Conceptualizing and Measuring White House Staff Influence on Presidential Rhetoric

Presidential rhetoric is hardly an understudied phenomenon in American politics. Since Richard Neustadt (1990) famously defined presidential power as the power to persuade, political scientists have evaluated and analyzed the empirical evidence supporting this claim. Scholarly treatments of the subject have ranged from the development and normative consequences of the "rhetorical presidency" perspective (Tulis 1987) and the strategic considerations behind "going public" (Kernell 1997) to the impact of presidential rhetoric on public opinion (Edwards 2003; Page and Shapiro 1984, 1992; Welch 2003a, 2003b), the public agenda (Cohen 1995, 1997; Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2005; Edwards and Wood 1999; Hill 1998; Wood and Peake 1998; Young and Perkins 2005), and congressional behavior (Canes-Wrone 2001, 2005; Powell and Schloyer 2003). These studies treat presidential rhetoric as an explanatory concept, one that primarily shapes other events. Scholars have largely ignored, however, the determinants of what the president says. Given the importance of presidential rhetoric, both substantively and symbolically, it is essential that we expand our understanding of why presidents speak as they do. Furthermore, it is important to explain the influences over rhetoric because the manner in which the president presents his ideas and positions on policy determines the nature of policy debates (Schattschneider 1960; Cohen 1995, 1997; Light 1999; Edwards and Wood 1999). Accordingly, the decisions of whether to endorse or oppose a particular policy position and how to frame that position are just as important as the action itself (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000). We suggest that White House-centered factors explain a great deal of what the president says and how he says it. We maintain that two key sources of power within the White House--speechwriters and policy advisors--vie for control over the words of the president, and that the balance of power is both dynamic and meaningful to presidential speech. In this article, we illustrate the dimensions of this conflict and provide a framework to guide future research on it. Intra-White House Conflict over Presidential Rhetoric A few scholars with humanities backgrounds have focused on the question of the influences on presidential rhetoric (see, e.g., Gelderman 1997; Huebner 1970; Medhurst 1998; Ritter and Medhurst 2003; Smith 1976, 1977), but no one has systematically addressed the question in a social scientific fashion. One reason for this lack of attention may be that scholars perceive they lack quantifiable data on rhetoric. In this article, we ameliorate this challenge by providing a method for creating such data using archival resources. (1) By chronologically ordering and examining iterations of speech drafts, along with memos between White House staffers and speechwriters concerning specific drafts, scholars can observe the cooperation and conflict between speechwriters and policy advisors on individual speeches. Scholars can use a specified set of speeches to explain how and why presidential rhetoric develops and evolves over a particular span of time. Not only can scholars exploit this archival data to compose descriptive narratives but they can also mine quantifiable data from the archives by tracking the ratio between speechwriter inputs and policy advisor inputs over iterations and the final drafts. In the section that follows, we introduce and apply our quantification method using a best-test case study for speechwriter versus policy advisor influence in the White House: President George H. W. Bush's announcement to veto the Tax Fairness and Economic Growth Acceleration Act of 1992. (2) President Bush's veto threat is a best-test case of speechwriting for two reasons. First, Bush delivered the speech to relatively little fanfare and public attention, rendering less pronounced the contextual factors that often govern presidential behavior, and leaving more room for intrastaff negotiation between speechwriters and policy advisors. …