Vanessa B. Beasley

The Rhetorical Presidency Meets the Unitary Executive: Implications for Presidential Rhetoric on Public Policy

Communication scholars interested in presidential rhetoric on public policy are very familiar with the rhetorical presidency, but there is another paradigm worth our consideration: the unitary executive. This model emphasizes the institutional reasons why presidents might not use public discourse to promote their policies, relying instead on the expanding powers of the executive branch. Although there is relatively little discussion of one model within scholarship dedicated to the other, this essay argues for the benefits of considering both models simultaneously. As changes occur within the executive offices capacity for creating and enforcing public policy, so too must our critical orientation to the study of presidential rhetoric.

Engendering Democratic Change: How Three U.S. Presidents Discussed Female Suffrage

Although the history of democratic change in the United States has largely been read through its constitutive debates, here I suggest that we might also explore how such changes have been explained by political elites. Using the years immediately surrounding the 1920 female suffrage victory as a case study, this essay asks when and how Presidents Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge discussed U.S. womens transformation from citizens to voters within particular texts.

Running on screen while black: Representations of black presidential candidates in U.S. film and television

ABSTRACT This essay asks what popular representations of fictional black presidential candidates reveal about the social and symbolic conditions that made their presidencies imaginable in the first place. We find that black presidents on screen are only rarely there as the result of democratic elections. Furthermore, when they are, their candidacies are represented in ways that rely heavily on racialized stereotypes of both the black candidate and presumptively white voters. Although these patterns are iterated within popular fictional narratives, we conclude that they could have implications for how actual black candidates are encouraged to perform in campaigns within an allegedly postracial society.

Race, Rhetoric, and Risk: Revisiting the History of U.S. Civil Rights

A few months ago a friend who teaches in another discipline called to say that his first book was going to be published by an Ivy League university’s press. After we reveled in his good news, he giggled and said, “Yeah, the editor told me that any book with the words ‘the Third Reich,’ ‘the Civil War,’ or ‘kittens’ in the title is an automatic shoo-in.” I will not, of course, reveal which of these magic three was in my friend’s title, nor will I reveal the press. (For the sake of our friendship, however, I will point out that his book, which has nothing whatsoever to do with pets, is quite good.) Yet even a short stroll through the aisles of your favorite bookstore will probably bear out his editor’s claim. There seems to be no shortage of books devoted to these three topics, and probably rightly so, at least in two of the three cases. Still, my friend’s story has made me think of the reasoning behind his editor’s apocryphal list of “shoo-ins”—that certain topics are safe bets within the publishing industry, whether the final product is a scholarly monograph or a coffee table book. More to the point, my friend’s story has also made me think about topics that could be on this list but somehow are not, compelling topics of general interest that BOOK REVIEWS