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: A Conceptual Framework
