The bully pulpit is one of the modern president's most powerful tools—and one of the most elusive to measure. Presidential Rhetoric and the Public Agenda uses the war on drugs as a case study to explore whether and how a president's public statements affect the formation and carrying out of policy in the United States. When in June 1971 President Richard M. Nixon initiated the modern war on drugs, he did so with rhetorical flourish and force, setting in motion a federal policy that has been largely followed for more than three decades. Using qualitative and quantitative measurements, Andrew B. Whitford and Jeff Yates examine presidential proclamations about battling illicit drug use and their effect on the enforcement of anti-drug laws at the national, state, and local level. They analyze specific pronouncements and the social and political contexts in which they are made; examine the relationship between presidential leadership in the war on drugs and the policy agenda of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorneys; and assess how closely a president's drug policy is implemented in local jurisdictions. In evaluating the data, this sophisticated study of presidential leadership shows clearly that with careful consideration of issues and pronouncements a president can effectively harness the bully pulpit to drive policy.

This book develops a theory of presidential public leadership taking into account the partisan nature of the political debate and the role of presidents.

Modern presidents regularly appeal over the heads of Congress to the people at large to generate support for public policies. The Rhetorical Presidency makes the case that this development, born at the outset of the twentieth century, is the product of conscious political choices that fundamentally transformed the presidency and the meaning of American governance. Now with a new foreword by Russell Muirhead and a new afterword by the author, this landmark work probes political pathologies and analyzes the dilemmas of presidential statecraft. Extending a tradition of American political writing that begins with The Federalist and continues with Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government, The Rhetorical Presidency remains a pivotal work in its field.

Through the analysis of eighteen years of presidential data, this book shows how Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump have conducted and framed the war on terror since its inception in 2001. Examining all presidential speeches about terrorism from George W. Bush’s two terms as President, Barack Obama’s two terms as President, and Donald Trump’s first year as President, this book is the first to compare the three post-9/11 presidents in how they have dealt with the terror threat. Presidential Rhetoric on Terrorism under Bush, Obama, and Trump argues that when policies need to be “sold” to the public and Congress, presidents make their pertinent issues seem urgent through frequent speech-making and threat inflation. It further illustrates how after policies are sold, a new President’s reticence may signify quiet acceptance of the old regime’s approach. After examining the conduct of the war on terror to date, it concludes by posing policy suggestions for the future.

Here, the contributors suggest how embracing the art of rhetoric might have allowed Bush to respond more successfully to the challenges of his presidency. Drawing on the resources of the Bush Presidential library and interviews with some of his White House aides, they explore such issues as the first Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin wall, Bush's environmental stance, and the 1992 re-election campaign.

Campaign rhetoric helps candidates to get elected, but its effects last well beyond the counting of the ballots; this was perhaps never truer than in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Did Obama create such high expectations that they actually hindered his ability to enact his agenda? Should we judge his performance by the scale of the expectations his rhetoric generated, or against some other standard? The Rhetoric of Heroic Expectations: Establishing the Obama Presidency grapples with these and other important questions. Barack Obama’s election seemed to many to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the “long arc of the moral universe . . . bending toward justice.” And after the terrorism, war, and economic downturn of the previous decade, candidate Obama’s rhetoric cast broad visions of a change in the direction of American life. In these and other ways, the election of 2008 presented an especially strong example of creating expectations that would shape the public’s views of the incoming administration. The public’s high expectations, in turn, become a part of any president’s burden upon assuming office. The interdisciplinary scholars who have contributed to this volume focus their analysis upon three kinds of presidential burdens: institutional burdens (specific to the office of the presidency); contextual burdens (specific to the historical moment within which the president assumes office); and personal burdens (specific to the individual who becomes president).

How Trump has used the federal government to promote conservative policies The presidency of Donald Trump has been unique in many respects—most obviously his flamboyant personal style and disregard for conventional niceties and factual information. But one area hasn't received as much attention as it deserves: Trump's use of the “administrative presidency,” including executive orders and regulatory changes, to reverse the policies of his predecessor and advance positions that lack widespread support in Congress. This book analyzes the dynamics and unique qualities of Trump's administrative presidency in the important policy areas of health care, education, and climate change. In each of these spheres, the arrival of the Trump administration represented a hostile takeover in which White House policy goals departed sharply from the more “liberal” ideologies and objectives of key agencies, which had been embraced by the Obama administration. Three expert authors show how Trump has continued, and even expanded, the rise of executive branch power since the Reagan years. The authors intertwine this focus with an in-depth examination of how the Trump administration's hostile takeover has drastically changed key federal policies—and reshaped who gets what from government—in the areas of health care, education, and climate change. Readers interested in the institutions of American democracy and the nation's progress (or lack thereof) in dealing with pressing policy problems will find deep insights in this book. Of particular interest is the book's examination of how the Trump administration's actions have long-term implications for American democracy.