Digby: Bully Pulpit for the Ages

Digby is the pen name of blogger Heather Parton.

Scott Lemiuex has an interesting post up today talking about the fact that LBJ got his agenda through congress with legislative skill rather than the bully pulpit. I have no idea if he was thinking of this post of mine when he wrote it, probably not, but it made me realize that it's probably important to distinguish what it is I mean when I talk about the bully pulpit.

It's not about bullying, for one. I know that Lemieux knows this but it occurs to me that some people might think it means the president shaking his fist and telling everyone how it's going to be. So no, it's not that.

And I'm fairly sure that most people don't think it's something that takes the place of sharp legislative strategy. Indeed, the people who are least likely to be persuaded by Presidential speeches are legislators. It's just part of the business to them.

So, what is it exactly? Wikipedia defines it like this:

An older term within the U.S. Government, a bully pulpit is a public office or other position of authority of sufficiently high rank that provides the holder with an opportunity to speak out and be listened to on any matter. The bully pulpit can bring issues to the forefront that were not initially in debate, due to the office's stature and publicity.

This term was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, who referred to the White House as a "bully pulpit," by which he meant a terrific platform from which to advocate an agenda. Roosevelt famously used the word bully as an adjective meaning "superb" or "wonderful" (a more common expression in his time than it is today).

So, all it means is that the prestige of the presidency automatically commands public attention and can therefore be used to set the agenda or articulate certain values. I think that's important, although I guess your mileage may vary. Indeed, I think it's one of the few ways that political values can be articulated to the general public outside the morass of electioneering, which is largely a he said/she said endeavor.

The president has the biggest bully pulpit as the only leader elected nationally and whose office represents one branch of our government. Does speechifying have immediate legislative value? Maybe, sometimes. But for the most part it's about being a leader to the country and explaining the meaning of your decisions, asking them for support, making the case for your political philosophy. Unless you want to leave it to a bunch of lawyers and advertising men to make utilitarian arguments each and every time you want to get something done it can be helpful to articulate a vision and values that last beyond the moment. More importantly, it allows other members of your party and your successors to carry that vision beyond your presidency.

Presidents have many powerful tools to work with. They have the awesome infrastructure of the executive branch and all the regulatory power that goes with that. In terms of affecting everyday lives, that's the area over which they have the most sway and which gets very little publicity. They have their party apparatus, which is hugely powerful, and their own skills at negotiating to use in legislative battles. And they have the bully pulpit to educate the citizenry and try to change public opinion (or shore it up), which can be helpful, at least on the margins, to move legislation. Some presidents are more successful at wielding some aspects of presidential power than others. But mostly, they use them all to some degree or another to pass their preferred agenda. Indeed, none of them can count on just one.

As an activist I'm certainly thrilled at each momentous step toward progress, whether it's health care or gay rights and I'm impressed with the various strategies that get them there. But I also hope that each of those gains be seen in ideological terms as expressive of liberal values. It's damned difficult to reinvent the wheel all the time so an understanding of the ideology that guides a president who is making this progress makes it much easier for the next person to pick up the baton and go to the next step.

The bully pulpit can be an amazing educational tool --- it can inspire and teach and create an emotional bond between the people and the political philosophy with which the person giving the speech identifies. Can it pass an individual piece of legislation? Probably not. But it can give the context within which peopleunderstand a piece of legislation and support it --- and, more importantly, the successive legislation that's built upon it.

None of this is to say that a president can convince his political opponents to back his program with his mere words. That's silly. Even the popular Roosevelt had unpersuadable enemies. And in our current polarized political climate with the two sides living in alternate media worlds, that enemy will likely always be fierce and powerful. But any political leader has a responsibility to prepare the ground for the people who come up behind him, if only to secure his own legacy. Failing to use the bully pulpit for that purpose is a failure.

Getting back to Scott's discussion of LBJ, it's undoubtedly true that it was his legislative skills that managed to get the civil rights legislation passed. But his speeches on the subject, particularly "We shall overcome" will long be remembered and taught and most people will come away with a profound understanding of the morality of the cause and the context in which he made the case.

Scott also references FDR's "welcome their hatred" speech and seems to imply that it led to 30 years of gridlock, which I don't really understand. The amount of progressive legislation passed during Roosevelt's first term was impressive and it took some time for the country to digest it all (and yes, spit some of it back.) Major legislative advances on race were stymied by the Dixiecrats, but the government itself expanded greatly under under Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in dozens of ways. It's true that the major civil rights legislation and Medicare finally passed partially as a result of LBJs legislative skills, but the fact that our young president had just been shot down in Dallas was a huge factor. The nation was riding an emotional tidal wave that Johnson very deftly rode, but it's hard to see that even with his monumental skills as a legislator that he could have done all that on his own, bully pulpit or not. Just as it's facile to say that the bully pulpit is all powerful, legislative skills is no foolproof way to predict the outcome of anything. I suspect it's always a matter of context, timing, and political skill, however you define that.

I would also be interested in seeing some data that proves the "welcome their hatred" speech was what made Roosevelt's agenda stall. I know that it's very fashionable to pooh-pooh the idea that presidential speeches are anything more than a ridiculous waste of a thinking person's time, and that the only thing that ever matters in an election is the economy, but I cannot then understand why a speech could have the power to completely destroy a presidential agenda either. It is certainly true that Roosevelt took a very wrong turn in 1937 and put the country back into a depression, but I'm guessing he was persuaded by his economic advisers that it was time to deal with the budget deficit and so he pulled back --- which didn't work out all that well. I suppose you can make a case that the Republicans made huge gains in 1938 because he was mean to the rich people, but I suspect it was more a result of Roosevelt foolishly backing a policy that made unemployment go up.

In spite of all that, however, Roosevelt was able to get through the modification of the Social Security program that allowed survivors and spousal benefits in 1939 and he passed the Fair Labor Standards Act during that period among other progressive pieces of legislation. He wasn't as active as he had been, but then it's hard to see how he could have been. And as I said he set the table for 30 years of progressive advances based upon the idea that government should take action to make the lives of ordinary people better. And I think his words mattered in making people understand it -- perhaps not as much at the time, but later, in the way we all came to accept that government had an active role to play in improving the lives of its citizens, an understanding that the conservatives have been fighting with everything they have for more than half a century to change. They certainly believe that communicating ideology matters, even if liberals don't.