Communication: Getting the Message Across

By Nicole Hemmer

In an increasingly polarized political environment, the first year of the new president’s term will be especially challenging. With a fresh mandate, however, the first year also offers opportunities that may never come again. The First Year Project is a fascinating initiative by the Miller Center of the University of Virginia that brings together top scholars on the American presidency and experienced officials to explore the first twelve months of past administrations, and draw practical lessons from that history, as we inaugurate a new president in January 2017.

This project is the basis for a new series of digital shorts published as Miller Center Studies on the Presidency. Presented as specially priced collections published exclusively in an ebook format, these timely examinations recognize the experiences of past presidents as an invaluable resource that can edify and instruct the incoming president.

Contributors: David Greenberg, Rutgers University * Anita Dunn, former Obama White House Communications Director * Susan Douglas, University of Michigan * Jeff Shesol, former Bill Clinton speechwriter * Mary Kate Cary, former Bush 41 speechwriter

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780813940199

Book preview

MILLER CENTER STUDIES ON THE PRESIDENCY

MARC J. SELVERSTONE, EDITOR

Miller Center Studies on the Presidency is a series of original works that draw on the Miller Center’s scholarly programs to shed light on the American presidency past and present.

THE FIRST YEAR PROJECT

Communication

Getting the Message Across

Edited by Nicole Hemmer

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

Contents

Introduction

The Not So Bully Pulpit: Inducing Americans to Listen to the President Is Harder Than Ever

Jeff Shesol

Manage the Micromoments: Reaching Americans Where They Live—on Their Smartphones

Mary Kate Cary

The Hundred Days Myth: Forget the Hype—It’s the Long Run That Matters

David Greenberg

Up Close and Personal: Exploit All the Available Tools to Manage the President’s Public Persona

Susan J. Douglas

Do More with Less: Communications When Governing Takes More Effort Than You Think

Anita Dunn

Contributors

Notes

Introduction

Communication is a critical component of democratic governance. Democracies run on information and persuasion: a free press, an informed public, and leaders subject to elections and public approval. To win elections and maintain authority, leaders must woo and win over, cajole and convince. Presidents can be crippled by low approval ratings as their congressional allies flee. But they can also wield their popularity to whip reluctant legislators to their cause.

The power to persuade both the public and the other branches of government runs directly through the ability to communicate effectively. But effective communication has meant different things at different times, conditioned by the changing media, mores, and messages of an era and an administration—a historical reality made evident during the Trump administration, which has pioneered not only a new set of social media norms for the presidency but a new set of communication values.

In an era of rising presidential power and consolidating national media, presidents were able to seize what Theodore Roosevelt called the bully pulpit. The term derived not from the idea that the president could bend people to his will—the modern meaning of bully—but from Roosevelt’s belief that the presidency was the ideal platform for reaching and influencing the American people.

The idea that the president—not the party or Congress—would set and sell the national agenda was new at the start of the twentieth century. Increasingly the power to reach the American people was vested not in party papers or local organizations, as it had been for much of the nineteenth century, but in a single person with access to an increasingly national media. Presidential speeches and pronouncements started to matter a great deal more, and soon speechwriters, communications professionals, and a press corps all became part of the White House.

The consolidated voice of government met a consolidated form of media. Though the mid-twentieth century saw an explosion of new media forms—radio, then television, joined America’s print outlets as the place news was made and distributed—the control of that media remained in relatively few hands: three or four networks, a handful of papers of record, a smattering of national magazines. Local media still mattered. But when it came to the presidency, national media mattered more.

In the twenty-first century, media have fragmented and polarized in radical ways. Perhaps the recent rise of right-wing media and, more belatedly, left-wing media signals a return to the party papers of yore, when people chose what news to consume based on their political loyalties. But unlike in the nineteenth century, media consumers today have far more power not only to choose their sources of information but also to produce, critique, and remake those sources through social media and the readily available technologies of digital multimedia publishing. Power may still be mostly concentrated in the presidency, but the pathway to the public is no longer concentrated in a single entity that we can call the media.

Which raises the