second Constitution,” as well as the prospect of constitutional
failure, more visible than has the election of Donald Trump. Indeed,
Trump’s “norm-busting” conduct (Tulis and Mellow , ),
coupled with his dystopian political vision (Tulis , ), have
helped make the familiar unfamiliar in a way no single book ever
could. By bringing to light the potentially cataclysmic consequences
that the rhetorical presidency can have for American politics, Trump
could, ironically, have the beneficial effect of making millions of Ameri-
cans aware of the pathological character of the rhetorical presidency—that
is, its proclivity to subvert the requisites of constitutional government, and
to corrupt the very entity it was invented to restore. Trump’s presidency,
then, could help reveal the habits of thought that the overwhelming
majority of us take for granted, which unwittingly end up sustaining
and aggravating those features of our politics that we most despise.

NOTES

. See, respectively, Federalist Nos.  and  (Alexander Hamilton), and Storing

, -.
. Regarding the availability of records of nineteenth-century presidential speech,
Tulis (, ) explains: “there are no official collections of unofficial speech.
I canvassed three major sources for manuscripts or references to speeches: ()
the Library of Congress collections of nineteenth-century presidential papers,
() the private ‘unofficial’ compilations of presidential speeches and addresses pub-
lished in the nineteenth century, and () biographies of each of the nineteenth-
century presidents. … I discovered approximately one thousand ‘unofficial’
popular speeches delivered by nineteenth-century presidents.” In addition to
these sources of unofficial speech, Tulis included the official collection of official
speech, known as the Richardson Papers.
. Pluta also criticizes the work of Elvin T. Lim ( and ).
. The papers are available here: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/
metabook?id=mppresidents.
. Tulis (, -) also points out that William Howard Taft, who came after
Roosevelt and before Wilson, began a “popular practice” “of his own.”
. In so doing, Wilson sought to achieve the Constitution’s own substantive ends by
“reinterpreting” its existing institutions (the presidency and Congress), rather than
by designing a wholly new set of institutions (ibid., ). The actual product of
Wilson’s reinterpretation—the rhetorical presidency—is therefore best under-
stood as a second interpretive layer “superimposed” upon the “text” of the Amer-
ican Constitutional polity (see, e.g., ibid., -; ). This view stands as an
alternative to those that posit multiple “foundings” in American political
 Critical Review

development, such as the constitutional-moments thesis of Bruce Ackerman

() and the multiple-republics thesis of Theodore Lowi (). For a fuller
treatment of these alternatives, see Tulis and Mellow .
. Jefferson, for his part, remained within the same basic framework when he
decided to deliver his address in writing rather than in speech (Tulis , ).
. Kraig , n, cites several other now-defunct newspapers making similar
claims.
. Tulis (, ) by no means denies that it was a partial cause, as his discussion of
“ideas as semi-autonomous factors in American political development” makes
eminently clear.
. E.g., Azari : “Forget Norms. Our Democracy Depends on Values.”
. Tulis (, -) suggests the form such an alternative today might take: “A
thoughtful and restrained constitutionally informed president might use Twitter
or other social media platforms sparingly and effectively to set a political
agenda or to alert the polity to an emergency. As a rare, selectively used resource,
one can see a good side to this new technology for constitutional politics. As a
routinely used political tool by presidents, it is hard to find any good in it.”

REFERENCES

Ackerman, Bruce C. . We The People: Foundations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press.
Azari, Julia. . “Forget Norms. Our Democracy Depends on Values.”
FiveThirtyEight, April .
Bailey, Jeremy D., and Brandon Rottinghaus. . “The Historical Presidency: The
Development of Unilateral Power and the Problem of the Power to Warn:
Washington through McKinley.” Presidential Studies Quarterly : –.
Bell, Thomas R. . “Perverse Politics: Recess Appointments, Noel Canning, and
the Limits of Law.” Presidential Studies Quarterly (): –.
Barnes, Fred. . “Mr. Popularity.” New Republic, January  and .
Berns, Walter. . “The Prattling Presidency.” Wall Street Journal, October .
Bessette, Joseph M. . The Mild Voice of Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Bimes, Terri, and Stephen Skowronek. . “Woodrow Wilson’s Critique of
Popular Leadership: Reassessing the Modern-Traditional Divide.” Polity 
(Fall): -.
Bimes, Terri, and Quinn Mulroy. . “The Rise and Decline of Presidential
Populism.” Studies in American Political Development (): -.
Bond, Jon R., and Richard Fleisher. . The President in the Legislative Arena.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cash, Jordan. “The Isolated Presidency: John Tyler and Unilateral Presidential
Power.” American Political Thought  (Winter): -.
Caruson, Kiki, and Victoria A. Farrar-Myers. . “Promoting the President’s
Foreign Policy Agenda: Presidential Use of Executive Agreements as Policy
Vehicles.” Political Research Quarterly : –.
Cooper, Phillip J. . By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct
Action. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
 Zug • The Rhetorical Presidency Redux 

