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From National Review, July 3, 2000 Issue
Tongues of Tin
The state of political oratory.

By Michael Knox Beran, author of The Last Patrician

ith 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" — was 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.

There is a second tradition, more deeply imaginative than the Ciceronian, wilder, more exotic, more sinuous. Its roots in the language are deeper-are found in the literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, periods when, Emerson said, the English language had "its teeth and bones and muscles largest and strongest." Where the rhythms of Ciceronian speech are as crucial to the effect as the words and images, the prose of the second tradition — the tradition of Shakespeare and the King James Bible — depends for its power upon the strength of its language and imagery. Public men like Francis Bacon and Edmund Burke were masters of this second rhetorical style. Ciceronian orderliness could never have appealed to Bacon. "There is no excellent beauty," he said, "that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Burke's rhetoric proves the truth of Bacon's maxim. His style awed the critic William Hazlitt with "its severe extravagance, its literal boldness, its matter-of-fact hyperboles, its running away with a subject and from it at the same time."

The influence of the imaginative tradition helped to prevent, in the British oratory and prose of the 19th century, the fatty excess, the Ciceronian grandiloquence, that burdened so much American eloquence during the same period. But although the imaginative tradition has had fewer disciples in America than in Britain, something of its influence can be detected in the way the greatest of America's statesmen have reached back into the history of the language — its strongest bones and muscles — for their most striking formulations. Abraham Lincoln, running for the Senate in 1858, told his law partner, William Herndon, that he sought "some universally known" figure of speech to "strike home to the minds of men in order to raise them up to the peril of the times." Lincoln found the right passage in the Gospel of Mark, as King James's scholars had rendered it: "If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand." Ronald Reagan demonstrated a similar ability to reach back into the past when he chose a powerful but, at the time, wholly unfashionable word — "evil," Milton's word, a King James Bible word — to describe the Soviet Union.

The example of Lincoln suggests how much the imaginative tradition in Anglo-American rhetoric has to offer the public speaker. It is sometimes said that Lincoln inaugurated a stylistic revolution in favor of a simpler political prose, but the simplicity of his style is deceptive. While Lincoln rebelled against Ciceronian grandiloquence, such Lincolnian formulations as "the last full measure of devotion" or "for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan," are not precisely simple. "The truth about Mr. Lincoln," William Herndon said, "is that he read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America." But if Lincoln's literary culture was not broad, it was deep. He did not read many contemporary books, according to Herndon, and he thought biography a swindle. But he nevertheless immersed himself in the two great sources of imaginative prose, the Bible and Shakespeare. His own public pronouncements reflect their influence.

If Lincoln did inaugurate a rhetorical revolution in America, as is sometimes maintained, it's not clear that anyone followed his lead. Ciceronian grandiloquence continued to be the standard in American politics until well into the 20th century. Some of this elaborate, high-Victorian rhetoric was first-rate (like the younger Holmes's Memorial Day addresses). Much of it wasn't. Woodrow Wilson's reputation for eloquence has never recovered from the assault in which H. L. Mencken called attention to "its ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence on greasy and meaningless words, its frequent descents to mere sound and fury, signifying nothing." Even FDR's great speeches are characterized by a degree of grandiloquence. "So first of all, let me assert my firm belief, that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Lincoln would have scratched the preliminary clauses and let the meat of the sentence stand alone. But Lincoln had a weak voice and could not glory in a series of subordinate clauses the way a Webster or an FDR could. Roosevelt could invest even the most ordinary phrase with a high dramatic significance. Simply listen to the way he said, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 . . ." The greatness of FDR's speeches derives less from their literary merit than from the splendor of Roosevelt's delivery, the qualities of his voice, the supreme confidence he displayed on the rostrum or at the microphone.

The Oratory of 'Let's Do Lunch'
The old rhetorical traditions are for the most part gone, as irrecoverable as frock coats and the Latin Mass. The conversational style of public speaking is here to stay: soothing words, set off, at appropriate intervals, by pointed soundbites — the rhetorical equivalent of elevator music interspersed with police sirens. Like the confessional mode to which it is related, the conversational style creates an impression of intimacy — of collapsing barriers, falling façades — which, though it is quite false, appeals to us. Like our casual, dress-down attire, the conversational style creates a phony impression of naturalness and ease: phony because, just as forsaking a necktie does nothing to mitigate the pressures of a job, so a casual, conversational style of speaking does nothing to mitigate a candidate's reliance, in everything he says, on polling data and focus groups. In each case, we are seduced by the belief that in relaxing standards, in lowering barriers, in embracing informality, we draw nearer to a more authentic and more "natural" humanity.

The evidence, of course, points in a different direction. Even Rousseau admitted that man in the natural state, for all his freedom, was a "stupid and limited animal." We are victims of our shortsightedness. So bound up with a particular civilized order are traditions like polished oratory, the wearing of neckties, the holding of doors by men for women, that we cannot see how much indirect good they do us; we perceive only their direct (and rather limited) effects. Do away with them, however, and you soon enough get a dumbed-down humanity, duller, more vulgar, more brutish.

Simplicity and ease have their place, in political oratory as in life. But so do intricacy, formality, and a respect for the elaborate. This is the point of a celebrated essay of Isaiah Berlin's on Winston Churchill. Defending Churchill's prose and his "deliberate return to a formal mode of English utterance which extends from Gibbon and Dr. Johnson to Peacock and Macaulay," Berlin argued that there "are those who, inhibited by the furniture of the ordinary world, come to life only when they feel themselves actors upon a stage . . . can function freely only in uniform or armour or court dress, see only through certain kinds of spectacles, act fearlessly only in situations which in some way are formalised for them, see life as a kind of play in which they and others are assigned certain lines which they must speak." In eliminating the mandarin element in human life, whether in dress or manners, in rhetoric or religion, you eliminate something of the poetry as well, the very things that, in Burke's words, serve "to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation."

No candidate can by himself defy the trends that have replaced public speaking with palaver, civility with casual days. If he is to win over his contemporaries, a candidate must in some measure sympathize with the spirit of his age. The best that can be hoped for, where public speaking is concerned, is that candidates find ways to use the old, strong words in the way that Reagan did — easily and unself-consciously, and yet without violating the conversational canons of the moment. Granted, of all the things that we have to worry about, the shortcomings of our politicians' speaking abilities must rank low. It may be that prosperous ages don't need great public prose; splendid oratory may be the consolation prize that God bestows upon troubled times. There is a sense, then, in which George Bush and Al Gore will do just fine. They have this obligation only: to try to keep alive some faint memory of the real power of language, that it might be preserved for a time when strong words are needed once more.