In his March 19 essay in The New Yorker, writer Ezra Klein asks, "Who listens to a president?"
To paraphrase a president, the answer depends on what the meaning of "listen" is.
As his first angry shot at the supposed power of presidential speeches, Klein offers President Obama's speech to Congress last September, on the American Jobs Act. You remember, Speaker Boehner put the president off for a day and POTUS had to compete with a compelling opening game of the NFL. His ratings were good nevertheless, and the speech was as persuasive as Obama and his speechwriting team could make it.
"But, in the days following the speech, Obama's approval rating was essentially unchanged," Klein writes. "The audience, apparently, had not been won over. Neither had Congress: the American Jobs Act was filibustered in the Senate and ignored in the House. … The President's effort at persuasion failed. The question is, could it have succeeded."
Klein must hope we imagine a White House Speechwriting Office full of shock, anger and recrimination. If only we would have used my elephant-in-the-living room metaphor! The bill would have passed, and President Obama would have gained three points in the Gallup poll!
The idea is absurd, because no one knows more than the people whose value Klein is questioning, just how limited their own power is. Speechwriters know, because of all the speeches they have written, the direct results they can point to are few and desolate between.
All communicators know the percentages. All writers do. Including Klein.
You don't think he's wondering this morning why his well-written, widely read New Yorker piece didn't precipitate a mass firing of White House speechwriters and a reordering of the president's calendar to include fewer speeches and more tee times.
No, he knows that his piece, however good, will disappear into a trillion other words on the subject, into a vast cosmic wash that sways Americans in mysterious ways.
"The world will little note nor long remember what we say here," said President Lincoln once during yet another throwaway ceremonial address in a field in Gettysburg, Pa. And no one would have been more surprised to see the words of a speech that did nothing for the president's approval ratings and failed to hasten the end of a bloody war, chiseled into marble in a monument to himself.
He would be surprised, however, to see an American scholar, seven score and nine years later, lauded in a national magazine for his discovery of the limits of the power of a single attempt at communication, presidential or otherwise.
As for Perfesser George Edwards, we'll deal with him tomorrow.
Point: Murray. I also struggle a bit with the idea that because a president’s approval rating didn’t improve after a speech that means it didn’t make a different. That’s a bit of a mug’s game. For all we know, without the speech his approval would have dropped. Sometimes success may be not gaining ground but simply not losing anymore.
True, Rueben. Klein’s argument is something close to, if you change your oil on schedule and the car still breaks down, you shouldn’t have bothered changing your oil.
Presidents speak. And if a president decided NOT to speak, or to speak only four times a year, it would be incumbent upon him to demonstrate to the American public what else he was up to the rest of the time.
In a speech, presumably.
True, David. In fact, there definitely seems to be an expectation (for better and for worse) that a president will speak at important times and on important issues, regardless of whether or not he is persuasive. When something big happens, if there isn’t a rapid response from the White House often the media shifts into “where is the president?” mode and not speaking becomes a liability.
For that reason, I’m not sure that persuasion should be considered the point or the measure of every presidential speech. It may be true that “the power of the president is the power to persuade.” But the role of the president is to lead. Sometimes he (or hopefully one day she) needs to lead through the exercise of power, and that power may depend on persuasion. But other times, as all good leaders understand, leadership may mean informing or explaining or inspiring or motivating or reassuring or consoling or any of a myriad other things.
When Reagan spoke to the nation after the Challenger explosion, for example, I’d like to think he wasn’t worried about trying to persuade anyone of anything or even caring much about his approval rating (although someone somewhere in the White House probably was). He was being the national comforter-in-chief. Perhaps ironically, it’s probably often these speeches that have the greatest impact on approval ratings.
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