6.3 The Myth of the Bully Pulpit

I have always been fond of the West African proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”

—Teddy Roosevelt

“To convince the American people,” said Sanders, imagining his first 100 days as president, “I suspect we’re going to use Air Force One quite a bit.” That’s exactly the sort of thing Robert Reich, Sanders’ most renowned surrogate, had in mind when he explained, in a 2016 op-ed, why Sanders, and not Clinton, would make the best president.

This is Robert Reich’s #1 reason for supporting Sanders.

This is the myth of the bully pulpit — the idea that presidents can use the status of their office to shift national opinion by “preaching.” Preaching?

When William McKinley was assassinated just six months into his second term, Teddy Roosevelt unexpectedly found himself president. Delighted with his new powers, he told a preacher friend, “Critics will call this preaching. But I have got such a bully pulpit.” Back then, “bully” meant “first-rate.”

The radical version of this myth holds that presidents can shift public opinion more than a little. It claims that the bully pulpit gives them the power to get all their good laws passed by “mobilizing the public to demand” them. That’s what Sanders planned to do with Air Force One.

It’s not terribly surprising that this myth is wrong. But it is shocking that Reich, at top-level academic and advisor to four presidents, gives four historical reasons for believing it, and every one of them is simply fake history — pure mythology.

And if that weren’t enough, as will see shortly, he then uses his bully pulpit myth to slander President Obama. Reich claims he used $16 billion a year of public money to bribe the drug companies to contribute to his 2012 presidential campaign — something he has no evidence for other than his own magical thinking.

The bully-pulpit myth will mainly harm Biden after he’s elected, but it hurts him in two ways right now. First, it is constantly used to blame Obama for all the things he couldn’t do. Calling Obama “such a disappointment,” taints how young voters view Biden. Second, because radicals believe in this magic, they are pressuring Biden to make radical promises. Many of these will not help him win the election; otherwise, he would have already made them.

Reich’s Accusation

In the 2016 op-ed just mentioned, Reich claims that Obama gave away $16 billion a year to the drug companies, essentially as a bribe for future campaign contributions. Really?

The accusation. At first, Reich says, “Obama got the Affordable Care Act this way.” So you might think that’s why Obama gave away the $16 billion a year. But then Reich tells us that Obama made the deal “because he thought he needed big money for his 2012 campaign.”

Those are not contradictory claims. Here’s Reich’s thinking

1. Obama approved a drug-company deal to get Obama-care passed. (True.)
2. Why didn’t he use his magic bully pulpit instead and save the public $16 billion a year? He knew he could. (Nuts.)
3. Since he didn’t, he must have needed the deal to shake down the drug companies for a campaign contribution. (Logical if #2 were true.)

Radical “logic.” Step #1 is easily checked and true. Step #2 is the problem step, but let’s just assume it’s true too. You’ll see why in a second. 

If Reich is right about #2, then Obama would have had no excuse — no reason to give away the $16 billion a year — because he could just have given a few speeches from his magic bully pulpit and saved us that money. 

So if step #2 is right, then Obama is guilty as charged. He must have made a deal for some corrupt reason, probably for campaign contributions.

But what if there’s no such thing as a magic bully pulpit or Obama didn’t know his was magic? Then he’s innocent. The reason he made a deal was because he saw no other way to have a good shot at passing Obama care.

So that’s the answer. Reich can only convict if (1) Obama’s bully pulpit was magic, and (2) Obama knew it was magic.

The key radical fallacy. As I’ll soon show, the bully pulpit is not magic and usually doesn’t work at all. But the above “logic” demonstrates the radical thought process that causes radicals to think others are evil. Here it is in capsule form.

• I know what’s right; it’s obvious. 
• It’s so obvious everyone must know it.
• So, anyone who doesn’t do what I know is right, must know they’re doing wrong. So they’re corrupt or evil.

This “logic” leaves out two possibilities. The person who’s using this “logic” could be wrong. The accused person might be mistaken — they might not have “seen the light.” That’s what religious fanatics miss when they accuse heretics. The fanatic “knows” what’s right because God told them. And then they told everybody, so all heretics must know they are doing wrong. 

