Rorotoko

In a nutshell

There is a strong belief in the media and among scholars that the best way to lead is by focusing clearly and consistently on one idea at a time. That if a president wants to influence policy, he must articulate one clear and coherent argument about that policy until it gets past. Bill Clinton, for instance, said he would focus on the economy “like a laser beam.” But I think it’s more complicated than that. Jimmy Carter, Human Rights, and the National Agenda shows how presidents can influence policy and public opinion in other ways.

Jimmy Carter put human rights at the center of his administration, and was sharply criticized by both the Right and the Left for how he managed human rights policy. He didn’t get a lot of what he wanted in the short term. But in the long term, he has proven to be enormously influential, and human rights remain an important component of policy. So this book offers a different model of presidential leadership, one that focuses on how presidents may be understood as failing in the short term, but actually succeeding in the long term.

Carter put human rights on the national agenda and did so in such a way that human rights are still there. Carter did this because the issue was already on the agenda in a small way—people had begun to talk about human rights issues when Carter became president. Second, as president, Carter spoke about the topic all the time, giving it a prominence it could not have had without him. Third, he spoke about human rights in particular kinds of ways. Fourth, the term itself resonated so well with long-standing American values and beliefs. Fifth, Carter established an administrative bureaucracy for human rights that meant human rights would live on in the executive branch after he left office.

I argue that presidential leadership is about more than giving speeches or signing laws; it’s a complicated combination of both.

The wide angle

Scholars of the presidency argue about whether what the president says matters. We wonder if anyone is listening; if they are, whether the president has the ability to persuade them; what the limits of that ability are; whether language choices, style, etc. matter. This book contributes to that conversation by arguing that presidents—even those who were notoriously poor at public communication—can influence the public while they are in office and even long after they have left. Carter’s longevity as a public figure with a particular authority on human rights issues is evidence of this.

The questions of what sorts of effects rhetoric has, and how we might know what those effects are, are tricky and occupy a good deal of time in the field. These questions go to the heart of democracy. If democracy is understood as a form of government that requires leaders to make arguments to defend their actions to the governed, then it is vital that we understand the nature of those arguments and how they affect people and politics.

I have been working at the intersection of communication and political science my whole career. I’ve worked on understanding the rhetoric of particular presidencies, especially Ronald Reagan’s, on understanding specific events like the speech given in response to the Challenger crisis, and on understanding the role of presidential rhetoric in forming and reforming our sense of who we are as a people. I’ve also worked in the area of media criticism. So I read a lot of the literature on priming, framing, and agenda setting. And I’m trained as a political scientist, so I read a lot of the work on public opinion and the presidency. The latter isn’t usually read by rhetoricians, while many presidency and media scholars don’t normally read a lot of rhetorical analyses.

Writing this book was so fun because very few people could have written it. As a scholar of the presidency, of the mass media and of political rhetoric, I am familiar with a broad array of literature that is usually compartmentalized—but those compartments can be brought into conversation with each other.

presidents—even those who were notoriously poor at public communication—can influence the public while they are in office and even long after they have left