Tongues of Tin - The state of political oratory

With another presidential election upon us, consider the state of political oratory in America: It is not good. George W. Bush's speeches are full of provocative ideas and suggest that the candidate has done some serious thinking (really). But the uniformly optimistic tone of his speeches eventually becomes tiresome. Candidates who attempt to imitate Ronald Reagan's sunny confidence in the future too often forget that Reagan was a master of a variety of rhetorical tones and styles. Controlled anger, conversational intimacy, plain humor, patriotic poetry-they were all in the Reagan repertory. Pollyanna Reagan was not.

Al Gore's performances are a different matter. The nondescript prose of the vice president's speeches is upstaged by the peculiarities of his delivery. When he pauses for effect, Gore has a habit of lifting his eyebrows, turning his head slightly to the side while simultaneously lowering it, and looking at the camera out of the corners of his eyes, like a person who has practiced in front of a mirror one too many times. This is perhaps nothing more than a manifestation of a politician's pardonable vanity. Lyndon Johnson used to think that one side of his face photographed better than the other; maybe Al Gore believes that he appears more presidential when he is captured in quasi-profile. And yet there is something disconcerting in this particular vice-presidential mannerism: Gore's arched brows, together with his dark hair, put one in mind of an actor made up for The Mikado.

This much is certain: The vice president's set speeches are very dull, and he was wise, during the heat of the contest with Bill Bradley, to abandon them in favor of unscripted soliloquies interspersed with questions from voters. The speeches Gore gives these days are full of an especially trying kind of self-righteousness: laundry lists of legislation that he has supported in the past and federal programs- described as "crusades," "initiatives," and "special commitments"-that he proposes for the future.

No revival of the rhetorical arts is to be looked for this year. America will get the political oratory it deserves. The soothing conversational tones of the candidates' speeches will perfectly echo our casual, dressed-down age, our impatience with any form of mannered art, our contempt for any ritual of elaborate civic civility. The candidates know that no special sensitivity to language is required to win-Bill Clinton has shown them that much. Clinton, who is nothing if not a successful politician, has very little feeling for words, or chooses not to reveal it if he has. He is, of course, alert to nuance and the finer shades of verbal meaning. He is a master of evasion, equivocation, the splitting of semantic hairs. And he has perfected the art of the poll-tested applause line. But no scraps of Clintonian oratory attach themselves to the memory in the way that Reagan's ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") or Kennedy's ("Ask not . . .") do.

The phrases one does associate with Clinton are not exactly gems of the speechmaker's art. One of these-"It's the economy, stupid"-derives from a sign posted in his 1992 campaign war room, while another-"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is"delivered in a legal proceeding. This second utterance, it is true, bears some resemblance to Pilate's question, "What is truth?" But Pilate's words have a weary urbanity quite absent from the president's formulation. Clinton's apparent blindness to literary art is perfectly consistent with his graduate-student intellectual sensibility, and demonstrates that even a modest literary culture is no longer requisite for success in American politics.

the old schools

What of the rhetorical traditions we have lost? For the English- speaking nations, there are really only two. The first, the classical- or really the Ciceronian-is sober, lapidary, and, at its best, characterized by an Olympian grace, the linguistic equivalent of a Greek temple. Its genius is concentrated in the ordered rhythms of the prose, rhythms that are controlled by means of an array of literary devices. Lord Bolingbroke, the British statesman of Queen Anne's time, was perhaps the greatest English-speaking exemplar of this tradition. Thomas Jefferson thought Bolingbroke's style one of "the highest order." He found in him a "lofty, rhythmical, full-flowing eloquence" worthy of Cicero, and argued that his "writings are certainly the finest examples in the English language of the eloquence proper for the Senate." Both Alexander Hamilton and Daniel Webster belong to the Ciceronian tradition in American oratory; John Kennedy may have been its greatest 20th-century master. Kennedy relied heavily on the kind of rhetorical tricks that schoolchildren learn (or used to learn) when studying Cicero: "Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate"; "Liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain."

The problem with this tradition is that it all too easily degenerates into hopeless pomposity. Garry Wills, in The Kennedy Imprisonment, might have put it too strongly when he said that the "famous antitheses and alliterations" of Kennedy's speeches "sound tinny now." Does Wills prefer the epicene vacuousness of Adlai Stevenson, or the monotone drone of Bill Clinton? But he was right to draw attention to the chief weakness of neo-classical rhetoric. Without discipline and a fastidious sense of rhetorical propriety, the speaker will produce only bombast or false grandeur.