The Breakfast Table

Whatever Happened to Rhetoric?

Michael,

I freely confess that it’s difficult to judge the quality of speeches with which one disagrees, because they make one angry at perceived distortions, unfair attacks, and the like. But in the case of Joseph Lieberman, I found myself neither angered nor captivated, but instead utterly and completely bored. I have always considered him a wonderful speaker, low-key but passionate. But tonight, watching on TV as opposed to your experience inside the hall, I found him deadly dull and the speech itself really uninspired and uninspiring. The delivery seemed to me to be painfully slow and the rhetoric profoundly unelevated. The partisan stuff was very mild, the praise of Gore very drippy, and the autobiographical stuff bereft of Lieberman’s usual attractive modesty.

Maybe you had to be there. I don’t really know, and I don’t entirely trust my own judgment for ideological reasons. What matters is the response by the public, which we’ll know today and Friday when we see the overnight tracking polls.

That said, I want to return to the matter of rhetoric. One of the things I most regret about the Clinton years is the lowering of presidential rhetoric. You said a couple of days ago that Clinton changed things by avoiding the kind of soaring effects that characterized previous presidential speechifying. That’s true, though George Bush the Elder started it with his strange staccato speaking style, which made his speechwriters flail about to find a way to capture his tone in prose. They couldn’t, and he never gave a good speech after his convention triumph in 1988.

But I like high rhetoric, and not only because I liked writing it for Reagan. I like it because it gives ordinary politics body and nuance. And at its best, it can commit presidents to hold true to their convictions when they are tempted to retreat from them. There were no flourishes in Lieberman’s speech, no effort to build to an emotional or policy high. Instead, it seemed almost like he was accepting an Oscar not only on his own behalf but on behalf of the American people.

The speech that I found surprisingly compelling was, amazingly, Karenna Gore Schiff’s. Not because it had elevating rhetoric, which it didn’t, but because she was so animated and so clearly full of love for her father that the honest emotion was infectious. To be sure, this trend of wives introducing husbands and daughters seconding the nomination of their fathers is sadly indicative of the Oprah-ish trough into which our politics has descended. Even so, speeches are at their best either about conveying feeling or conveying ideas. Karenna conveyed feeling. Lieberman conveyed mostly his own joy at having been chosen to run as vice president, which may be an honest emotion but which means nothing to me and should mean nothing to the American electorate. The presidency is not a reward. It’s a job, a leadership position, and it should be approached with gravity.

Humor is, of course, always deeply appreciated, because when it’s done well in the course of a serious speech it lightens the gravity at points and allows the audience to take a breath and find some release. It was a profound weakness of your old boss that he could not find a moment to be light of spirit, but I never found it surprising. He’s not, in my view, a serious person, so he had to affect seriousness by avoiding humor. When released from the necessity to be serious, as at the correspondents’ dinners, he was always at his best.

Again, I’m delighted you enjoyed yourself, because, as my grandmother used to say, you should only be happy. So let me wish you all the happiness of this convention, since I’m not experiencing it at all.