Suchergebnisse

Artist Michael Barrett, a former Marine, polished nearly 7,000 pennies – one for every war casualty between 2001 & 2014 – as part of his Memories for the Future exhibit in the Clark County Government Center Rotunda Gallery. Over the eight-week time span, Barrett's mission was to create a tangible, yet fragile symbol of recognition, mirroring the circular footprint of the Government Center Rotunda. Using a Kevlar ballistic apron, a book, metal polish and 6,805 U.S. pennies, Barrett individually polished each penny, while creating a spiral mosaic on the rotunda floor.

By and large, unless the president's public appeals for legislation are reported by the national media, only his immediate audiences will hear them. This article examines 541 presidential legislative appeals from the Reagan and first Bush administrations to determine how often such appeals are reported and which ones generate press coverage. It is discovered that the majority of appeals by the president are not reported. This finding helps explain why presidents struggle to build public support for their proposals, as the public cannot be persuaded by messages it never hears. Presidents themselves appear largely responsible for this limited coverage, as most of their appeals are quite short and not the central focus of their public remarks. However, appeals that meet the press's criteria for newsworthiness are reported more often, particularly those that are most significant to the president and that easily fit the narrative style of reporting favored by journalists.

This article examines the public appeals of three modern presidents (Carter, Reagan, and the first Bush) concerning 253 significant pieces of legislation. It shows that these occupants of the Oval Office took their case to the American people only a few times regarding most of the bills examined. This finding holds across a number of measures of presidential appeals, including general appeals, calls for public and congressional action, television and radio appeals, and appeals made outside of Washington, DC. The presidents analyzed were more likely to speak in support of rather than in opposition to legislation, however. They also went public repeatedly regarding a handful of proposals, particularly their own initiatives.

Since the publication of Samuel Kernell's Going Public in 1986, many political scientists have accepted the theory of going public; yet, few scholars have tested the effectiveness of this presidential strategy. This article provides the first large-scale quantitative test of going public to determine whether this strategy increases the president's probability of success in the legislative arena. In particular, this study is based on a content analysis of thousands of presidential remarks from the PublicPapers of the Presidentsfor the years 1977-1992regarding 186 significant pieces of legislation. Based on this analysis, going public is a successful legislative strategy for presidential initiatives and other bills supported by the president.