Opinion and the Presidency

For Wednesday,

• Assignment?
• Reagan, 1983 "Evil Empire" speech in Orlando: both the manuscript (see link here) and the video/transcript
• Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (New York: Random House, 1990), ch. 5. (on Canvas).
• Watch the State of the Union tomorrow night.  
• A brief history: prime time in 1965, out-party response in 1966
• See the 2020 version
• Wag the Dog

Polling (Edwards 123-124)

• How can 1000 people represent the whole country?
• Random samples
• Response rates

What is public opinion?

• Cognitive (Thinking/Beliefs): Represents knowledge, intellectual capacity, and beliefs about a subject.
• Affective (Feeling/Emotions): Relates to emotional responses, attitudes, and moods toward the subject, such as liking or disliking something.
• Evaluative (Judgment): Assessment of value, good/bad, or success/failure.
• Conative (Action/Intent): Refers to t behavioral intention to act, such as the intention to vote

All dimensions are connected.  Think about implications for presidential communication.

Cognitive

• Limitations of institutional knowledge
• Young voters' knowledge
• International politics
• "From the River to the Sea"
• Locating Ukraine on a map
• Polarization of Knowledge and news sources
• Watch out for nonattitudes

Approval of individuals:  mix of affective and evaluative

• Presidential approval: 
• Decay curve
• 21st century trend toward lower approval (Edwards 135-136, 139-140).  Connect to last Wednesday's discussion of close elections.

Why?

What influences attitudes toward the president and national conditions?

• Partisanship
• Events

So what can a president do?

Bill Clinton explains "crafted speech":

So what do I use polls for on the issues? What I primarily use polls for is to tell me how to make the argument that's most likely to persuade you that I'm right about what I'm trying to do. ... Okay. I'll give you an example where, according to the polls I have the unpopular position, okay? The Congress passes a repeal of the estate tax, an outright repeal. Now, I can--and I'm going to veto it if it comes to my desk, okay? Now, I can say the following. I can say, "I'm going to veto this because it only helps less than 2 percent of the people and half of the relief goes to one-tenth of one percent of the people, and it's an average $10 million." That is a populist explanation.

I can say, "I'm going to veto it because we only have so much money for tax cuts, and I think it's wrong to do this and say this is our highest priority, when we have done nothing to lower the income taxes of low-income working people with three kids or more or to help people pay for child care or long-term care for their elderly or disabled relatives or to get a tax deduction for college tuition."

Or I could say, "I think there should be estate tax relief." I do, by the way. "I don't care if it does help primarily upper income people. The way so many people have made so much money in the stock markets in the last 8 years, there are a lot of family-owned businesses that people would like to pass down to their family members, that would be burdened by the way the estate tax works, plus which the maximum rate is too high. When it was set, income tax rates were higher, but there was a lot of ways to get out of it. Now the rates are lower, but you have less ways to get out of it. You have to pretty much pay what you owe more." So I could say that.

So it's not fair to totally repeal it. Like even Bill Gates has said, "Why are you going to give me a $40 billion tax break." And he's going to give away his money, and I applaud him and honor him for it.

So I could make either of those three arguments. It's helpful to me to know what you're thinking. I know what I think is right. I'm not going to change what I think is right. But in order to continue to be effective, you have to believe I'm right. So that's kind of what I use polls for.

 

Nixon memo

• Knowledge of predecessors
• Third person discussion of self: "I speak first of the simple idea of warmth. I don't mean by that that we want to get away from the fact that the President is reserved, dignified, etc., but there are numerous incidents of warmth that have not come through. Now here, I want to emphasize a point that will go against what Sa fir e would like everybody wants me to sit down and talk to members of the staff in a puffing way about how "nicey nice" I have been to them. That is not the way to do it. If warmth is to be believable, it must be discovered, and at this stage there are many examples.

Second Assignment, Spring 2026

Pick one:

Option 1

Track a major policy proposal from President Trump's February 24, 2026 State of the Union. Explain the message war: how Republicans sell it, how Democrats counter, and who "wins" the first five days (including the Sunday talk shows). Use public opinion data, message pickup, elite cues, media stories, and any movement you can document. Define what “win” means in your analysis. Poll results are available at major media outlets and these sites:

• RealClearPolitics
• Pew Research
• Polling Report

Option 2

Compare Vice President Vance to any vice president since Nixon's time as Eisenhower's veep. Has the vice presidency grown more powerful, specialized, political, or presidential? Consider whether differences come from personalities or institutional changes. Look at each veep’s policy portfolio (if any), political role, and relationship with the president. Use at least one presidential or vice presidential memoir, one scholarly book or article, and reputable news sources.

