The Rhetorical Presidency: Deepening Vision, Widening Exchange

Research on the rhetorical presidency has been marked by two important sets of theoretical divisions: individual versus institutional approaches to the analytic task and instrumental versus constitutive understandings of the rhetorical enterprise. In both cases, this has led to a situation in which scholars from the differing positions tend to talk past rather than to one another. In keeping with the generally interdisciplinary focus of political communication as it develops as a recognizable subfield with places in both political science and communication studies, this essay is intended to begin pointing the way toward redirecting some of those conversations, such that representatives from the various analytic communities can begin to work with one another rather than on parallel or opposing tracks.