Rhetoric Matters

Has the Obama administration totally mismanaged the health care debate?

Now, the White House announces that the president wants to address a joint session of Congress next week on health care. One of my graduate students wonders if that’s a “risky” move. It seems to me that this is a correct judgment–Obama is taking a big risk. I’m wondering about how these moves work historically.

Such speeches seem to be a creature of the rhetorical presidency, but in a rather unusual way. Books of presidential message and speeches from the eighteenth century contain numerous statements to Congress, but they weren’t delivered oratorically. Even State of the Union messages were delivered in writing until Woodrow Wilson actually went to Capitol Hill to deliver his report. Of course, Wilson is often identified as among the first of the truly rhetorical presidents.

There aren’t a lot of joint session speeches that come to mind. Big crises (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) give rise to such speeches, but I’m not sure that there’s many on particular public policy questions. Garth Pauley notes in his Voices of Democracy analysis of LBJ’s speech on civil rights legislation before a joint session that “Presidents rarely deliver special messages to Congress  in person to advocate for a specific bill, especially on domestic policy; Harry Truman had been the last president to do so. Such speeches are risky, as they put the president’s crediblity on the line and chance making members of Congress resentful, feeling they are being coerced into action and having their law-making duties usurped.” (Garth Pauley, “Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’ (15 March 1965),” Voices of Democracy 3 (2008): 24).

This is the challenge facing Obama, and it’s unlike the other rhetorical challenges he’s faced. Perhaps the hardest part for Obama will be finding the balance between general principles and delineations of the problems with the current health care system and specific policy proposals. And this is the problem he’s faced all along–the initial decision to not spell out a specific proposal but to leave that task to Congress.

In his fervent quest not to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton health care plan, Obama created a rhetorical vacuum that filled all too quickly by speculations about “death panels” and pulling the plug on grandma to Canada-style federal takeovers of health care. Sibelius and Gibbs give away the farm on the public option, then the administration backtracks. Now no one’s happy–not the left who are worried about being sold out by their knight in shining armor nor the right who were suspicious of Obama all along.

Will one big time speech do the trick? Probably not.