The fragmented and polarized political environment that presidents face daily makes it difficult for them to accurately communicate their messages to the public, yet it seems that every week we see presidents visiting local grocery stores or manufacturing plants, gracing the magazine cover of specialty magazines (like Runner's World), or giving exclusive interviews to local network reporters. This practice of narrow targeting defines the modern, “local” president, beset by a 24-hour media hungry for stories, a growing plethora of media outlets and partisan griping from all levels. It is with this in mind that Jeffrey E. Cohen argues in Going Local that it is time to rethink how presidents attempt to persuade the public.
Building on, but articulating distance from, previous studies of presidential leadership, Cohen thoughtfully augments the concept of “going public,” in which presidents are said to eschew bargaining with Congress in favor of persuading constituencies to then pressure Congress to enact the president's preferred agenda. He argues that “although they [presidents] have not abandoned the going public leadership strategy, presidents have modified their public leadership activities to better fit these new realities” (p. 1). This modification prominently features “mobilizing support from their party base, interest groups, and select localities” (p. 2). Simply put, instead of going public on a national scale, “presidents now go narrow; that is, they focus their public activities on building support in their party base, some interest groups, and select localities” (p. 3).
That this conceptualization matches the reality of presidential leadership is revealing. But perhaps as important, Cohen puts the history of presidential persuasion in historical and political context as a way to better understand the transitions to new presidential strategies. This “context theory” (p. 18) helps to explain how and when we might expect presidential persuasion (in its various forms) to have an effect on the public, Congress, or the media. Shrewd presidents change their operating style to accommodate changes or challenges in the structural political environment. Not only does such a conceptualization help us to explain what has and is currently happening with respect to presidential leadership, but it also helps us to identify future transformations as political structures change.
So, why have presidents abandoned what has been the cornerstone of presidential leadership since Woodrow Wilson? Fundamentally, Cohen assesses, the transition from institutionalized bargaining (from the 1940s to the 1970s, as captured by Richard Neustadt's Presidential Power, 1990) to individualized pluralism (in the 1970s an 1980s, as captured by Samuel Kernell's Going Public, 2006) changed presidential tactics from negotiating with Congress to appealing to the public. Bringing the trend up to date, Cohen suggests that the transition from individualized pluralism to political polarization and the “post-broadcast media” (the emergence of cable) frames the president's current political environment. Presidents are limited in their ability to go public on a national scale due to increased party polarization in the public and in Congress and the fragmentation of media into a plurality of selections for news coverage. The author argues that “in place of a national leadership style, in which the president tries to build support from the mass public on a larger scale, the polarized partisan atmosphere and the diversity of media outlets have forced president to develop a more targeted approach to public leadership and communications” (p. 30).
Beyond the important notion of the transformation in opinion leadership trends, however, Cohen's work gives valuable insight into how and why presidents seek to gain coverage locally, merging theories of media management and “newsworthy” presidential activities. Presidential news management strategies, based in the “market model of news production,” suggest that they attempt to control the supply and demand of media coverage (p. 83). This discussion is supplemented by intuition into when presidents may want more coverage (to lean on wavering members of Congress or to distract the public) or less coverage (of an issue they would prefer not be discussed). Such a prospect radically alters presumptions by scholars or journalists who suggest that the president is an invariable, hyper-frenetic public actor.
What does this strategy look like? Because of geographic clustering of partisans, individual localities are often more or less supportive of the president and his policies. The White House's strategy, therefore, is centered on getting positive local coverage. The “market model” of news production validates presidential efforts to reduce the cost of news production by holding press conferences and providing access to local reporters. Presidents may also stimulate demand locally by visiting a state or inviting local reporters for one-on-one interviews (p. 83). On the other hand, presidents desiring to limit coverage of a controversial decision or action may tamp down the total news produced by “oversupplying” news content (p. 102)—with more “news” than they can handle, local reporters' costs to cover the news increase and, given finite space to report news, the total coverage is therefore less.
While the data are limited at points with respect to time and scope, as the author acknowledges, the results he provides are strongly suggestive of telling new trends. Utilizing a carefully constructed database, Cohen finds that while the total coverage of the president in local newspapers is low, presidents can alter the amount of coverage they gain locally. The data reveal that several factors produce more coverage in local papers: more speeches by the president (although there are diminishing returns at a certain point), higher circulation (akin to media resources), and the presence of a Washington bureau of the paper. Coverage in the Washington Post also has a trickle-down “intermedia” effect (p. 140), whereby presidential activity reported more broadly by the Post affects trends in coverage at the local level. This latter finding is important because it shows that presidential activity nationally may alter local coverage trends.
In a more challenging test of this emerging White House strategy, Cohen queries whether or not presidents can influence the tone of their media coverage. The results show that in 2000, Democratic papers were more favorable to the Democratic president (Bill Clinton) and presidential approval had a positive effect on tone. Like the findings for quantity of coverage, the tone of coverage and the number of speeches given by the president are also curvilinear; that is, after 10 speeches, presidents are more likely to enjoy more positive local coverage. Related to this finding, does this positive tone in the local media pay off in more positive approval for the president? Using a unique design in the Annenberg National Election Study, Cohen cleverly matches respondents' approval of the president with the local newspapers they read. Local positive coverage is found to influence approval of the president, especially among those that do not possess strong political predispositions.
Recent presidential communication strategies suggest a new reality of successful presidential persuasion, and Jeffrey Cohen's book helps us to understand the sources and causes of this new reality. The ideas here will pollinate several research agendas and the vivication of new macro and micro theories of presidential leadership and White House media operations. In particular, mapping the diverse strategies used by presidents to engage in this form of narrow communication (and identifying their relative success) is an important next step. The richness of the theory and the scope of the argument demand that scholars of the presidency, political communication, and media grapple with the new puzzle that Cohen has presented in Going Local.
