The Constitution requires only that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information on the State of the Union” and recommend measures for improving it. Although Washington and Adams had delivered their messages orally, Jefferson in 1801 sent a written message, a practice continued until Wilson went up to Congress in 1913, his first year as president. Jefferson’s and Wilson’s decisions expressed sharply contrasting understandings of the presidency.
In 1801, in his first giving of “information,” Jefferson told Congress that recent “wars and troubles” were largely surmounted, so taxes could be cut and government pruned. As used to be customary, Jefferson put his remarks in a context of constitutional interpretation, stressing that “the states have themselves principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns.” Enterprise flourishes most when most free, and the federal government should feel strictly inhibited by the “limits of our constitutional powers.” The idea of such limits now seems quaint, but not more so than Jefferson’s concluding pledge: “Nothing shall be wanting on my part to inform, as far as in my power, the legislative judgment, nor to carry that judgment into faithful execution.” Jefferson envisioned a modest role for presidents. They are primarily to execute the judgments of the First Branch, and secondarily to help “inform” that branch’s deliberations.
It would have been in character if Jefferson, having economized time by not traipsing up to Capitol Hill, had spent the time reading a book. Clinton could profit by doing that, and a particularly pertinent book is “The Rhetorical Presidency” by Jeffrey K. Tulis of the University of Texas at Austin.
Tulis identifies Wilson as the principal progenitor of the modern presidency, the office that has broken many of its occupants, including Wilson. Wilson, who regarded the separation of powers not as the Constitution’s genius but as its defect, articulated in theory and vivified in practice what has become the unexamined premise of contemporary politics. It is that the president’s primary function is to exercise rhetorical leadership to mobilize the public’s “opinion” in order to shatter the gridlock to which a large and pluralistic society, with a government of checks and balances, is prone.
It was grimly apposite that Wilson’s health collapsed beneath the weight of this duty, during his Western tour to arouse opinion against congressional opposition to the League of Nations. Wilson cast presidents in a crushing role, one demanding skills that few presidents have in a sufficiency for the post-Wilson office. Tulis warns of, and Clinton should worry about, “an increasing lack of ‘fit’ between institution and occupant” in the era of the rhetorical presidency. Increasingly “presidential abilities and institutional requirements diverge,” now that those requirements involve constant exhortation of an–inevitably–jaded public.
Clinton, who has been campaigning unceasingly since 1974 (20 campaigns since then), vows not to stop, promising more bus trips and the like. The presidency has become a seamless extension of campaigning, at a cost to the deliberative processes of government. Management of the dynamics of public opinion takes precedence over the rhythms of deliberation in representative institutions.
The toll that rhetorical style can take on substantive policy is illustrated by Tulis’s analysis of President Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union declaration: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty.” War. Unconditional. That bugle call launched the nation on a hurried march to disillusionment.
Johnson promised to “pursue poverty” with “pinpointed” attacks. It would not be an easy “struggle”; no single “weapon” or “strategy” would suffice “in the field.” Rather than make a reasoned, deliberative presentation, persuasive about why eliminating poverty should be considered possible and an “unconditional” imperative, Johnson used a metaphor-“war”-as a substitute for argument. Indeed, it truncated debate. The premise-we were at war-drove policy: frantic urgency, quick mobilization. Johnson’s subsequent message to Congress bristled with martial metaphors. Poverty is the “enemy” to be “driven from the land,” not by “a single attack on a single front” but by all our “weapons” in “many battles,” just as in “war against foreign enemies.”
The metaphor “worked.” Hearings in the poverty program were hasty; dissent seemed like a shirking of wartime duty. But the public’s understanding of what it had embarked upon was superficial. And when the “war” bogged down, the public’s commitment to it proved to be slight.
The “rhetorical presidency,” continuously trying to mold the public mind, suits the temperament of the hyperkinetic persons who prosper by means of peripatetic campaigning. But one result is the loss of indirectness in government-representation, separation of powers. As Congress comes to accept the terms of competition with the “rhetorical presidency,” it, too, tries to become a molder of “opinion,” but in the unequal struggle Congress becomes a marionette of opinion, a role devoid of dignity. (Witness senators telling Zoe Baird their counts of telegrams and telephone calls.)
There is a tension between rhetoric written to a deliberative assembly and rhetoric spoken to an audience of scores of millions. The former seeks to “inform”-Jefferson’s word-the reasoning within an assembly’s walls. The latter seeks to inspirit the populace. Prior to this century, Tulis says, presidents preferred written communication with Congress rather than oral addresses to the public. This preference derived from an idea-the Founders’-Of the proper functioning of the government. After Jefferson vowed “to inform … the legislative judgment,” he continued: “The prudence and temperance of your discussions will promote, within your own walls, that conciliation which so much befriends national conclusion; and by its example will encourage among our constituents that progress of opinion which is tending to unite them in object and in will.”
That is representative government, elegantly understood not as a handmaiden of public opinion but as an “example” elevating that opinion. It is still worth trying.
