Virtual Communities: Bowling Alone, Online Together

each other and their leaders in productive conversations about difficult issues, or they can shut down discussion with their rhetorical choices. By refusing to justify his position or to engage in dialogue, Cleveland escalated a crisis that was already severe. In the years before the Civil War, Pierce and Buchanan similarly failed to open up space for deliberation, as did Johnson after the war. These presidents stand in stark contrast to Lincoln. What was the difference between Lincoln and Johnson, who shared similar pasts and intellectual abilities? Stephen Howard Browne answers: ‘‘the difference was that his past bequeathed to Lincoln an affective capacity for others, an enlarged mentality with which he could sympathize with the plight of others while respecting their essential dignity,’’ while Johnson’s ‘‘vaunted egoism’’ led to a myopic worldview and an inability to identify with common folks that made him seem like a fraud (201 2). Lincoln’s rhetoric, Browne and others suggest, created space for democracy. In the end, the fine examples of rhetorical criticism in Before the Rhetorical Presidency raise as many questions as they answer. This is how the editor would have it. As Martin Medhurst writes in the introduction, ‘‘My suspicion is that this book will not end debate about the rhetorical presidency*nor should it. I do hope that it will open some new avenues for consideration, both by advocates and detractors of ‘going public’’’ (13). It certainly does.