Option 3

Choose one office from the White House internship list and explain why you would want to be an intern there. Go beyond the official description: what does the office really do, and how much influence does it really have? Use primary sources such as executive orders, press releases, speeches, internal memos, news coverage, and interviews with former staff. Also look at books and articles about White House staff. Explain what the office truly produces and its role in presidential governance. Finally, explain why it fits you.

The specifications:

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page.
• Please submit all papers in this course as Word documents, not Google docs or pdfs.
• Read Strunk & White and my stylesheet (with links to model papers). Watch my writing lecture.
• Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of the Chicago Manual of Style. Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space.
• Misrepresenting AI-generated content as your own work is plagiarism and will result in severe consequences
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. 
• Return essays to the Canvas dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Friday, March 13. (If you have trouble with Canvas, simply email it to me as an attached file.) I reserve the right to dock papers one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

See this page for Internet resources on the presidency.

Presidential Elections

For Monday, Edwards ch. 5 and Nixon memo to Haldeman.

Questions on the assignment?  Be sure to link anecdotes to national patterns and trends.  Document what you say.

For your writeup, answer one of the discussion questions at the end of chapter 5. Alternatively, you may offer a guess as to the winner of the 2028 election, but provide reasons based on this week's material.

Keep an eye on the Iran situation.  We will later discuss war powers.

What are conventions for anymore?

Sometimes they backfire, big time

And 2024, not your grandfather's convention:

What do presidential candidates look for in running mates?

Running mates 1948-2020

Why Walz?  Why Vance?

Why did Congress change campaign finance law?

SUPER PACS!  (start at 3:00)

Why the electoral college?

How does it work?

Illustrates change in the political landscape:

Maps and strategy

What really matters?

Events:  what happened in 2024?

Demographics

Partisan trends:

 

Presidential Nominations

For Wednesday, read Edwards, ch. 4.

Questions on the assignment?  Stylistic tips

• Please, no "the purpose of this paper is..."
• In US English, periods and commas go inside quotation marks. Superscripts follow punctuation.
• Do not dangle your modifiers or split your infinitives!
• Avoid dropped quotations.
• Cut down on -ize words and management-speak.
• Avoid the passive.
• Use endnotes with Arabic numerals.

How did the old system work?

Why did the system change?

The 1968 Democratic convention (Edwards 56)

New system relies on primaries and caucuses.  What are they?

New system more open to outsiders:

• Carter
• Reagan
• Obama -- HRC ahead at first
• Trump -- GOP pols slow to endorse in 2016

Why do primary debates make more of a difference than general-election debates?

Example from Edwards, p. 70.

The Shadows Stretch to the Present Day

For Monday, read Edwards ch. 3.

Questions on the paper?

For your writeup, take another look at Ike's Farewell Address.  In 1961, he foresaw problems that would beset his successors and the country as a whole. Other than "the military-industrial complex," briefly discuss one of those problems.

Why did Kennedy go by his initials?

Why did Kennedy conceal his health problems?

Then came Dallas

Kennedy:

LBJ 

With FDR and TX Governor James Allred, 1937

Early Senate campaign button:

LBJ's program was The Great Society.  Medicare was its key achievement.  Signing the Medicare bill, LBJ said:

In 1935 when the man that both of us loved so much, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, signed the Social Security Act, he said it was, and I quote him, "a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete."

Well, perhaps no single act in the entire administration of the beloved Franklin D. Roosevelt really did more to win him the illustrious place in history that he has as did the laying of that cornerstone. And I am so happy that his oldest son Jimmy could be here to share with us the joy that is ours today. And those who share this day will also be remembered for making the most important addition to that structure, and you are making it in this bill, the most important addition that has been made in three decades.

Nixon:

Schoen: How could a political moderate be so polarizing? 

Impact on the presidency

• OMB and WH staff
• Communications

Nixon and his successors

Ford:  the veep

Carter: the anti-Nixon

Reagan: the frenemy

Bush:  the appointee

Clinton: Kennedy fanboy and Nixon doppelganger

Roger Stone:

"So what did you think of him?" I asked Richard Nixon after his first meeting with Bill Clinton.

"You know," Mr. Nixon replied, "he came from dirt and I came from dirt. He lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency, and I lost a gubernatorial race and came back to win the Presidency. He overcame a scandal in his first campaign for national office and I overcame a scandal in my first national campaign. We both just gutted it out. He was an outsider from the South and I was an outsider from the West."

Bush 43, then Obama

Franklin Delano Obama?

