Presidential Disfluency: Literacy, Legibility, and Vocal Political Aesthetics in the Rhetorical Presidency

Abstract

The presidency was once a carefully scripted and carefully controlled site of speech production. Today's media environment has not lessened efforts at control, but it has rendered these efforts increasingly difficult. Previously disruptive and disfluent ways of speaking now serve a useful role in presidential address, allowing mass-mediated audiences to apprehend the presidency in ways that appear to be more intimate and more authentic than careful scripting allows. In response to this new and fast-evolving rhetorical landscape, this essay develops an analytically, historically, and conceptually wide-ranging argument, inviting rhetorical scholars to supplement their abiding interest in traditional forms of presidential eloquence with a commitment to the study of presidential disfluency. Awkward pauses, verbal hiccups, botched colloquialisms, confessionals, and overly personalized speech—all transgress the norms and expectations of presidential eloquence, allowing scholars to reflect on the longstanding, rhetorical discrepancy between presidential speech as it appears in the official historical record and presidential speech as mass-mediated audiences actually hear it.

Keywords:

• Literacy
• Orality
• Paralanguage
• Presidential Rhetoric
• Public Address
• Rhetorical Criticism
• Conversation Analysis
• Rhetorical Presidency
• Presidential Disfluency
• Vocal Political Aesthetics
• Delivery

Notes

1. David Amerland, The Social Media Mind: How Social Media is Changing Business, Politics, and Science, and Helps Create a New World Order (New York: New Line Publishers, 2012).

2. Robert Hariman, “Afterword: Relocating the Art of Public Address,” in Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Thomas W. Benson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 163–83. See also James P. McDaniel, “Figures for New Frontiers: From Davy Crockett to Cyberspace Gurus,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 91–111.

3. See, for instance, Samuel McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 109–31.

4. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language as Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Mathew Adamson, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 68–9. On the history of sermo humilis in American public discourse, see Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

5. Elvin T. Lim, “Five Trends in Presidential Rhetoric: An Analysis of Rhetoric From George Washington to Bill Clinton,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 32 (2002): 228–45. See also Greg Goodale, “The Presidential Sound: From Orotund to Instructional Speech, 1892–1912,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (2010): 164–84.

6. This is not to suggest, of course, that all unscripted speech is disfluent. Presidential disfluency is just one form of unscripted speech. Extemporaneous eloquence is another. Although vastly different from presidential disfluency, extemporaneous eloquence still qualifies as unscripted speech.

7. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. 3, Ch. 1 (1403b–1404a).

8. See Thomas P. Miller, “Eighteenth-Century Rhetoric,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 230.

9. See Mary E. Stuckey, The President as Interpreter-in-Chief (Chatham: Chatham House, 1991).

10. See, for instance, Stefan Sirucek, “EXCLUSIVE: Palin's Tea Party Crib Notes,” The Huffington Post, 7 February 2010: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stefan-sirucek/did-palin-use-crib-notes_b_452458.html

11. The Late Show with David Letterman, “Farewell Tribute to Great Moments in Presidential Speeches,” available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbhzyoNwQYk.

12. For analyses of Bush's rhetoric in historical context, see Robert E. Denton, Matthew T. Althouse, Gwen Brown, and Stephen Cooper, eds., The George W. Bush Presidency: A Rhetorical Perspective (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2012); Elvin T. Lim, The Anti-Intellectual presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Oxford, 2008); Allan A. Metcalf, Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004).

13. See, for example, Mel Laracey, Presidents and the People; The Partisan Story of Going Public (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2010); Martin J, Medhurst, Before the Rhetorical Presidency (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2008); Martin J. Medhurst, Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

14. Karen S. Hoffman, Popular Leadership in the Presidency: Origins and Practice (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2010).

15. Although this phenomenon is most often associated with the media environment of the late 20th century, there is evidence that it began much sooner. See, among many others, Roderick P. Hart, Seducing America: How Television Charms the Modern Voter (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998); Roderick P. Hart, The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

16. See http://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln50.html for a copy of the well-publicized letter 11-year-old Grace Bedell addressed a letter to Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln concerning his public appearance and its relation to his electoral hopes.

