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| Chapter 13: The Presidency |
| Get Involved |
| The American president was not always such a public figure. Early presidents actively avoided public campaigning. If the Internet had suddenly become available in the eighteenth century, for example, it is highly likely that George Washington would not have used it. The authors of the Constitution generally shared a common concern, which was that too many direct appeals to the mass public could run the risk of pandering to the public through populist rhetoric. But democratic notions of the presidency have changed, as have conceptions about how the president should communicate with the people. Today, candidates actively pursue any and all methods for communicating their vision and message.
Presidents today have gone beyond the famous “Fireside Chats” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Today, an interested voter can visit the White House website and look up information on the President, the Vice President, and the First Lady. An interactive “Ask the White House” web feature allows citizens to pose questions to Cabinet secretaries and to senior White House officials. The White House website solicits questions about presidential trivia. Even more importantly, the White House now regularly posts extensive documentation of press conferences, public addresses, and other records of presidential activity online. Future administrations will only continue to explore what possibilities for “going public” the Internet can provide. |
| 1. If you want to conduct a research project on the current president’s rhetoric, one valuable website is Project Vote Smart, located at www.vote-smart.org.
Project Vote Smart compiles a list of all public statements of the incumbent administration. Go to the website, look up the current president, and click on the link to access his past public statements (located on the left-hand menu). The website provides a search engine feature where you can look up specific topics in past speeches. If you wish to know what the president has said about the environment, for example, type in “environment” to Vote Smart’s search feature, and it will give you a list of speeches. a. What are some of the recent speeches and public statements given by the current president, according to Project Vote Smart? Read and briefly describe one of the president’s recent public addresses. |
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| 1b. Which topic did you search for? Why? |
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| 2. When studying the American presidency, the name Abraham Lincoln often looms large. Lincoln is regularly listed as one of the greatest presidents in United States history.
As one test of your knowledge of this key president, try your hand at being Abraham Lincoln. The Constitution Center provides you with a walk-through series of questions where you confront the same fateful decisions that President Lincoln did: http://www.constitutioncenter.org/lincoln/html/introduction.html a. How many decisions made by Lincoln would you have handled in the same way, according to the Constitution Center survey? |
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| 2b. What do you think of Lincoln’s decisions, after taking this survey? |
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| 3. For an informative, interactive 2000 survey of how other presidents have been ranked, review a list sponsored by C-SPAN at: http://www.americanpresidents.org/survey/historians/
a. How does Lincoln rank against other presidents, using the criteria in the 2000 C-SPAN survey? |
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| 3b. Are there any categories where he did not rank in the top three presidential achievements? |
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