Book Review: The ubiquitous presidency: Presidential communication and digital democracy in tumultuous times by Joshua M. Scacco & Kevin Coe

Abstract

Joshua Scacco and Kevin Coe’s The Ubiquitous Presidency: Presidential Communication and Digital Democracy in Tumultuous Times presents a wellhistoricized account of how the office of the U.S. presidency and those who have held it since the 1980s have attempted to gain, shift, and navigate attention under changing technological conditions and a changing relationship between audience and speaker. The authors’ framework of the overarching contexts of any ubiquitous presidency (personalization, accessibility, and pluralism) and the particular goals of any presidency in a ubiquitous era (visibility, adaptation, and control) will continue to be useful as the conditions of ubiquity dominate the coming presidencies. While this book certainly influences the study of the presidency and presidential address, it also, thankfully, offers a broader approach that illuminates elements of digital political communication in a wider arena. As the authors argue in their conclusion, it can be extrapolated to better investigate and understand political elites outside of the particular office of the U.S. Presidency. Although the authors give examples of national leaders across a range of countries, I was struck by the potential usefulness of this lens to explore lower-level national office holders in the United States (senators and highprofile members of congress) whose campaigns and administrations have recently harnessed or made use of the conditions of ubiquity. As Coe and Scacco trace the past 30 years of the presidency and shifts in media attention and use by presidents, the historical development of ubiquity is where this book truly shines. By untangling ubiquity from the digital contexts in which we often see the term deployed, Scacco and Coe’s intervention of studying spaces that garner public attention that does not always get defined as “news” and are often not considered political, including The Hollywood Reporter, Consumer Reports, who a president grants a medal of freedom, sports programs, and entertainment programmings like appearances on late-shows or MTV. Impressively, throughout the book, Book Review