>> because i didn't speak and i didn't get really a window into my life, i had become kind of an evil cartoon and it didn't help myself with wearing a hat coming out of my plea in court, and thought i had become kind of a villain and i wanted to show people, i'm not an evil person. i'm a regular person. i did things that were wrong but i don't have a tailor horns. i grew up like everybody else. >> now on encore booknotes, political science professors paul brace and barbara hinckley sat down in 1992 to discuss the effect of opinion polling on the oval office. and "follow the leader" the co-authors chronicled the influence of polling on presidential of administrations from harry truman to george h. w. bush. c-span: paul brace, co-author of "follow the leader," what impact has opinion polling had on the modern presidency? >> guest: well, in our book we try to trace the evolution of the office since the advent of modern regular approval polling. that begins, of course, with harry truman's administration. and we trace what we believe is a change in the office, attributable to polling, up through the bush administration. take, for instance, harry truman's opinion about the polls. in his own diary, he talks--asks what moses would have done if he'd taken a poll before going into egypt. and he says it's leadership that matters, not the opinion of the moment. and we compare and contrast that with insider accounts of the bush administration, not to single out mr. bush, but he's the last point in this evolutionary process to date, where he and john sununu, upon getting into the white house, plotted a comparative approval chart for mr. bush vs. other presidents and strategized about policy and activities based upon where they were and where their predecessors had been in their administration. c-span: barbara hinckley, who started this opinion polling? >> guest: who started the polling you mean for the--the polling people, or the president? people... c-span: yeah, which... >> guest...are interested in... c-span: ...president decided this was a way to go? >> guest: i think there was a gradual evolutionary, and maybe a sudden gradual gradient now. truman, obviously, was not very interested in the polls; eisenhower obviously was. and we've seen, we trace out in our book the presidents who seem to be more interested in their popularity and less interested in it. some, like truman or johnson, ford even, for example, seem to make decisions against the polls and took some kind of pride in having low approval ratings or being independent of opinions. others, like eisenhower or reagan and they are probably our two best examples before bush the polls seemed to matter a great deal. but we now have a situation, you see, with the two presidents reagan and bush, that they mattered for both of them. so we may now be coming into a kind of precedent-changing situation where everyone feels they have to do this. that they have to have the poll charts up in kind of a war room in the white house to succeed. c-span: what method--how did you approach this thing? >> guest: well, we took--on a number of levels. one was we had--one, our choice of presidents was structured by this nice database which is monthly approval ratings for this entire period. and we were interested in commonalities across administrations. we were also interested in the types of activities that we could reason presidents might use to influence their polls and we were also, alternatively, interested in how presidents react to drops in their polls and whether or not that might stimulate activity by the presidents. c-span: you talk about the press. what do you think of the press and its use of the opinion polls and the popularity of the president? >> guest: well, we're seeing it right now on the '92 election. i think the problem in which people point out the polls are leading the people, or the polls are leading the professionals, including the press. and in the approval polls that we write about, the same kind of thing happens. with bush, commentary on the polls then became a driving force when the polls were going up or down. certainly with carter, commentary on the polls became a driving force to make them go down at a certain time. and the other polls, election polls, you--right before the '92 election--have headlines talk about the polls as the news story. this is--something's happening here. this is no longer public opinion; it's reifying public opinion out so the--the public is reading about what the public is supposedly thinking. there's problem there, we think. and that's why we call it "follow the leader," because we are asking the question: who's following and who's leading who? c-span: what are you--what do you want the average citizen to get from--and by the way, did you write the book for the average citizen? >> guest: yeah. >> guest: yes. c-span: what do you want them to -- if the average person looks at the clinton administration... >> guest: mm-hmm. c-span:...and has to get some help from this book about what to look for as the administration grows, what is it? >> guest: well, i mean there's a number of issues we need to think about, and one is the question of leadership and one is the question of democracy. public opinion is supposed to inform our government's decisions, but it's not to dictate our government's decisions. and if presidents are focused on their month-to-month approval ratings, they aren't taking a leadership position. they aren't looking at the long term; they're looking at the short term. and so in their efforts to be perhaps extremely responsive to short-term public opinion, presidents might avoid making the types of decisions that are good for the long-term health of the polity, of the economy, of the nation. and so i guess i would tell the public to be more cautious in rendering harsh judgments about the president in the short run, not to be overly critical when a president falls into a slump, which they all do. in the middle of their administration, presidents find themselves inevitably in a slump, and they find themselves in a precarious situation trying to dig themselves out. c-span: there's something called the decay curve that you write about. >> guest: that's right. c-span: what is it? >> guest: that's right. >> guest: this is the common curve across all administrations. and that is if you average the approval ratings of all presidents, all our modern presidents, in their first term, you find that they come into office with their comparative high level of approval and suffer an inevitable decline through their third year. >> guest: because the approval was