But what, after all, makes for an effective political insult?
The answer is style. Too coarse, and the abuser sounds malicious. Too unimaginative, and the words evaporate en route. Too petty, and the insulter is harmed more than the insultee. Too distant from truth, and it just won’t stick. Bill Moyers’s jibe that “hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life” is an attempt at wit; the real thing is Bill Buckley’s remark that LBJ was a man of his last word. Is Jimmy Carter the worst president the U.S. ever had, or, as William Safire put it, the “best U.S. president the Soviet Union ever had”? Gore Vidal calling Ronald Reagan a “triumph of the embalmer’s art” seems itself the triumph of a curdled soul; but even Reagan could laugh when Gerald Ford quipped, “No, Reagan doesn’t dye his hair. He’s just prematurely orange.”
It is one thing for our semiliterate intellectuals to sneer at the current president’s locution, and another to remark, as H.L. Mencken did of Warren Harding, that his speech “reminds me of a string of wet sponges . . . It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.” Compare this to Sen. Harry Reid’s feeble attempt at scathing wit against President George W. Bush in 2005: “I think this guy is a loser.
Joesph Tartakovsky is only partially right. Style is certainly part of what we’ve generally lost in politics. But without any substance, all the style in the world won’t help much. Let’s compare Buckley’s putdown of LBJ with Reid’s putdown of GWB.
First, Reid inserts himself: “I think this guy is a loser.” Buckley lets his phrase stand on its own: “Johnson is a man of his last word.”
Second, Buckley took a cliche and gave it a twist that illuminates Johnson’s contradictions; Reid relies on a cliche that only adds to the fog of confusion around Bush’s presidency.
Third, Buckley’s gibe is a specific criticism of Johnson’s tendency to pander to his audiences and his rapid changes in policy due to what’s popular; it’s telling that summarizing takes more words than Buckley’s actual epigram. Reid’s criticism, however, is vague and depends on his listener sneering at Bush in the same way Reid does.
People usually claim to dislike politics because it’s nasty. But since so many issues, from wars to waste management, are intrinsically nasty, getting the nastiness out of politics—getting the politics out of politics, so to speak—is probably impossible. Perhaps the problem with politics today isn’t that there’s no style, but that there’s no substance behind the sneer. Without the redemption of substance, the nastiness has become an end in itself.
I’d care about what Barack Obama had to say about dissent and not questioning the patriotism of others, if one of the defining moments of his campaign wasn’t him questioning the patriotism of people who wear flag pins, and then allowing the media somehow to portray it as him being attacked.
“I will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign.”
“The young soldier who first spoke about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib - he is a patriot. Recognizing a wrong being committed in this country’s name; insisting that we deliver on the promise of our Constitution - these are the acts of patriots, men and women who are defending that which is best in America. And we should never forget that - especially when we disagree with them; especially when they make us uncomfortable with their words.”
What about those young soldiers who were stripping Iraqis and photographing them in pyramids? Are they patriots?
What I hate - absolutely hate - about patriotism talk from Leftists is that it’s pretty focused on defining those who kvetch the loudest as the most patriotic. It generally involves snooty people like Obama using their highfalutin ideals to look down on people who do mundane things like wear flag pins.
What I’d really love is if a Democrat candidate would stop telling everyone what a great patriot he is and instead simply be such a great patriot that everyone says, “Wow, that guy’s a great patriot.” Instead we get some guy who spent three years as a “community organizer,” went to Harvard Law, and now spends his spare time griping about how much his student loans cost and how flag pins are phony patriotism. How about some guy who takes America’s side in a war from time to time, or stands up for us when a bunch of foreign pinkos rail against our imperialist foreign policy? How about someone who openly encourages his children to join the military and advocates military service as being a little more noble than being a community organizer? Or not spending 20 years in Jeremiah Wright’s church. There are all sorts of ways for those on the Left to show their patriotism, but, their political leaders at least, routinely fail to do so. Instead, they offer us speeches saying, in essence, being a kvetching Leftist is per se patriotic.
Like everything with Obama, there needs to be less talk and more substance.
P.S. “As we begin our fourth century as a nation…” Huh? I question his maths.
P.P.S. I like it when he praises Lincoln for not “demonizing” his enemies. I guess he didn’t so much “demonize” them as imprison them and banish them. I think no other president was as active at using his powers to attack his political enemies as Lincoln. Of course, with Lincoln, a great many of his enemies really were traitorous. But that wouldn’t have really fit in with the theme of Obama’s speech.
If you’ve ever read David Frum’s How We Got Here, two things that strike you are both his sympathy for people in situations that they can’t understand and his omnivorous learning. He has an uncanny knack for tying small issues together with large ones and thus illustrating a common concept.
Something has long been wrong with the Bush administration; this we all know. The question has been, what specifically is wrong? Frum’s answer: personnel is policy, and the way Bush manages people weeds out good people. (Frum himself was on staff, but lasted less than two years.) How did Scott McClellan go from a political hack in Texas to the White House press office to the hottest thing on amazon.com? From Frum’s National Post column:
As the current press secretary Dana Perino daily reminds us, you don’t have to be a genius to succeed as press secretary. But you do need (1) composure under fire, (2) verbal fluency, (3) an understanding of the imperatives of the news business and (4) access to the interior workings of the administration. McClellan never possessed qualities (1) and (2), and his colleagues refused to grant him (4).
In these deficiencies, McClellan was not alone. George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation. McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office, and if he never belonged to the innermost circle of power, he nonetheless gained closer proximity than would be available to almost anyone who did not first serve in Texas.
That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.
Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock — but Rove did it.)
These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.
Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.
In one column, Frum has explained how so many momentous decisions fell into the hands of people who, like Bartleby the Scrivener, would prefer not to. In short, Frum has explained why What Happened happened. Frum has already written one book where he explained what he thought was good and bad about this presidency; I hope he writes another, now that we know more.
Cutting the moderators from the debates is the greatest idea for presidential politics since someone thought of putting Reagan on a ballot.
And let me say, if Obama talked about issues instead of whining about campaign styles, there’d be a lot more discussion of issues and a lot less focus on campaign styles. Since he claims that he wants a discussion of issues instead of a focus on campaign styles, the credulous might be led to ask why doesn’t he do just that. Cynics, on the other hand, have their guesses.
I am really dreading an Obama-McCain election. It will be nothing but month after month of demanding retractions and bemoaning various fake outrages. I despise the thin-skinned politics of apology; I would rather replace elections with actual bare-knuckled fist-fights. At least then it would give some impression that our president was a man and not a cry-baby. Hillary should lend each of these two a testicle; she seems to have some to spare.
Addendum: From the story:
In Anderson, Obama noted that McCain has switched views on issues like tax cuts for the rich to curry favor with the GOP base. “The straight talk express lost a wheel,” said Obama.
The first step in launching a new politics is not to repeat stale lines.
Apollo posted this at 1:17 AM EDT on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 as Politics
For example, Dr Pepper is a Republican soda. Pepsi-Cola and Sprite are Democratic. So are most clear liquors, like gin and vodka, along with white wine and Evian water. Republicans skew toward brown liquors like bourbon or scotch, red wine and Fiji water.
As for specific candidates, the article says:
If there’s butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you’re likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, Bear Naked granola and a latte to go? You probably like Barack Obama, too. And if you’re leaning toward John McCain, it’s all about kicking back with a bourbon and a stuffed crust pizza while you watch the Democrats fight it out next week in Pennsylvania.
That probably explains why getting the Sur La Table catalog shortly led to those pesky Democrat mailings.
Dorothy posted this at 10:54 PM EDT on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 as Politics