Radical purity tests work the same way, but with God replaced by some radical ideology. And remember, even when the ideology is right, the other person could be mistaken rather than evil. Why can’t radicals see this? I really don’t know.

So what really happened? Obama was staking his legacy on this bill. Yet Reich claims he gave away $16 billion per year for some one-year contribution of perhaps $4 million — about 1% of his campaign budget. For that, he screwed the public and risked getting caught. That makes absolutely no sense.

And what happened? Big Pharma shifted from being even-handed in 2008 to favoring Romney in 2012. Big bucks to fund his campaign? Quite the opposite. And Obama did get hammered by the left radicals for cutting a deal. Moreover, there is not a shred of evidence for Reich’s sinister accusation.

Obama’s motivation is obvious. Universal healthcare had been blocked by lobbyists for 75 years starting with FDR, then Truman, then LBJ, then the Clintons. Obama knew that if he failed, it might take another 20 years, but if he succeeded even halfway, that would open the door for each Congress to improve the bill — just as happened with Social Security and most entitlement programs. He was not going to risk fighting on all corporate fronts at once as Hillary Clinton had.

This is the deal he won. The drug industry would chip in $80 billion to help fund the law’s insurance expansion, and they would support Obamacare with generous advertising. In return, the new law would leave their prices alone (Reich’s $16 billion). Given how close this bill came to failing, even with Big Pharma on board, that was one hell of a smart deal. And no, Obama got nothing out of it, except the satisfaction of taking the biggest step toward FDR’s goals that had been achieved in half a century.

Reich is smart, dedicated and well-intentioned. But the radical bully-pulpit myth has sucked him in and caused him to do something shameful.

Without believing the bully-pulpit myth, he would realize that Obama had no choice but to make a deal or take an irresponsible risk. So what convinced Reich to believe in this myth?

The Four Bully-Pulpit ‘Miracles’

Roosevelt’s excitement 118 years ago makes a flimsy foundation for a theory of fundamental political change. Realizing this, Reich backs up his claim about the power of the bully pulpit with four examples of Teddy Roosevelt doing astounding things, supposedly by using his bully pulpit. Reich claims that by using his bully pulpit “Teddy Roosevelt got:

1. A progressive income tax, 
2. Limits on corporate campaign contributions,
3. Regulation of foods and drugs, and 
4. The dissolution of giant trusts.”

Before we check these, I should mention that Reich served under Presidents Ford, Carter and Clinton. He is the Chancellor’s Professor at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Public Policy and has taught at Harvard’s School of Government.

1. The income tax. The Democrats passed the first federal income tax in 1894, and it was progressive. But the next year it was declared unconstitutional, and it remained so until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1913. Teddy Roosevelt was president from 1901 to 1909. So he had nothing to do with getting a progressive income tax. He didn’t even push for it.

To top it off, the real story shows the exact opposite of Reich’s theory — we got the income tax through … you guessed it: political dealmaking! President William Howard Taft championed the 16th Amendment and secured its ratification. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of The Bully Pulpit:

As he [Taft] pursued his tax agenda with [Senator] Aldrich, Taft engaged in “some pretty shrewd politics.” He met individually with members of the Finance Committee and “committed them separately” to [backing the 16th Amendment].

That’s not using a bully pulpit. That’s backroom dealmaking, and that’s how we got a progressive income tax. 

2. Campaign contributions. In his first run for president, in 1904, Teddy Roosevelt and the Republicans were caught taking enormous corporate campaign contributions. The most radical of the era’s famous progressive journalists argued privately with Roosevelt that he should give them back. Roosevelt refused and argued that it was “entirely legitimate to accept contributions, no matter how large,” provided they were freely given. Finally, under mounting political pressure, he signed a bill, written by his archenemy, “Pitchfork Ben,” limiting contributions — but lacking an enforcement mechanism.

I was prepared for Reich to overplay the bully-pulpit myth, but I was totally unprepared to discover that Reich had misled me about which side of an issue Roosevelt was on.

