156 Presidential politics
disputes, throwing their weight behind one faction or another, and hoping
to benefit one day from the gratitude of the successful contender, although
they may equally reap the bitter enmity of the opposing and not necessarily
defeated faction. The dangers, and the likely lack of success, of too deep an
involvement in local politics are illustrated by the experience of Franklin
Roosevelt in the elections of 1938, when he attempted to intervene on behalf
of Democratic congressional candidates without success, but a more subtle
and continuing use of presidential influence is an inescapable part of a suc-
cessful president’s armoury.
The president may hope, therefore, to call upon party support, however
engendered, for administration policies, but cannot rely upon it. Often, in
order to get Congress to accept proposed legislation, the president must turn
to a wider and more inclusive source of support, the American people. It
is, of course, difficult to distinguish clearly these two roles of the president.
Usually, in appealing for support to the people, the president is attempting
to demonstrate to the party in Congress that they would be unwise to flout
presidential leadership. At the same time the president may be appealing to
members of the opposing party or to political independents for support on
a national, non-partisan basis, for the good of the country as a whole, and
on many issues it will be possible to achieve such support both in Congress
and in the country. The president’s appeal to public opinion has become of
considerable political importance. The prestige and prominence of the office,
the fact that the president alone can claim to speak for the nation, gives a
special right to speak to the nation. With the development of the mass media,
the president has tended to appeal for support more and more to a unique
constituency, the nation, against the members of Congress who can be seen
with some truth as an assembly of local politicians. Franklin Roosevelt first
used the radio as an effective political weapon in his ‘fireside chats’ in the
1930s, in which he told the American people what he was attempting to do
and asked for their support. The use of the radio (President Bush still makes
a weekly radio address) has been surpassed in importance by presidential ap-
pearances before the television cameras, and the presidential press confer-
ence has become an institutionalised part of the machinery of government.
Woodrow Wilson, who established regular press conferences, first put the
direct dialogue between the president and the representatives of the press
on a regular basis. Franklin Roosevelt further developed this medium of com-
munication in which the president could give background information and
explain his policies to reporters, on the clear understanding that he would be
quoted directly only when he gave his permission. In this way the president
hoped for an understanding of, and representation of, his policies that would
go beyond his public announcements. The presidential press conferences
were then held in the intimacy of the president’s office in the White House,
but President Truman gave them a rather different character by transferring
them to a much larger room where hundreds of correspondents from all over
the country, and indeed all over the world, could attend. This proved to be
the initial step in transforming the press conference into something quite