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Words, words, words

Thursday, August 21, 2008

WHEN THE MEDIA act as megaphones for political leaders, what we obviously get is amplified rhetoric. It’s a pity, but rhetoric these days is increasingly getting a bad name. The label is becoming merely a loose synonym for meaningless verbiage.

That’s been evidenced by the terms in which western allies have been dismissing Russia’s concern over the Bush Administration’s plan to place its new missile interceptor system in neighboring Poland.

 

Fresh from his army’s belligerent and world-defying incursion into Georgia, Russia’s second most publicly senior military officer, General Anatoly Nogovitsyn quoted his country’s warfare doctrine and warned that “by putting up interceptors, Poland is placing itself at risk … such targets are the first to be destroyed”.

 

In response, NATO's Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer first told reporters that the general’s threat was “pathetic rhetoric", saying “it is unhelpful and it leads nowhere." And then as if singing from the same hymn-sheet, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates went on ABC News to say “It strikes me as pretty strident rhetoric” and proceeded to parse what he really meant: “probably very empty rhetoric”.

 

Now, for those of us shaped to any degree by the emphasis on rhetoric as a worthy pursuit in the Ancient World - and I mean mainly the days of Greece’s Aristotle (above left, courtesy of Museo Nazionale Romano) and of Rome’s Cicero and Quintilian - the use of this very word as a term of belittling abuse seems wrong-headed. 

 

Classical rhetoric, after all, was something good citizens studied and practiced as part of a rounded education to equip them for leadership. It was to that end that it included the mastery of fundamental principles in political philosophy, ethics, and what we’d today call psychology. A student of rhetoric was not merely learning to “make a good speech”, but to develop all the essential elements of good character and civic responsibility.

 

Recalling all this, I was intrigued to get Frank Luntz’s take on the rival efforts of Barack Obama and John McCain to win the ears, hearts and minds of evangelic pastor Rick Warren’s legions of mega-churchgoers centered in Lake Forest, California (the two candidates briefly seen together, with Warren, above right). Luntz may not be a Quintilian, but he is the word maven, market survey expert and political pollster (Republican in his own sympathies) who wrote the successful book “Words that Work”, which is newly out in paperback from Hyperion.

   

 

SINCE WORDS ARE THE SALIENT TOOL any public speaker has to use, I was heartened that Luntz employed, as he does in his book, very close textual analysis (and well as close scrutiny of live-action performance skills, of course) to arrive at his judgments. He had a well-controlled, almost laboratory-style test-case to examine – with Rick Warren posing identical questions, in identical order, to each Presidential candidate, and before the same (not as homonegous as you'd think)audience. 

 

Luntz felt McCain’s use of language is less effective generally out on the stump, because it’s more conventionally political – but he said that the Saddleback Church discussion showed McCain to better advantage: “I could see, and the audience could see that he has an internal passion”.

 

One telling distinction came when Warren asked the candidates if either thought “Evil” existed and if if it did what should we do, “ignore it? … negotiate with it? … contain it? … defeat it?"  Obama went into a considered mini-dissertation (including Darfur, child abuse and other instances of evil – for which Luntz said “we credit him for thinking about it, pondering it”). Not having heard Obama (we’re told) because he was kept in a cone of silence, McCain later adopted a very different stance – instantaneously proclaiming “Defeat it” - before running on fast to cite Osama bin Laden as evil, and vowing to pursue him “to the gates of Hell”.

 

 
 

To me this just sounded like crude rabble-rousing on McCain’s part - maybe a vote-winner, maybe not.

 

Luntz’s conclusion overall was more favorable generally to Obama – and don’t forget this is comes from a Republican:

 

“When you take an independent view of Obama’s communicating you cannot help but be impressed. He’ s the greatest communicator we’ve had since Robert Kennedy. And what’s amazing about Obama is that he knows how to capture emotion, he knows how to put together language that goes for the heart and not just the head”.

 

But will that win him the election?  I doubt it, though I suspect Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian might have said it ought to.

   

   

 

**A RADIO DISCUSSION OF THIS COLUMN AIRS EVERY WEEK ON CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

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