artificially high to start with. everyone... >> guest: we believe. >> guest:...was all excited about the new administration. hopes ran high. this is a kind of artificial high point that's going to then come down automatically. c-span: is the inauguration day, january the 20th, the biggest and highest day of a--usually of a president's... >> guest: i would say--i would guess so. c-span:...most solid high? >> guest: we don't--we can't... >> guest: on average it is. >> guest:...look at before. >> guest: you know, you might have an intervening event that could lift it higher. for instance, an international rally event, some foreign policy crisis might elevate that particular president's approval higher than when he came into office. but on average, all our presidents have this common curve within their administration. and so they enter high; they suffer decline; and then their approval picks back up right before the re-election. c-span: when did you decide to write this book? >> guest: i don't know now. >> guest: just about two years ago. >> guest: yeah, i think so. c-span: and how did you two get together? >> guest: we were colleagues at nyu--new york university--and we began discussing the project, oh, maybe three years ago. some preliminary ideas. and we became--as we paid more and more attention to how much polling has become such a dominant influence on our discussions about politics, and particularly the presidency, this led us to explore further how much polling is influencing the office and how much it's influencing how we interpret what the president does. c-span: you are neither one at new york university today. >> guest: no. >> guest: no. c-span: let me ask you briefly--where are you? >> guest: i'm at purdue university now. c-span: doing what? >> guest: teaching american politics. teaching on the presidency and congress. c-span: let me ask you how long you were at new york university. >> guest: about five years. and i was at the university of wisconsin for a long time before that. c-span: why this shift from a big town like new york to a small town in indiana? >> guest: well, i get up to chicago pretty regularly too, so i get my city and my small town. a nice combination. also a lot of very interesting things are going on at purdue, so, in terms of american politics. c-span: what do you find, on the part of the students, the interest level, at new york university vs. purdue? >> guest: i haven't been probably at purdue long enough to say if it differs at all--yet, so maybe i'd better not get into that one yet. c-span: and you are where now? >> guest: i have a joint appointment. i'm in the institute of government and public affairs at the university of illinois and in the department of political science at the university of illinois-chicago. c-span: why did you make the shift? >> guest: they made me an offer i couldn't refuse. they came after me with a very attractive employment opportunity to do research and to work within this institute. and gives me access to state politicians and a lot of interesting opportunities that i've found very attractive. c-span: are you noticing any difference between new york and illinois? >> guest: oh, certainly. in terms of the politics? c-span: just the level of interest in politics, the attitudes. >> guest: certainly the attitudes. i mean, you are taking two cities that are, by most people's definitions, unique. new york is new york, and chicago is certainly chicago. and they're not comparable to anything else. and i would say the attitudes are very different on a lot of levels there in terms of how they view politics, and traditional political patterns in the two cities. c-span: where are you both from originally and where did you go to school? >> guest: massachusetts. i grew up in massachusetts. c-span: where? >> guest: western mass., outside of holyoke, and went to mt. holyoke and then went to cornell university for my ph.d. c-span: all of it in political science? >> guest: no. i started in english, as a matter of fact, in literature. c-span: when did you first get interested in politics? >> guest: oh, i guess that was about in the 1960s. i think i wanted to be relevant. and of course, once you get into politics, you realize you could have been just as relevant in english as you could in politics. c-span: did you ever work on a campaign? >> guest: a little bit. not too much. mm-hmm. c-span: which one? >> guest: i worked in some campaigns in the late 1960s. c-span: presidential? local? >> guest: both. yeah. >> guest: went to the--i grew up in portland, oregon. went to the university of oregon, and i did my graduate studies at michigan state university. c-span: when did you get interested in politics? >> guest: 1972. c-span: how come? >> guest: it was the first year i could vote. and the vietnam war and eventually watergate. and i think a lot of people of roughly my age cohort were interested in american politics about that time because of the events of those years. c-span: have you ever worked in government, ever worked on a political campaign? >> guest: no. no. c-span: go back to your book, "follow the leader: opinion polls and the modern presidents." is there anyone--and you went back and you started looking at first, post-world war ii, and harry truman is the first of nine... >> guest: mm-hmm. c-span:...presidents you looked at. you talk about harry truman coming in with an 87 percent popularity right after the war. >> guest: mm-hmm. c-span: but ending up with the lowest--i think it was 23 percent. what happened to harry truman? >> guest: harry truman did not care about polls, as his own... >> guest: and went out of his way to show it. >> guest: ...diaries--yes. he simply did not wish to bend to public pressures. he--again, he stressed leadership is the thing. and this sets up a problem for the presidency, because everyone's trying to bend, to compare themselves to harry truman now. all the presidential candidates did. he's believed to be a great leader. but he wasn't in his own administration. and so to be successful, in the long run, we're asking presidents to be very unsuccessful in the short run. to ignore polls in the short run can cost you your office. harry truman did not seek re-election. harry truman's approval ratings were way too low to have a reasonable chance at re-election in 1952. he ignored polls. so he was... >> guest: we talked about an uneasy balance. >> guest: that's right. >> guest: that presidents have to sort of walk a tightrope between ignoring popularity too far and following it too closely. i think one thing you asked before and what we were trying to do in the book, it's