Beasley, Vanessa B. You the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Christina F. Jeffrey

Beasley, Vanessa B. You the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. x 204 pp. Cloth, $39.95.

Edwards, George C., III. On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. xii 303 pp. Cloth, $40.00.

Tenpas, Kathryn Dunn. Presidents as Candidates: Inside the White House for the President's Campaign. Reprint, New York: Routledge, 2003. xxiv 191 pp. Cloth, $24.95 (Garland Press, 1997).

Towle, Michael J. Out of Touch: The Presidency and Public Opinion. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. ix 162 pp. Cloth, $37.95.

These four books focus on two aspects of the American presidency. Beasley, Edwards, and Towle are most concerned with presidential rhetoric. Tenpas's insights are directed toward presidential campaigning. All are well-written and researched, take their subject matter seriously, and are interesting to anyone who follows American political history. Tenpas's book has practical utility for those contemplating involvement in a presidential reelection campaign.

Presidents as Candidates

According to Steven A. Shull, editor of the Garland series "Politics and Policy in American Institutions," of which Kathryn Dunn Tenpas's Presidents as Candidates was the inaugural volume, Tenpas's book represents a unique and invaluable introduction to the role of the White House in presidential reelection efforts (pp. ix-x). Her study treats presidential campaigns from Eisenhower to Clinton capped by an epilogue ("Memorandum to the Next President Elected in the Year of the Millennium") summing up what she learned studying the reelection efforts of eight presidents. Originally published in 1997 in hardback edition, Presidents as Candidates was republished in a handy paperback edition in time for the 2004 election.

Tenpas takes her readers behind the scenes and into the White House itself to scrutinize campaigns of incumbent presidents. Her primary concern is how the work of the president and his staff changes once the White House shifts to "campaign mode." In readable academic prose, she describes the various tools and processes involved in presidential reelection campaigns. She does a particularly good job of describing and analyzing the intersections between a president's role as head of the executive branch of government and that of presidential candidate. That he and his staff would make reelection a priority comes as no shock.

Tenpas's research draws on the best presidential case studies, statistical analysis, and fifty-three personal interviews with experts. Her bases for comparison of presidential campaigns are: public standing, whether the incumbent confronts an international crisis, the state of the economy, internal party cohesion, opposition-party activity, presidential personality and style, the influence of key advisers, the caliber of the opponent, and luck.

Tenpas categorizes her presidential reelection campaigns on the basis of type. Her typology is organized by outcome and candidate background and shows that all victorious presidents are not alike. Nor are defeated presidents cut from the same cloth. Type 1 are Victorious, Type 2 are Defeated, and Type 3 are Takeover Presidents (e.g., those who became president originally through succession rather than election). Of the Type 3 presidents, one won (Lyndon B. Johnson) and one lost (Gerald R. Ford).

What follows is a brief comparison of victorious and defeated presidential campaigns as described by Tenpas:

   All the Type 1 (Victorious) presidents--Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan,
   and Clinton--benefited from higher approval ratings that served to
   discourage primary challenges. Further, they all had experienced,
   well-oiled campaigns (p. xv).

As might be expected, the Type 2 (Defeated) presidents--Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush--entered the campaign season with declining approval ratings. While Tenpas maintains that primary challengers are characteristic of losing campaigns, she refuses to credit this factor with causing defeat, even though she concedes that challengers "put the presidents on the defensive, label them as candidates well before election day, and drain finite resources from the presidential campaigns" (p. xvi).

Tenpas argues that low approval ratings do not lead to primary challengers. The distinction is very subtle and it might have helped if she had addressed it directly. Apparently, primary challengers signal weakness rather than cause it. Instead of poor poll numbers leading to primary challengers, Tenpas believes that challengers emerge from "the dissatisfaction of a particular wing of the party" (p. xvi).

Tenpas's third category, Type 3 (Takeover) presidents, are treated separately because they were never elected by the people. Johnson, at least, was elected vice president under President John E Kennedy, but Ford was an appointed vice president. No one outside of his congressional district in Michigan had ever voted for him. Besides this difference between these two takeover presidents, Tenpas notes the vast differences in the presidents who "hired" them. Kennedy was young and popular. The country mourned his untimely and tragic death. His successor, Johnson, benefited. Ford, on the other hand, succeeded his patron, the disgraced Richard M. Nixon. His pardon of Nixon did not help him. Tenpas calls him unlucky.