… Americans see the president’s power to sell Congress and this country’s citizens on an idea as one of the more important duties of his office. In 1961, Richard Neustadt, a professor of government at Columbia University, wrote Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, which argued that the most important power the president has is the “power to persuade.” …
But what if we’re focusing on the wrong thing? As John Dickerson put it at Slate a year ago, “the evidence suggests that if people don’t agree with a president, his ability to persuade them otherwise is pretty limited.” While Jeffrey Tulis argued in The Rhetorical Presidency that Americans expected 20th-century presidents to “defend themselves publicly, to promote policy initiatives nationwide, and to inspirit the population,” actually, according to research by Texas A&M’s George C. Edwards III, they don’t really do much of that at all. [cont.]
Daniel Luzer, Pacific Standard