also important to bring out. we want to bring the public into this game, if we can call it that, and i'm not sure it's a good word for it. the presidents are playing the poll game; the polling organizations and the media are certainly playing a poll game the political scientists are playing a poll game. but it's all in terms of public opinion. so we do want to try to lay out very clearly, it's quite easy to read; it's--it's easy to understand. if we're talking about a decay over time, if we're talking about uses of force, very dramatic wars, or things like that calling a rise in popularity, to have the public to understand this. so say after the gulf war, rather than having headlines saying, 'george bush's popularity is 91 percent, a record high,' the public would--why would this be news? it shouldn't be news. c-span: mm-hmm. >> guest: it's at a time when all the public could predict: of course his popularity will be high. and four months from now, it will be down again because that's a particular event. so to bring the public into this, make them much more conscious of this public opinion game that is going on. and i think truly, maybe this sounds a bit na> guest: right. >> guest: because if you have a more conscious public, maybe some of the problems with this polling situation might be changed. c-span: what can you say, based on your research, about a clinton administration? and is there any--are there absolute givens of what will happen? >> guest: there are some things we can say. >> guest: based on past performance, i'd... >> guest: mm-hmm. >> guest:...say the following: he will come into office at his relative peak in--barring any external events that might intervene, such as a war that we do know can stimulate a dramatic increase--short-term increase--in approval. but he'll be at his relative high his first hundred days in office. it's not coincidental that we focus on those first hundred days. that's when presidents have the most political capital to expend. their approval is at their--at its relative peak. he will suffer an inevitable decline. it will go on through his third year. within his administration, people might start to become paranoid, thinking that things are out of control, that we can't get--capture--recapture the public's imagination. this is about the time jimmy carter gave his 'public malaise' speech--nobody seems to know what you want from us. well, this is common to all presidencies. we would recommend, i think, that presidents not react to this inevitable decline and see it for what it is. not make short-term decisions to try and resuscitate their opinion, but to ride that out and keep a focus on the long-term political goals they're trying to achieve in their administration. c-span: anything else that would be... >> guest: and at the same time, not to have, say media commentators and others, react: what has mr. clinton done wrong? if year two or year three his polls are down. the answer is nothing. compared to the other presidents, this is where we would expect him to be. so have the commentary ride that out, become more informed, too. c-span: you write about speeches--domestic speeches--and the impact, or lack of impact. what happens if a president goes into the country, makes a lot of speeches around the country, or even stays in the oval office and makes televised speeches? what examples do you have of those? >> guest: well, it's different results. when the president stays in the o--oval office with the seal of office and being very presidential, his approval polls in the short term, in the immediate short term, go up. when the president goes around the country making perhaps more political speeches, we don't know, but when he sort of comes off his pedestal, got--gets less presidential, oddly enough, the polls go down. >> guest: we feel that it's when he's traveling around the country that he's probably trying to shore up his political base. or he might be going out and trying to bolster the political fortunes of some candidates in his party. so ronald reagan might go and give a speech with jesse helms, and that's broadcast nationally, even though the--the speech was given locally. and this can have a--an effect of diminishing the president's approval. when the president speaks to the nation from behind the desk in the oval office, however, this bolsters his approval. it's the one thing presidents have within their control to increase their approval. c-span: what about the economy? is there a -- i kept reading, you'd go back to the economy. if the economy is bad, this will happen. no matter what? >> guest: no matter what. c-span: what will happen if the economy is bad? have we just seen it... >> guest: yes. c-span:...in this campaign? >> guest: yes. >> guest: yes. >> guest: one could explain part of bush's fall in the polls--part of bush's pall--fall in the polls--the same way that carter fell in the polls: because of bad economic circumstances. and there's not too much presidents can do about that. ironically, these are factors outside of their control, although they're being, in a way, charged for these circumstances. they are held responsible for an economy; therefore, their polls will go down. c-span: what was the methodology you two--how did you break up the way you wrote this book between the two of you? >> guest: well, it was truly a collaborative effort. but i did most of the analysis, and barbara did a lot of the interpretation. we discussed the interpretation, but--and the presentation. and barbara did the biographical sketches, and i did the statistical modeling. c-span: now, there's reference in here to several people. clinton rossiter, richard neustadt and also james david barber. and you used the, positive/negative, that whole james david barber way that he looks at presidents. can you explain that and why you used that? and then you used a method that didn't necessarily track with his. >> guest: barber has... c-span: who is he, by the way? >> guest: james david barber is a very senior professor at duke university who wrote a very influential book called "presidential character," and he employs a methodology typically called psychobiography, in which he examines the biographies of individuals, in this case, presidents, and tries to arrive at a judgment about their future behavior based upon elements of their past. and he breaks it down into four categories: whether they're active or negative, and whether they're passive or--excuse me--passive or active and--and positive or negative. and so active/positive usually are democrats, and for mr. barber. and kennedy would be an active/positive.