White House Communications Strategy and the President's Spouse

Going Personal: White House Communications Strategy and the President’s Spouse A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Government By Lauren A. Wright, M.A. Washington, DC December 11, 2014 Copyright c 2014 by Lauren A. Wright All Rights Reserved ii Going Personal: White House Communications Strategy and the President’s Spouse Lauren A. Wright, M.A. Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Stephen J. Wayne, Ph.D Abstract Political scientists have failed to recognize the political importance of the president’s spouse. While the evolving role of the first lady over time from White House hostess to presidential advisor has been documented in historical narratives and news articles, the tremendous responsibility placed on her office to communicate the president’s message and shape his public image has received little attention. This responsibility has increased markedly in the last three presidential administrations, illustrated by the fact that Michelle Obama made more speeches and major public appearances in her first five years in office than any first lady in history. In addition to demonstrating that presidential spouses are an integral part of White House and campaign communications strategy, this dissertation challenges the popular notion among scholars that communications tactics designed to boost presidential popularity and garner support for the president’s policy agenda have a negligible impact on public opinion. Detailed examinations of speech transcripts, elite interviews, and survey experiments inform an assessment of the possibility that presidential spouses are mobilized in a calculated effort to enhance the public reputation of presidents and their policy agendas, and that under some circumstances, these efforts can profoundly influence public opinion at the individual level. Index words: First Ladies, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, Pet Projects, Public Opinion, Politicization, Gender iii For Dickerson, Katherine and Stephanie Wright iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank my dissertation committee for the ample guidance and encour- agement they provided me: Professors Mark Rom, Lynn Ross, and my chairperson, Stephen Wayne. Many thanks also to Professor Martha Kumar for taking a special interest in my project and offering me an opportunity to continue this important research in the future, and to Jonathan Mummolo for his invaluable insight and unwavering support. Finally, thank you to the many experts who participated in the interview process and lent me a much deeper understanding of the East Wing than I would have acquired without their help. v Preface Like most labyrinthine intellectual journeys, the idea for this dissertation is rooted in a simple puzzle. Presidential spouses are some of the most recognizable figures in Amer- ican politics and among the least studied figures in political science. Their absence from research on presidential communications is glaring. The lack of empirical work on presidential spouses is characteristic of the enduring, albeit shrinking, disconnect between those who practice politics and those who study them. Political operatives and campaign professionals devote tremendous amounts of time and resources to the task of improving the public image of presidents and presidential candidates despite widespread agreement among scholars that their efforts rarely change public opinion in the aggregate. Perhaps because of my own background as a gubernatorial campaign staffer turned doctoral student, I consult both of these groups in my investigation of the role presidential spouses play in White House communications strategy and their ability to shape the public’s opinion of presidents and their policies. There are a few reasons political practitioners and political scientists may dis- agree on the importance of presidential spouses. The first is data availability. There have only been 45 first ladies in U.S. history, and because they are not elected offi- cials, information about them was not systematically collected and organized until recently. Gallup conducted the first public opinion poll about the president’s spouse in 1939, and job approval ratings for first ladies were not measured until the Clinton administration. Furthermore, public appropriations for staff to the first lady were not routinely designated by Congress until 1979. For these reasons, records produced by vi the Office of the First Lady that facilitate empirical research on the formal role of presidential spouses are scarce, and existing scholarly work on first ladies is weak. Without descriptive statistics in which to anchor their claims, American politics scholars, jour- nalists, and historians have relied on typologies of first ladies to assess their roles. For example, due to her lack of interest in politics and comparatively low educational attainment to Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush is largely deemed a traditional first lady rather than a modern first lady. The evidence I present later in this dissertation sug- gests these typologies are severely flawed. Fortunately, there has been very consistent documentation of the activities of the first lady since 1992, when the advent of the internet enabled the National Archives to organize and preserve speeches made by first ladies as well as transcripts of their public remarks online. I make use of these materials by coding over 1,500 public speeches made by Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush and Michelle Obama in the last three presidential administrations. The second reason political scientists may have neglected the Office of the First Lady as a legitimate research topic is measurement. American politics scholars have increasingly moved away from questions that cannot be answered through the analysis of quantified data. Though quantifying speeches delivered by first ladies provides valuable evidence for my suggestion that the strategic mobilization of presidential spouses by the White House has become a more common practice, there are critical aspects of this project that cannot be informed through the numerical analysis of public records. For example, why does the first lady appear in public so often? What purpose do these appearances serve? What makes presidential spouses appealing to the American public? As I mention later in the dissertation, there is hardly a way to answer these questions reliably without consulting the political professionals respon- sible for mobilizing first ladies on behalf of the White House and on the campaign trail. vii Elite interviews are important tools for evaluating existing hypotheses and generating new ones. Encouragingly, in recent years there have been more examples of political practitioners collaborating successfully with political scientists. Campaign strategists have adopted some of the tools political methodology offers for gauging the impact of mes- saging tactics such as television advertising, and have even allowed scholars to conduct experiments that test different strategies for ad placement and content. This kind of experimentation was common in the 2012 elections, when the Obama campaign began buying air space in Montana early in the summer in order to test the effective- ness of ads in a low-risk setting. Scholars like Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995), Hol- brook (1996) and Shaw (1999) have discovered that campaign events have a marginal, though not long-lasting, effect on voting behavior. For instance, in their 2003 study, Hillygus and Jackman found that support for Bush in 2000 increased after the debates, but not during the conventions, and support for Gore increased following the conventions, but not during the debates (2003: 583). Though first ladies are merely one instrument in the presidential communications toolkit, studies that argue communications strategies employed by White House and campaign staff do often influence the perceptions and behavior of voters are promising, especially because presidential spouses have become such a big part of these strategies. In this dissertation I assess the impact of public appearances made by the first lady on individual evaluations of the president and his policy agenda using controlled experiments not unlike those employed in the aforementioned campaign advertising studies. Even if the first lady’s influence on mass public opinion is difficult to ascertain, experiments allow opinion to be measured at an individual, personal level, where nonnumeric mechanisms like the supposed humanizing quality of presidential spouses do their work. viii The final reason some political scientists have been dismissive of the study of first ladies pertains to gender. In my search for advisors to guide me through the process of writing a dissertation, I encountered scholars who thought the study of political spouses would demean academic discussions about women and politics. Compared to the existing gender and politics literature, which largely focuses on the obstacles women face while running for office, their underrepresentation in appointed and elected government positions, and the difference they make when they are elected, at first glance, research centered on the president’s wife appears inconsequential. It is not. The powers of the president’s spouse are informal, but they are formidable. First, first ladies have more access to the president than any single White House staff member or government official. Though the efforts of historians to assess the pri- vate influence of first

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