RETROSPECTIVE CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF BARACK OBAMA’S AND OLUSEGUN OBASANJO’S POLITICAL COMMUNICATION FEATURES AND STYLES

Governments make calculated human capital commitment to political communication because of its indispensability and effectiveness as a veritable tool, which underlies and is underlined by massive government investment in public communication. Presidential communication is rooted in, influenced, and limited by, usually, certain written codes. This study examined why, when, and how two presidents said what they said, and why they did or not do as said. Thesis problem was unravelling how features and styles of two presidents facilitated their political communication and public policies. Study fitted into two models, using two political communication theories: mainly ‘Aristotelian Political Rhetoric;’ Walter Fisher’s ‘the Narrative Paradigm’ as theoretical guides. Using original communications of two presidents, this comparative and historical study bridged the sparse scholarship on comparative presidential political communication. Data were obtained from purposively selected sample population, collated, analysed and interpreted, deploying multiple instruments, majorly content and discourse analyses chosen for their effectiveness at measuring predetermined variables. Selected published presidential communications 178 and 158 each all totaling 336 obtained from secondary sources formed the sample population. Findings of study revealed both presidents were largely more dissimilar than otherwise. Their backgrounds reflected, not dominated their communications. As communicators, they were urban-romanticisers, but rural-jilters, promoting rural exclusion, and accessibility to selected urban congregations. Obama’s presidential communication was delivered using peculiar styles, like Olusegun Obasanjo’s, both relying on diverse notable features. Conclusively, presidential political communication should be additional statutory responsibility of presidents to legally guarantee accountability, and practical democracy. Presidential communication system must be deconstructed and reconstructed to promote professional speech-making, and polity-connected presidential political communication.

Expectations of the Ubiquitous Presidency

This chapter assesses journalistic and public expectations of the presidency and its communication. It analyzes news media and public reactions to uncover patterns in how presidents are characterized as “presidential.” The chapter then employs a survey experiment to test how partisanship shapes opinions around acts of presidential communication. It ties the implications to increasing political polarization. The chapter concludes by leveraging national and statewide survey data, including never-before-used measurement approaches, to gain insight into how members of the U.S. population expect presidents to communicate. The cross-sectional survey data, collected in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign and then again during the summer of 2019, include a randomly selected sample of more than 15,000 likely voters across 16 states. The analysis compares the demographic and political factors that influenced standards of presidential communication in the final months of the Obama presidency and at the midpoint of the Trump administration.

The Ubiquitous Presidency: A Conceptual Framework

This chapter introduces and critiques the existing mythology of the 20th-century presidency to illustrate the need for a new way of understanding the contemporary presidency, then provides an overview of the book’s argument about the ubiquitous presidency. It discusses assumptions of traditional understandings of presidential communication and outreach—using the “rhetorical presidency” as a key example—and shows how those assumptions fail in the contemporary environment. The chapter then explicates a new framework for understanding the contemporary presidency, which we call the ubiquitous presidency. This framework rests on three goals (visibility, adaptation, and control) and three contexts (accessibility, personalization, and pluralism). The chapter concludes by arguing for a broader array of methods and new objects of study in research on the presidency, and previews the book’s approach and structure.

The Ubiquitous Presidency in Its Contexts

Across six American presidencies, this chapter introduces and examines three key contexts within the broader socio-technological environment that intersect with the goals of presidential communication: accessibility, personalization, and pluralism. First, it defines accessibility based on where the president appears and how the president chooses to engage with audiences. This section tracks the frequency and type of media interviews presidents grant and how the White House website has evolved to include various degrees of interactivity. Second, this chapter reviews personalization and its significance, including techniques of informality and disclosure. This section chronicles how symbolic presidential behaviors disclose aspects of personality. The chapter concludes by discussing pluralism in terms of growing multiculturalism and heightened salience of group identity in the United States. This section analyzes communication that references pluralism or prejudice, awardees of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the frequency with which presidents grant interviews to media outlets marketed to minority audiences.

The Ubiquitous Presidency

American democracy is in a period of striking tumult. The clash of a rapidly changing socio-technological environment and the traditional presidency has led to an upheaval in the scope and standards of executive leadership. Research on the presidency, although abundant, has been slow to adjust to changing realities associated with digital technologies, diverse audiences, and new political practices. Meanwhile, journalists and the public continue to encounter and shape emerging presidential efforts in deeply consequential ways. This book offers a comprehensive framework for understanding contemporary presidential communication: the ubiquitous presidency. Presidents harness new opportunities in the media environment to create a nearly constant and highly visible presence in political and nonpolitical arenas. They do this by trying to achieve longstanding presidential goals, namely visibility, adaptation, and control. However, in an environment where accessibility, personalization, and pluralism are omnipresent considerations, the strategies presidents use to achieve their goals are very different from what we once knew. Using this novel framework, the book undertakes one of the most expansive analyses of presidential communication to date. A wide variety of approaches—ranging from surveys and survey-experiments, to large-scale automated content and network analyses, to qualitative textual analysis—uncover new aspects of the intricate relationship between the president, news media, and the public. Focusing on the presidency since Ronald Reagan, and devoting particular attention to the cases of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the book uncovers remarkable shifts in communication that test the institution of the presidency and, consequently, democratic governance itself.