Copyright by Rebecca Jean LaVally 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Rebecca Jean LaVally certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Political Contradictions: Discussions of Virtue in American Life Committee: ____________________________________ Roderick P. Hart, Supervisor ____________________________________ Sharon E. Jarvis ____________________________________ Maxwell McCombs ____________________________________ Bartholomew H. Sparrow ____________________________________ Natalie Jomini Stroud Political Contradictions: Discussions of Virtue in American Life by Rebecca Jean LaVally, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2010 Dedication For Ernie Acknowledgments My husband, Jeff Raimundo, deserves an honorary degree for reviewing multiple drafts of this dissertation—and for sharing the adventure of my doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin while running his political consulting business in Sacramento. College of Communication Dean Roderick P. Hart quipped that I was his only advisee who submitted draft chapters with endorsements. That is just what I did: “Here is my latest draft, and Jeff likes it.” Jeff’s patient, encouraging, and unselfish nature, along with his very flexible definition of fun, were crucial to the completion of my doctorate. I am indebted to the 48 citizens from California, Kansas, Maine and Connecticut who shared their ideas about political virtue to give this study its soul—and the benefit of their reflection, common sense, insight, and wisdom. Dean Hart has earned many well-deserved accolades and awards that far outshine my ability to express my appreciation for the privilege and wonder of being his advisee. As nearly as I can tell, he possesses all eight of the virtues explored in this dissertation. However, as with the politicians I studied, he does not display all eight of them at the same time. His conviviality, so evident in the wordplay that marks his scholarship, can go dormant in the face of a steely decisiveness that insists only certain words will do—or that a draft chapter simply will not do at all. The Dean told me to imagine writing for an impatient and persnickety reader who abhorred wasted words and needed some compelling reason to direct his attention to any given page. It turned out, however, that I also was writing for an industrious and even idealistic teacher who was willing to work flexibly and inclusively with my own ideas. Dean v Hart’s high-minded expectations demanded much learning from me. Happily, he was a resilient teacher, even when it seemed Chapter 5 would never materialize in proper form. His proficiency at stimulating deeper and more scholarly thinking proved transforming. The members of my stellar committee—Dean Hart, Sharon Jarvis, Maxwell McCombs, Bartholomew Sparrow, and Natalie Jomini Stroud— together contributed to the core of my learning at UT. This dissertation represents a synthesis of their teaching, scholarship, and the ideas that they believe matter. Each generously contributed to my intellectual growth inside and outside the classroom. I also have learned volumes from the incomparable Barry Brummett, Dana Cloud and Joshua Gunn, impressive people and masterful scholars and teachers. The unfailingly cheerful, honest, and able Susan Corbin, our Communication Studies graduate coordinator, helped see me through. Our children—Sarah, Todd, Amy, and Scott and their spouses, Adam, Mandy, and John—never questioned whether moving to Texas to pursue a doctorate was the right thing for me to do. The same was true of my mother, whose death came before this dissertation was completed, and of my parents- in-law. I am grateful to them all for their love and support. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the invaluable encouragement of old friends and new ones these past five years. Our small lunch group of Texas cohort rhetoricians—Meredith Bagley, Adria Battaglia, Bryan McCann, and Luke Winslow—shared each other’s company and progress updates on Fridays. Our monthly Soup Group of political consultants, legislative staffers, and vi former journalists remained steadfast in Sacramento, and four members—Ann Bancroft, Lorie Shelly, Rona Sherriff, and Steve Swat—helped verify the reliability of my newspaper coding. Special thanks go to the Goodtime Grad Gals, a well-bonded collection of former graduate students, their spouses, and a couple of professors from my master’s program at California State University, Sacramento. Several of them—Aleta Carpenter, Albert Sanchez, Julie Kanoff LeTendre, Rich LeTendre, Chris Miller and Edith LeFebvre—also reviewed the reliability of my newspaper coding. Master’s program colleague Lanette Pogue graciously formatted my dissertation and, having fortuitously moved to Austin with her family, helped make the Lone Star State feel like home. My running partner, music teacher Alice McKinley, also checked my newspaper coding and patiently listened to the unfolding story