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As quintessentially an exercise in speaking effectively and with
authority, presidential addresses represent the very embodiment
of the rhetorical situation, epitomising argumentative
discourse, or else, “speech designed to persuade,” as famously
defined by Roman orator Cicero. Although at the pinnacle of
attention throughout modern times from both the direction of
humanities scholars and that of social and political scientists,
public speeches by heads of state have seldom formed the object
of systematic enquiry. When rarely this has been the case, it
was more often than not foreign or home affairs rather than
economic affairs that found themselves in analytic focus.
Historically, presidential speeches have thus been interrogated
for the rhetorical transaction they instantiate, in studies
treating preponderantly of argument weaving, image management,
public approval and disproval ratings. Aptly internalising the
disparaging connotation acquired by the discipline after the
dawning of its classical age, of an endemically manipulative
elocutionary act, mainstream literature in the field has
concentrated on uncovering in deconstructionist vein the
incongruities, syllogistic principles and logical fallacies at
work in modern public speaking from the disciplinary perspective
of culture-critical theory. Thematic, content-analysis
approaches have thus been slow to emerge among an otherwise
abundance of resources.
Processing a massive corpus of discourses from inaugural
addresses to press conferences, Dan B. Wood’s study profiles
itself from the outset as an unlikely and ambitious reference in
both scale and method. Identifying the constant prevalence of
economic issues in public speeches, indeed the urgency of
“talking publically about the economy” (7), Wood provides an
examination of economy as a pattern in the rhetoric of US
presidents with a view to observe the impact of presidential
remarks on economic behaviour. Departing from mainstream
enquiries, Wood undertakes the daunting task of conducting a
literally exhaustive statistical research by virtue of a
computer-assisted approach to coding, specifically of PERL
(Practical Extraction and Report Language). The implementation
of advanced software resources, notably of C programming
language in the actual discourse processing, distinguishes
Wood’s approach from prior investigations. It enables Wood to
focus on “each unique sentence” by sifting through The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, the
official publication of presidential speeches, public writings
and remarks by 12 presidents over 63 years. Working
atomistically with segmental units of analysis rather than
entire speeches, Wood is able to peruse and quantify an entire
plethora of documents and textnotes impossible to cover by a
single researcher based on conventional resources alone.
Bracketing aspects concerning the ways in which addresses at
various points in US presidential history beg various questions,
arguing that one claim or the other is true –the usual suspects
of deconstructive readings – the stress here falls on the
dynamics, the discoursal variables corresponding to the market
fluctuations, the disjunctions between market reality and
presidential emphasis. We are thus dealing with economic
rhetoric viewed from the point of view of causality, not simply
as discourse for political ends. As the title suggests,
The Politics of Economic
Leadership: The Causes and Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric
is less about the pathos in presidential appeals, the ‘true and
false’ claims under deconstructionist fire; or else, it is not
economy as a ‘trope’ which is investigated, but as a pattern
indicative of a set of core reiterative themes, of which
unemployment, inflation, and the federal deficit stand out as
key indicators. While not concerning himself with exposing the
inductive or deductive mechanisms underlying the claims, Wood
seeks to set up a “natural weighting scheme” (22) to be easily
put to various statistical, structural or thematising ends. In
so doing, he implicitly offers revealing insights into the
‘ethos’ presidential addresses project in exploiting the
economic rhetorical setting. One of the central conclusive
statements the book advances is that although not falling
directly under the president’s duties, the common perception of
the American audience is that economic well-being is a
presidential responsibility, hence the privileged role
presidential statements addressing this enjoy in the public
opinion.
Over two millennia of scholastic argumentative theory and
practice have probed the nature of oratory as a verbal art whose
function transcends the mere rhetorical flourish of figures of
reasoning and amplification. Not confined to the persuasive
appeals, the three Aristotelian
pistis or forms of
proof, it involves a complicated dynamics, the result of the
interplay of several at times ineffable relations among
rhetor, text and
audience, made manifest in various framings. It therefore yields
to a multi-disciplinary and multi-perspectival examination.
Subject to an unprecedented crisis of confidence, presidential
rhetoric has since 9/ 11 come to be infamously associated with ‘Bushspeak’,
the ‘war on terror’ and what has been dubbed the ‘resurgence of
the warfare state’. Attention seems thus to have duly shifted
from the conscious deployment of rhetorical devices extolled by
the classical liberal arts to the ethics of rhetoric, i.e.
speech as an expression of ‘doubletalk’ and double standards. In
sharp contrast with the flurry of ‘textualist’ interpretations
taking issue with the teleological assumptions of White House
discourses, Wood’s study proposes a dispassionate, in-depth
diachronic perspective on US presidents’ verbal eloquence and
the force of their appeal to the public. This change of gears is
both refreshing and extremely topical against the background of
ongoing elections.
The
Politics of Economic Leadership: The Causes and Consequences of
Presidential Rhetoric is without doubt a cutting-edge work, grounded
in revolutionary and innovative technology that valorises
pathbreaking quantitative modes of examination, using the
machine coding of text documents in order to achieve exhaustive
statistical analysis, indeed to quantify “every word spoken
publicly” (xiv) from WWII through George W. Bush’s
administration. Furthermore, insofar as it does not rely on case
studies or the single speeches approach, it eliminates the
markedly discursive and interpretable character of post-9/ 11
studies. As well as shedding meaningful light on presidency as
an institution, illustrating how influential the figure of the
president, how impactful his economic speeches, the study has
the merit of enhancing awareness of the rise of rhetorical
presidency in modern times. Its relevance thus extends to the
spheres of both US culture politics and political culture. While
certain to affect readers in all manner of fields, it stands for
a unique resource for specialists, in short, fundamental
research of the most immediate interest.
ADRIANA NEAGU
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
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