3. Regulation of food and drugs. Upton Sinclair’s blockbuster novel, The Jungle, was released January 25, 1906, and has never gone out of print. The book’s hero worked in a meat-packing plant and became a socialist. To set the scene, the book described the unhealthy conditions in slaughterhouses.

According to a popular political commentator of the time, Roosevelt was “reading it at breakfast when he suddenly cried, ‘I’m poisoned,’ started throwing his sausages out the window and became a vegetarian.” In reality, Roosevelt was slow to catch on. After reading the book, he wrote to Frank Doubleday, the publisher, and berated him for publishing “such an obnoxious book.” A strange way to lead the progressive movement from your bully pulpit.

Doubleday, and eventually TR’s own inspectors, confirmed the book did in fact accurately portray the meat-packing industry. The public outcry caused by Sinclair’s book was so great that in 1906, Congress passed both a new Meat Inspection Act and the long-dormant Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair Lewis mobilized the public, and Roosevelt dragged his feet.

4. The dissolution of giant trusts. TR did have his justice department file 44 lawsuits based on the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. But I’m sorry to say that does not count as mobilizing the public. So where did the public pressure for such actions come from? The short answer is Ida Tarbell — not Teddy Roosevelt. 

In a series of 19 lengthy articles published in McClure’s Magazine beginning in November 1902, Tarbell exposed the Standard Oil Trust. It was her focus on John D. Rockefeller that won her a huge national audience. The Outlook, a publication aligned with TR, proclaimed Tarbell to be “a Joan of Arc among moderns,” crusading “against trusts and monopolies.” The Washington Times said she had “proven herself to be one of the most commanding figures in American letters.” She used McClure’s Magazine as her bully pulpit, and she galvanized public opinion.

Ultimately, Roosevelt sued Standard Oil, but not until 1906. He was not leading the way from his bully pulpit; he was following.

Roosevelt’s Role in Progressive Change

Roosevelt played an important role in the progressive movement, but usually he followed it and gave the movement his blessing or made deals to implement what the progressive movement wanted. But as with the civil rights movement and LBJ, the movement needed to be led by outsiders. 

The one fundamental change that Teddy Roosevelt deserves full credit for — a change that has stood the test of time better than anything else he did — was to lay the administrative foundations for corporate regulation. And to accomplish that, he used his first-rate dealmaking skills of which he was justly proud.

What about his bully pulpit? Despite its title, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, The Bully Pulpit, only mentions Roosevelt using it once: “He created the Palisades Park and used his bully pulpit to promote it.”

In fact, her book shows that Roosevelt was mostly following the progressive movement at a safe distance and using his dealmaking skills to implement some of their desired changes. This shouldn’t be surprising. Lyndon Johnson is most famous for his unparalleled dealmaking skills. Franklin Roosevelt is noted for his fireside chats. But these did not average even three per year, and he used this bully pulpit mainly to reassure a worried public who already wanted more change than he could deliver.

Reich picked Teddy Roosevelt because he’s the only one who supposedly got fundamental change by using his bully pulpit. But it turns out that that’s just a myth based on his famous quote and his love for “preaching” during campaigns. That was not done to lead a radical movement; It was done to win election. He was always very even handed between the capitalists and the workers.

The Political Science of the Bully Pulpit

The mild version of the bully-pulpit myth, which says that presidents can have some influence on public opinion, has long been widely believed. However, On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit, a book by political scientist George Edwards, shows that presidents nearly always fail in their attempts to persuade the public. And not infrequently, speaking from their “bully pulpit” has had the reverse effect to what they intended.

For example, Edwards found that during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, support for regulatory programs and spending on healthcare, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities all increased rather than decreased — the opposite of what he intended. And remember, Reagan is known as the “great communicator.”

Edwards spent 10 years researching this topic. And the bottom-line conclusion from his research, and the research of others as well, is that presidents can sway members of their own party a bit. But the other party sees what they’re up to and heads in the opposite direction. Even the mild version is just a myth.