First, the journalist's description of the President's communication method with advisers:
President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting ...
If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not.
Depending on the circumstances and personalities involved, a team of advisers can be understood to inform their leader and/or steer their leader towards a course of action. I find it interesting that the President's advisers are steering him in the formatting of their memos, which discourage response and nuanced discussion in favor of decisive decision making.Second point of interest is this claim forwarded by the journalist:
A President’s ability to change public opinion through rhetoric is extremely limited. George Edwards, after studying the successes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, concluded that their communications skills contributed almost nothing to their legislative victories. According to his study, “Presidents cannot reliably persuade the public to support their policies” and “are unlikely to change public opinion.”Nope, not buying it. Are you telling me that Roosevelt's fireside chats didn't make his audience more amendable to the unprecedented policies of his administration? That all Kennedy's talk of the "New Frontier" didn't help the success of the space program? That Reagan's pronouncements about "Morning In America" didn't inspire support? The argument and content around this passage feels as if it was inserted haphazardly. Whether (and how) Obama used rhetoric effectively once he was in office is a question that would require more research.