of this study at literally every step. A few weeks after we Goodtime Grad Gals received our master’s degrees in 2005, one of our fellow graduates succumbed to cancer. We took turns staying with Ernestine during the final days of her life. When shifts overlapped, we would tell stories across her bed, sharing the laughter but not the tears. Ernie and I were together when she took her last breath on a lovely July afternoon. A month later, I left for Texas. We were the same age. This dissertation is for Ernie. vii Preface “The California Capitol is a very male place,” a reporter for the Associated Press told me shortly after I joined the Sacramento bureau of rival United Press International. She was right. The portraits of governors and lieutenant governors that personalized the high-ceiled walls invariably depicted men; state Senate and Assembly proceedings were run by men and witnessed mostly by male lobbyists. Only a handful of women were among the 80 or so members of the Capitol Press Corps who, like me, were covering California government and politics in the late 1970s. Just two women—Ivy Baker Priest, elected state treasurer in 1966, and March Fong Eu, who became California’s secretary of state in 1975—had ever been voted into statewide office in California. As this is written in the spring of 2010, the Golden State has never elected a woman governor or lieutenant governor, and its Legislature remains 72.5% male. My journalistic career paralleled the advancements of women during a second-wave feminist movement that naturally made us very aware of our collective progress. We became the first women to do this or that—in my case, the first woman hired in UPI’s Cleveland bureau (where a 2 a.m. walk to my car near the Lake Erie waterfront each night made clear why I had no female predecessors), and the first woman to run UPI’s Sacramento bureau, a job that doubled as California political editor. All four political women in this study were conscious of their groundbreaking status, touted in the biographies on their government websites when I reviewed them in late 2008. M. Jodi Rell noted that she was the first viii female Republican governor of Connecticut. Senator Olympia Snowe was “the first woman in American history to serve in both houses of a state legislature and both houses of Congress” (“About Senator Snowe,” 2008, n.p.). Kathleen Sebelius was America’s first daughter of a governor to be a elected a governor herself. Dianne Feinstein’s biography seemed to radiate a kind of woman power: Senator Feinstein's career has been one of firsts—she was the first woman president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the first woman mayor of San Francisco, the first woman elected senator of California, and the first woman member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Most recently, Senator Feinstein became the first woman to serve as the chairman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. (“About Dianne,” 2008, n.p.) Despite these and other gains, women still can feel like outsiders to their own political system, as my interviews for this dissertation sometimes showed. Politics is an accommodating business, however, perhaps even capable of sensing its own shortfalls. No study—and certainly not this dissertation—can explain why American political life has been unable to more fully integrate the genders. But my findings suggest that politics does recognize its maternal deficits, and may acknowledge them in ways both odd and intriguing. Sometimes, I find, its attempts to compensate for what is missing are unabashedly virtuous. ix Political Contradictions: Discussions of Virtue in American Life Rebecca Jean LaVally, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Roderick P. Hart This dissertation asserts that American political culture faces a crisis of virtue and explores the role of citizens, journalists and politicians in fostering it. The historic election of Barack Obama on a platform of hope and change in 2008 suggests that Americans yearn for an infusion of virtue into political life. I assert, however, that we have lacked a lexicon of political virtue, or any systematic understanding of which virtues we value and which matter most to us. Nor have we understood whether groups who constitute key elements of our democracy—citizens, journalists, politicians, men and women, Democrats and Republicans—value virtues in politics similarly or differently. Without a working knowledge of the anatomy of virtue in the body politic, what is to prevent us from having to change again? By charting the virtue systems of these key groups, I have made explicit what is implicit to reveal that political virtue is more valued—and more present—than Americans likely realize. This exploration, I believe, contributes to the scholarship of political communication by enabling a fuller and more useful understanding of American political culture—and of the contradictions, curiosities, and surprises that enrich it.