contributor ezra klein. he s here to talk about his piece in the new yorker on the performance of rhetoric. presidents have plenty of pollsters on staff. they give many speeches in the course of a year. how do they overestimate the importance of those speeches? the study for presidential studies at texas a&m believes that by the time the presidents reach the white house their careers have taught them they can persuade anyone of anything. the normal way is talking for two years, that s all you do and somehow you win. you must be a really persuasive fellow. but being president, ezra writes, isn t the same as running for president. when you re running for president, giving a good speech helps you achieve your goals. when you re president, giving a good speech can prevent you from achieving them. ezra, good to see you. good to see you. it s an interesting point. you think about the way speeches are covered. state of the union, for example,
that is, washington, adams, jefferson, madison, they didn t give speeches. right. they put out statements, long statements. they d be read. roosevelt masters the radio. kennedy, reagan television. how does the role of rhetoric change as the medium changes? is this the next great president have to be a twitter president? it becomes less important. it s one of the one of the conclusions you would take from the numbers. take the president s big speech in september, his big jobs speech. there is a whole flap of whether he would give in on the wednesday or the tuesday. 30 some million people watch that speech. it s a good number of people. it is a fraction of the country. it is much lower. there s a lot of doubt on this. year by year the audience, the average presidential speech is getting smaller because people have other choices. when fdr gave a fireside chat, there was no tv and there was nothing else on the radio. and when in the 1950s eisenhower or kennedy would come on and giv
joran bush s efforts to sell social security privatization, when reagan left office, support for social spending was higher than it was coming into office. and maybe give a slightly different speech it would be different. what about presidential speeches they give at an event, the challenger explosion, things like that? that is what i call nonpersuasive. right it is symbolic. it is important and i don t know as well whether that can have an effect on public opinion but it isn t clear what kind of effect it would have. what i m sort of interested in this article is how do you get things done in washington? because i think that the model we have is you put the president at the center of the action and say the president will give a speech that will either persuade congress or persuade the public to persuade congress to do something. it doesn t work. we see it not working all the time but we return to the same strategy even though it seems to never pan out for us. as culture changes do
you ramp up the coverage, get the countdown clock, analyze it and the next morning if you ask 100 people what was said in speech, two, three could probably tell you. and this is the way it is every year. one of the pieces of evidence, gallup went back and looked at every state of the union they had polling for. this went back to carter, tracking polling right after state of the unions. the average bump a president got from the state of the union, and that s a big speech. the best speech writers, save up their best policy announcements, zero. in fact, a bunch of presidents, including reagan, george h.w. bush have a negative bump. clinton had a plus 3% and these things would go away. you do not see any sustained movement of public opinion when these guys go out in front of the population. and it s funny because i think people are surprised to hear that. but when you think of your experience, how popular health care or the stimulus is.
happy monday. september 12th. this is your wake-up call. thank you for joining us this morning. breaking news on the world markets to tell you about this morning. they re taking quite a hit. investors are worried that greece could default on loan repayments. the nikkei closed at a 2 1/2-year low. the hang seng down over 4%. european markets opened over two hours ago. they re all down. about four hours until the markets open here. but dow futures are down 180 points. the nasdaq and s&p are down, as well. sorry. i had to tell you. congress supposed to get its hands on president obama s jobs bill today. but the president will hold a rose garden ceremony, flanked with teachers and business owners. 40,000 bank of america jobs are reportedly on the chopping block today. and today, we re expected to get details from the ceo at an investor conference at 9:00 p.m. eastern in new york. but the l.a. times are reporting most of the layoffs are supposed to come from consumer banking o