Ezra Klein: Presidential Speeches Are Overrated
... In 1993, George Edwards, the director of the Center for Presidential Studies, at Texas A. & M. University, sponsored a program in Presidential rhetoric. The program led to a conference, and the organizers asked their patron to present a paper. Edwards didn’t know anything about Presidential rhetoric himself, however, so he asked the organizers for a list of the best works in the field to help him prepare.
Like many political scientists, Edwards is an empiricist. He deals in numbers and tables and charts, and even curates something called the Presidential Data Archive. The studies he read did not impress him. One, for example, concluded that “public speech no longer attends the processes of governance—it is governance,” but offered no rigorous evidence. Instead, the author justified his findings with vague statements like “One anecdote should suffice to make this latter point.”
Nearly twenty years later, Edwards still sounds offended. “They were talking about Presidential speeches as if they were doing literary criticism,” he says. “I just started underlining the claims that were faulty.” As a result, his conference presentation, “Presidential Rhetoric: What Difference Does It Make?,” was less a contribution to the research than a frontal assault on it. The paper consists largely of quotations from the other political scientists’ work, followed by comments such as “He is able to offer no systematic evidence,” and “We have no reason to accept such a conclusion,” and “Sometimes the authors’ assertions, implicit or explicit, are clearly wrong.”
Edwards ended his presentation with a study of his own, on Ronald Reagan, who is generally regarded as one of the Presidency’s great communicators. Edwards wrote, “If we cannot find evidence of the impact of the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, then we have reason to reconsider the broad assumptions regarding the consequences of rhetoric.” As it turns out, there was reason to reconsider. Reagan succeeded in passing major provisions of his agenda, such as the 1981 tax cuts, but, Edwards wrote, “surveys of public opinion have found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities”—all programs that the President opposed—“increased rather than decreased during Reagan’s tenure.” Meanwhile, “support for increased defense expenditures was decidedly lower at the end of his administration than at the beginning.” In other words, people were less persuaded by Reagan when he left office than they were when he took office....
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