Similarities between 2008 and 1932?

Differences in the political and institutional setting? 

The Shadow of FDR

For Wednesday, read the Schoen chapters on Nixon (Canvas).

Questions on the paper?

Coolidge:

Hoover

Connections

FDR a distant cousin of TR, who gave away Eleanor at their wedding. The connection helped him get the VP nomination in 1920 but he also moved away from the Roosevelt Corollary with The Good Neighbor Policy.

FDR and Wilson

• FDR served as Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1913–1920: was also in touch with his British counterpart, Winston Churchill
• Wilson's "New Freedom" program was a template for the New deal and war leadership provided a model for FDR, who later adopted similar interventionist approaches to economic crises and global conflict. 
• WWI precedents for WWII;  financing through bonds, extensive use of propaganda; J. Edgar Hoover.
• League of Nations was both a model and a cautionary tale.

FDR expands presidential hard power:

• Comparisons with Trump
• Inaugural address (4:00)
• The New Deal and Administrative State
• Influence over Congress and the 100 Days
• Executive Office of the President and WH staff
• Supreme Court
• Failed court-packing scheme
• But eventually got a liberal majority
• War Powers: 
• Rationing and economic control
• Military establishment
• Internment of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066. 

FDR Soft Power

• Rhetorical presidency and "Fireside Chats" -- not always on specific policy
• Portrayal of POTUS in newsreels and movies -- concealing his disability

Ike does not repeal the New Deal, instead warns of the military-industrial complex that had started to grow under FDR

JFK

• Joe Kennedy was first head of the SEC and Ambassador to Britain
• 1960 campaign, clutching the hem of FDR's garment

Sprinting Though Presidential History: From Lincoln to the 20th Century

PRESENTATION ON THE DC PROGRAM

QUESTIONS ON THE ASSIGNMENT?

FOR YOUR WRITEUP, DISCUSS ONE THING THAT SURPRISED YOU ABOUT ONE PRESIDENT WHO SERVED BETWEEN THE FOUNDING AND 1920

FOR MONDAY, READ 

• William Leuchtenberg, In the Shadow of FDR, 4th ed. (Cornell University Press, 2009), excerpts.  TWO CHAPTERS ON CANVAS.
• Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address
  
• Gregory Frame, "The Myth of John F. Kennedy in Film and Television," Film & History (Winter 2016).  ON CANVAS.

.The Very Long Shadow of the Civil War

Between 1876 and 1892, no president won a majority of the popular vote:

1876 Hayes.......... 48.0*
1880 Garfield.......48.3
1884 Cleveland.....48.5
1888 Harrison.......47.8*
1892 Cleveland......46.1

McKinley

• Imperialism and the Spanish-American War: Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines -- and a few years later, Gitmo
• Hawaii
• Pioneered modern presidential communication and campaign finance, 
• Assassination led to permanent Secret Service protection.

TR, Wilson, and Taft:  Three Theories  of the Presidency

Roosevelt: "My view was that every executive officer, and above all every executive officer in high position, was a steward of the people bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and not to content himself with the negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin."

• "Bully Pulpit" and the rhetorical presidency
• Executive orders to create 150 national forests, federal bird reservations, and game preserves, protecting roughly 200 million acres
• Trust-Busting 
• Legislative advocacy and the Hepburn Act
• Foreign Policy: the "Big Stick"Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
• Outside the box: involvement in labor disputes and even in football!  Precedent for reaching far beyond fedeal policy.

Taft: Constitution and the presidency: "The true view of the Executive functions is, as I conceive it, that the President can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to some specific grant of power or justly implied and included within such express grant as proper and necessary to its exercise."

Wilson: "The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution, — it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on its part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and Congress has not. He has no means of compelling Congress except through public opinion."

• Rhetorical presidency and SOTU
• "New Freedom" Agenda
• Economic regulation:  Federal Reserve and FTC
• Racism: WW grew up in Virginia during and after the Civil War
• Segregated the civil service
• Promoted The Birth of Nation, which quoted one of his books:


• WWI and Versailles
• WWI and War Power
• Propaganda: The Committee on Public Information (CPI), or Creel Committee, drummed up support for World War I. with posters, films, and 75,000 "Four-Minute Men" speakers, to "sell" the war to Americans.  CPI strategist Edward Bernays wrote: “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”
• Repression: arrest and imprisonment of opponents. About  2,000 prosecutions under the Sedition Act, and 6,000 arrests in the 1919-1920 Palmer Raids -- the first "Red Scare."  A rising star was young J. Edgar Hoover