17. James Ceaser and his coauthors associate this with the “Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency” and attribute it to the growth of the media, changes in campaigning, and what they call “the modern doctrine of presidential leadership.” They note the importance of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson but place most of their emphasis on more modern presidents, beginning with FDR. See James W. Ceaser, Glen E. Thurow, Jeffrey Tulis, and Jospeh E. Bessette, “The Rise of the Rhetorical Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11 (1981): 158–71.

18. For a discussion of this point, see Parry-Giles, Shawn J. (2010). “Archival Research and the American Presidency: The Political and Rhetorical Complexities of Presidential Records.” In The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan, pp. 157–83. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.

19. In keeping with the requirements of federal law as it has developed since Roosevelt, presidential documents are now available in a myriad of forums. Executive orders and proclamations, for instance, are published in The Federal Register and The Code of Federal Regulations (Title 3). Signing Statements and other statements regarding legislation can found in The United States Code of Congressional and Administrative News and in The Congressional Record. Speeches and other kinds of public address, details of administrative appointments, and the like are available in The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents and The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States and through whitehouse.gov.

20. On the relationship between his speech and his health, see David W. Houck and Amos Kiewe, FDR's Body Politics: The Rhetoric of Disability (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003).

21. This, of course, influences the way the mass public receives, understands, and remembers the institution and those who occupy it. For an analysis of the intersections between popular culture and the presidency see Shawn Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, Constructing Clinton (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).

22. Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age.

23. Certainly, the most important biographer of this complicated president is Robert A. Caro, whose third installment of his magisterial series on Johnson is The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2012). Other important biographies illuminating the painful distance between Johnson's private self and his public image include Robert Dallek, Lyndon B (New York: Penguin, 2005); Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: St. Martin's 1991); Randall Bennett Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). On his awkwardness as a speaker, see Stuckey, The President as Interpreter-in-Chief. On his reference to the Teleprompter as “Mother,” see Martin Waldron, “Aids Recall LBJ's Many Sides,” Eugene Register-Guard, February 10, 1972: 14D. Available online at: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19720210&id=tdtVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=JuEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5819,2715987.

24. On these protections, see Mary E. Stuckey, The President as Interpreter-in-Chief. There is a voluminous literature on both the public and the private pathologies of Richard Nixon. Some of the more important studies that emphasize the intersections between those pathologies include Don Fulsom, Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of America's Most Troubled President (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2012); Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Dell, 1976); Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-made Man (New York: Mariner Books, 2002).

25. Richard M. Nixon, “Remarks to State Legislators Attending the National Legislative Conference,” March 30, 73. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3787

26. For a broader, more contemporary take on this phenomenon, see Nathan Jurgenson, “Speaking in Memes,” The New Inquiry, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/speaking-in-memes/.

27. On the confluence of politics, the presidency, and sports, see Alan Bairner, Sport and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012); Michael Hester, America's #1 Fan: A Rhetorical Analysis of Presidential Sports Encomia and the Symbolic Power of Sports in the Articulation of Civil Religion in the United States. A dissertation submitted to the Georgia State University Department of Communication, Atlanta, GA, 2005).

28. Watergate transcripts were, of course, famous for the number of “expletive[s] deleted.” See, among many others, White, Breach of Faith; Stanley I Cutler, Watergate: A Brief History with Documents (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

29. Contrast, for example, the carefully scripted announcement of his decision to resign with his other, increasingly revelatory and uncomfortable farewells: Richard Nixon: “Address to the Nation Announcing Decision To Resign the Office of President of the United States,” August 8, 1974. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=4324; Richard Nixon: “Remarks on Departure From the White House,” August 9, 1974. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=4325.

30. Although Bill Clinton's travails certainly serve as a recent example of the perils of this confluence. See, among others, William H. Chafe, Private Lives / Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

31. See http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/index.php and http://www.whitehouse.gov/; www.mittromney.com; www.ricksantorum.com; www.newt.org.

32. There is even a website dedicated to documenting presidential errors. See http://presidentialblunders.blogspot.com

33. For a discussion of this point, see Teru L. Morton, “Intimacy and Reciprocity of Exchange: A Comparison of Spouses and Strangers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 72–81.

34. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University California Press, 1950), 26.

35. See Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age.

36. See David Brooks, “South Carolina Diarist,” January 16, 2012, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/opinion/south-carolina-diarist.html

37. For two very different perspectives on this fact, see Jeremy D. Mayer, “The Presidency and Image Management: Discipline in Search of Illusion,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34 (2004): 620–31; Kurt Ritter and Martin J. Medhurst, eds. Presidential Speechwriting: From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution and Beyond (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

38. This is generally referred to as “the presidential bubble.” See, for example, reasonableviews.com/2011/11/23/the-presidential-bubble/

39. See, for example, Lori Cox Han and Diane J. Heith, In the Public Domain: Presidents and the Challenges of Public Leadership (New York: SUNY Press, 2005).

40. See, for instance, the CD-ROM accompanying Journal of Communication 52.3 (2002).

41. Broader considerations of the methodological affinities between rhetorical criticism and discourse analysis are provided in McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance”; Barbara Johnstone, Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley, 2007); Karen Tracy et al. (eds), The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Barbara Johnstone and Christopher Eisenhart (eds), Rhetoric in Detail: Discourse Analyses of Rhetorical Talk and Text (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008).

42. Interestingly, many of today's transcription conventions date back to classical forms of punctuation, the primary function of which was to help readers segment texts in preparation for their oral delivery. Commas, colons, periods—all marked places in the text where oral readers were to pause for a breath. See M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Here, we are relying on the transcription system developed by Gail Jefferson, especially as used in McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance.” Some of the most commonly noted symbols, several of which we discuss later in this essay, include the following:

.    (period) Falling intonation.

↑    (arrow pointed up) Rising intonation.

,    (comma) Continuing intonation.

-    (hyphen) Marks an abrupt cutoff.

::    (colon[s]) Prolonging of sound.

never   (underlining) Stressed syllable or word.

WORD  (all caps) Loud speech.

°word°  (degree symbols) Quiet speech.

>word<  (more than and less than) Quicker speech.

Hhh   (series of h's) Aspiration or laughter.

.hhh   (h's preceded by period) Inhalation.

[]    (brackets) Simultaneous or overlapping speech.

=    (equals sign) Contiguous utterances.

(2.4)   (number in parentheses) Length of a silence.

(.)    (period in parentheses) Micropause, 2/10 second.

()    (empty parentheses) Nontranscribable segment of talk.

(word)   (word or phrase in parentheses) Transcriptionist doubt.

((laughter))  (double parentheses) Description of non-speech activity or sound quality.

43. See, among many others, William F. Lewis, “Telling America's Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 280–302; Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

44. Mary E. Stuckey (2005). One Nation (Pretty Darn) Divisible: National Identity in the 2004 Conventions. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8: 639–56.

45. Paul Waldman, “The Power of the Campaign Narrative,” The American Prospect July 17, 2007, prospect.org/article/power-campaign-narrative

46. Earl N. Phillips, “Partisan Divide on War and the Economy: Presidential Approval of George W. Bush,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53 (2009): 905–33.

47. A concise review of this literature is provided in Daniel C. O'Connell and Sabine Kowal, “The History of Research on the Filled Pause as Evidence of The Written Language Bias in Linguistics (Linnell, 1982),” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 33 (2004): 459–74. See also Michael Erard, Um … Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (New York: Anchor Books, 2007).

48. See Laurel J. Brinton, “Historical Discourse Analysis,” in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, eds. Deborah Schiffrin et al (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 138–60.

49. This argument is developed more fully in Robert Hariman, “Amateur Hour: Knowing What to Love in Ordinary Democracy,” in The Prettier Doll, 239.

50. Greg Goodale, “The Presidential Sound: From Orotund to Instructional Speech, 1892–1912,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96 (2010): 164–84; Joshua Gunn, “On Speech as Public Release,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13 (2010): 175–216; Joshua Gunn, “Speech is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 343–64; Joshua Gunn, “Gimme Some Tongue (On Recovering Speech),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 361–4; Samuel McCormick, “Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse”.

51. On the close connection between political power and public performance in the American presidency, see Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).