Corwin, Edward. . The President: Office and Powers -, th ed. New York:
NYU Press.
Crockett, David A. . The Opposition Presidency: Leadership and the Constraints of
History. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Crockett, David A. . “The Rhetorical Presidency: Still Standing Tall.” Presidential
Studies Quarterly (): –.
Cronin, Thomas E. . The State of the Presidency, nd ed. Boston: Little, Brown &
Co.
Edwards, George C. . At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Ewing, Connor M., and Charles U. Zug. . “What Happened to the State of the
Union Address? Originally, It Helped the President and Congress Deliberate.”
Washington Post, January .
“Eyes on Congress Is President’s Idea in Reading New Message.” . The Brooklyn
Daily Eagle, April : .
Friedman, Jeffrey. “A ‘Weapon in the Hands of the People’: The Rhetorical
Presidency in Historical and Conceptual Context.” Critical Review (-):
-.
Friedman, Jeffrey, and Shterna Friedman, eds. . Rethinking the Rhetorical Presidency.
London: Routledge.
Garsten, Bryan. . “The Idea of an Un-Rhetorical Presidency.” Critical Review 
(-): -.
Howell, William G. . Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential
Action. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kernell, Samuel. . Going Public: New Strategies of Presidential Leadership.
Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
Kraig, Robert Alexander. . Woodrow Wilson and the Lost World of the Oratorical
Statesman. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Laracey, Mel. . Presidents and the People: The Partisan Story of Going Public. College
Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Laracey, Mel. . “The Rhetorical Presidency Today: How Does It Stand Up?”
Presidential Studies Quarterly (): -.
Lepore, Jill. . “Annals of the Presidency.” New Yorker, January .
Lim, Elvin T. . “Five Trends in Presidential Rhetoric: An Analysis from George
Washington to Bill Clinton.” Presidential Studies Quarterly (): -.
Lim, Elvin T. . The Anti-Intellectual Presidency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lowi, Theodore J. . The End of Liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lowry, Rich, . “Trump Norm Violations Don’t Make Him a Despot.”
Newsmax, January .
Mayer, Kenneth R. . With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential
Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Moe, Terry M. . “The Revolution in Presidential Studies.” Presidential Studies
Quarterly : –.
Muirhead, Russell. . “Foreword” to Tulis .
Neustadt, Richard E. . Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, rd ed.
New York: Free Press.
 Critical Review

Nichols, Curt. . “The Presidency and the Political Order in Context.” Polity :
–.
Orren, Karen, and Stephen Skowronek. . The Search for American Political
Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pangle, Thomas L. . “The Puzzle of The Rhetorical Presidency.” Critical Review 
(-): -.
Pluta, Anne C. . “The Evolution of Popular Presidential Communication.”
Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, University of California, Santa
Barbara.
Pluta, Anne C. . “Reassessing the Assumptions behind the Evolution of Popular
Presidential Communication.” Presidential Studies Quarterly (): -.
Rottinghaus, Brandon, and Jason Maier. . “The Power of Decree: Presidential
Use of Executive Proclamations, –.” Political Research Quarterly :
–.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. . The Imperial Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Skowronek, Stephen. . The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to
Bill Clinton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Storing, Herbert J. . Toward a More Perfect Union, ed. Joseph M. Bessette.
Washington, D.C.: AEI Press.
Tulis, Jeffrey K. . The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tulis, Jeffrey K. . “On the State of Constitutional Theory.” Law and Social Inquiry
(): –.
Tulis, Jeffrey K . “Revising the Rhetorical Presidency.” In Beyond the Rhetorical
Presidency, ed. Martin J. Medhurst. College Station: Texas A&M University
Press.
Tulis, Jeffrey K. . “Deliberation Between Institutions.” In Debating Deliberative
Democracy, ed. James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett. Oxford: Blackwell.
Tulis, Jeffrey K. . The Rhetorical Presidency, new ed. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Tulis, Jeffrey K., and Nicole Mellow. . Legacies of Losing in American Politics.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Will, George. . “Rhetorical Presidency.” Newsweek, February .
Zug, Charles U. . “Could Political Science Become Diagnostic? Restoring a
Forgotten Method.” Perspectives on Political Science. DOI: ./.
..

View publication stats