Obama just another politician?
My friend Michael Callaghan sent me an email about the state of today’s political speech-making, and Barack Obama’s campaign speeches. Michael doesn’t agree that Obama is a great orator. He wonders if his campaign is “stuck.” I thought the two minutes we saw of his Orlando rally on the 30-minute “Obama Show” last night were quite stirring. But here’s what Michael told me:
I heard a lively discussion on CBC Radio about the speeches of this presidential campaign. One of the participants was a writer who had worked on the script for The West Wing. Something he said seemed to fly in the face of all the punditry about today’s politics. We are supposed to be living in a time of “the five-second clip.” The Age of Slogans. What politician today gives a formal oratorical addresses?” That, at least, is the “received wisdom” as Galbraith would put it.
Today’s speakers do not open with a hypothesis and close with an epilogue, or “peroration” as the Greeks would say. Gone are the rousing calls to action and brilliant imagery, like that of Martin Luther King. That aside, what the CBC writer said that intrigued me was this, “you can’t remember anything Obama has said, nor McCain.” And it is true! I had heard that Obama was a great orator, and tuned in eagerly to his Convention speech, and then to the debates, and I was bemused. Where was the soaring rhetoric, or even any language that was memorable, or, beyond his shopworn call for a change, any important or fresh idea? Where were the magic-carpet words to carry us to new heights? Nothing!
A friend explained that debaters these days dare not say anything startling or memorable for fear of offending someone. Thus, in their mild way, they just slang each other.
It is said that Obama’s campaign is now stuck. But what is he stuck on? Why are so many impressed with him, as others hang back? What is it about him that is impressive? At first, it was rumored to be his speeches. His enemies claimed it was just rhetoric, that he was a contemporary Hughey Long with little substance to his talk. Yet if you listen carefully to his words it isn’t much of a speech. Is the effect from his appearance, a physical style, a carriage, an expression, what is often called “stage presence?” Does he just look presidential?
In a witty and observant book, “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell describes a “Warren Harding Effect.”
Some say Warren Harding was the worst president ever, even though he was elected by the greatest ever percentage of popular vote, and did a few fine things, such as getting the vote for women, and he was a cautious and even reluctant warrior. However, many of the friends he put in Cabinet went to jail. And Harding was a rumbling and grandiloquent speaker. But Gladwell’s book, Blink, is about judgements we make before we think, such as “first-impression” judgements of people. Gladwell coined the “Harding Effect” to explain why Harding had been so instantly and widely popular. It was his “looks.” He was a “lady killer” who looked presidential.
I suspect that Obama generates the “Warren Harding Effect.” It is so powerful that people don’t hear what he says, and don’t care. Or is it enough that a black man is running for President? And that is the change. Yet, if they listened they might find little difference between Obama’s thinking and the attitudes of G.W. Bush. And I believe that is why his campaign is stuck. At first glance, he’s a great idea – a black man in the White House. And many think “that says it all.” While others wonder what else there is to say.
But people aren’t listening to those dull speeches, and don’t remember anything Obama’s has said. They like his “stage presence” or Harding Effect. I’d rather call it the “John Wayne Effect” because Harding brought a lot of scandal with him, and I don’t know much at all about Obama’s cast of characters. (There was a scandalous association with a developer in Chicago, but not too serious. But who else?)
But if you listen to what the man has said, he is another American who would strike first, and ask questions later. So there’s no change there. And he is for Israel Big Time. Netanyahu will be back in power while Obama is president, and the Road to Peace is already ditched, and Obama has agreed with Netenyahu that Jerusalem must be a new undivided capital of Israel, and there will be no more talk of withdrawal from settlements. That’s Obama! And he approves of unilateral attacks into Pakistan and Lebanon (or anywhere). He’s another “man of action.” Obama went to Harvard, and Rumsfeld went to Yale as did G. W.
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My thanks to Michael for letting me post this.
