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Choosing exactly the right words

Thursday, November 6, 2008

AFTER A FINAL WEEK OF THE MEDIA being filled with nasty attacks ads, America’s way of changing leaders could seem like a tough and bruising affair. But not, in one respect at least, to this transplanted Brit.

If this week’s elections had picked a new occupant for No 10 Downing Street rather than the White House, this very day we’d be seeing camera teams lined up to capture the time-honored - if speedy and brutal - appearance of movers’ trucks to take out the old leader’s personal effects and bring in the new.

 

The American “softer, gentler” way is to have a 76-day transition period - dating only from Franklin D Roosevelt’s January 1937 inauguration, before which the American tradition, born of horse ’n’ buggy days, was to let the existing Administration linger on for an extraordinary four months before being replaced.

 

But the lame duck George W Bush was quick to summon news crews to the Rose Garden and attempt some graciousness to match the previous night’s gentlemanly concession speech from John McCain. While repeating in public his previous phoned invitation to Barack Obama and Michelle Obama into the White House for an early visit, he also formally promised full cooperation during the hand-over with the Democrats’ transition team.

 

Bush’s remarks, however, struck a very different tone from that of the Administration departmental instructions, which had earlier been leaked to journalists and which warned staff to be very guarded in how they respond to the Obamanites’ questions.

  

 

**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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TONE DOES MATTER. AND OF COURSE IT IS in large part the exact choosing of words that establishes a tone. The McCain-Palin ticket made much negative play of describing Obama as a “talker”, even claiming that eloquence is somehow a vice rather than a virtue, and in so doing they probably contributed to their own self-fulfilling case for defeat. It was like shooting fish in a barrel to compare, as I did almost involuntarily, Sarah Palin’s tellingly erratic patterns of speech with the calm and orderly, Frederick Douglass-style oratory of Obama.

 

A speech-writer who knows a thing or two about connecting with the ears and hearts of America, Peggy Noonan - for a long time Ronald Reagan’s most persuasive wordsmith - put it well, in of all places the right-wing Opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal (and before Election Day, it should be said). She wrote that “Obama took down a political machine without raising his voice”.

 

I haven’t seen the commentariat draw attention, as I would draw it, to just a single word in the extremely tightly-crafted victory speech with which Obama enthralled Grant Park and the entire world during the wee small hours of yesterday.

 

He’s always been very particular in his word-choices.  As Noonan was crisply suggesting, he has tended, even when being determinedly critical, to avoid shrill or aggressive words of excoriation. What he has done, in his process of settling upon the right phrase, is to seek descriptiveness along with a high degree of specificity.

 

In brushing aside and urging a move on from the “partisanship and pettiness” of the feckless Bushite approach, he applied an additional label of such precision that it positively leapt out from the Chicago waterfront right at me.

 

                                  

    

 

“Immaturity” was what he called it. How perfect, for our puerile American posturing across the rest of the globe - combined so dispiritingly, as it has been, with finger-pointing and name-calling at home.

 

Obama’s promise of maturity and thoughtfulness was aptly underlined for me when a friend, a veteran of South Africa’s long struggle for racial justice, emailed me while the results were coming in. He’s a noted communicator domestically and on the world stage who happens to have origins in his country’s minority Indian community, and his delighted realization was that, instead of being naively out of step with the world, as he put it, “America now looks as it if gets it”.

 

My friend still hadn’t caught up with the verbatim of Obama’s victory speech when he wrote, but he expressed this hope: “Maybe the US is finally at the point of growing up”.

 

   

 

MATURITY AND SERIOUSNESS IN LEADERSHIP WOULDN'T EVER PRECLUDE the inspiring of frivolity, still less of amiable creativity. Already Obama: the Musical has taken Nairobi audiences by storm at the Kenya National Theater.

 

A mainly young cast of 48 actors and singers recreates the life journey of the now most famous member of the country's minority ethnic group, the Luo. (The best Kenyan joke I've heard in a while says it's easier for a Luo to become president of the US than the president of Kenya). Late script-changes were made to the play this week, incorporating quotations from both the McCain and Obama speeches.

 

Producer/director George Orido is harboring high hopes - why shouldn't he? - after visits to his show by scouts from Broadway and from (but of course) the ever-adventurous Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. 

  

In entertainment ... in politics ... in just about everything, this history-making week bears out once more the enduring insight of Caius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) in his taut aphorism from the first century AD, using just five words (five Latin words, at least - in our less taut English it comes out as six):  "Ex Africa semper aliquid novi". Always something new out of Africa.

 

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