Whether writing from the perspective of rhetoric or political science scholars of presidential
communication often assume that the ultimate meaning of presidential rhetoric lies in whether
it achieves policy success. In this book David Michael Ryfe argues that although presidential
rhetoric has many meanings one of the most important is how it rhetorically constructs the
practice of presidential communication itself. Drawing upon an examination of presidential
rhetoric in the twentieth century - from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt from
Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton - Ryfe surveys the shifting meaning of presidential
communication. In doing so he reveals that the so-called public or rhetorical presidency is
not one fixed entity but rather a continuously negotiated discursive construct.
