Hillary Clinton’s Rhetorical Offenses (and why words matter)

February 25th, 2008 Posted in Hillary, Obama

To believe that such talk really ever came out of people’s mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man’s mouth was a rolling-mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there.

Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses

Rhetoric in the Pejorative Sense

Enter Barack Obama, whose rhetorical skill is unusual in American politics. The shock is not just that he is young and eloquent, but that people seem to be buying it. They’re showing up to rallies in large numbers. They’re enthusiastic. And they’re voting for him.

To competitors who have played by the rules, this must be nothing short of offensive. Conventional wisdom has demanded that they immunize themselves from cynical derision by emptying their public statements of ambition—whether that means style or nuance, grand ideals or difficult truths. The point is to stay out of trouble and win votes.

Meanwhile, conventional power is a function not of rhetorical ability but of established party pecking order, not of direct communication with the public but incubation within the machine: how many favors you have promised and received, and whether it is ready to promote you. The internal vetting process is primary, the public one secondary.

The conversation of pundits revolves around the premise that politicians are just self-interested strategists. It focuses on motives, strategies, and public opinion, but never on political positions per se. Words don’t have anything to with the facts or intentions they seem to express. Rather they are tea leaves to be used to divine the fate of a political actor’s career. We are meant to believe that contemporary seers like Chris Matthews move effortlessly beyond the rhetorical trappings of public figures to pierce the Machiavellian heart of matter—the will-to-power that drives all political life. On this view rhetoric and action are not just problematically related, but at best unrelated, and at worst entirely opposed.

In this climate it is reasonable, when a young and unusually inspiring candidate like Barack Obama comes along, for an opponent to think that she might be able to turn his eloquence into a disadvantage—to accuse of him of rhetoric in the pejorative sense.

One line of attack is to try to warn us that we are wrong on principle to be inspired more by speeches than experience; that we have to “get real,” and approach politics with more rationality and sobriety; that the feelings we get from politicians are less worthy of our attention than their resumes.

Another is to link eloquence and inspiration to youth and flakiness; to paint Obama as a man so good with words that he can’t possibly live in the world of deeds—as an inexperienced and naïve idealist, not tough enough for the real world.

A final line of attack, inconsistent with the others, is to suggest that Obama is not really what he seems—that he must be just as cynical and power-hungry as other politicians, and all the worse for his seeming sincerity.

The first line of attack cautions voters to question the relevance of their emotions to the political domain—to doubt themselves; the second and third ask them to infer that anyone arousing these emotions in this context is either too good for the world to move it or too slick not to be selling snake oil—i.e., to doubt their candidate.

These lines have been tried by Hillary Clinton, to little avail.

Rhetoric in the Classical Sense

The problem with these approaches, strategic and factual, is that in their cynicism they ignore the deeper meaning of rhetoric—the real relationship between political words and deeds, and the importance of that relationship to a democracy.

That relationship has long been a subject of inquiry. Rhetoric was important to the ancients, and by the middle ages its role in education had been formalized. Alongside grammar and logic (or dialectic), it was one of the first three subjects taught to students, or the trivium. The trivium was in turn preparatory to the quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Together these comprised the seven “liberal arts.”

This is not to say that the pejorative sense of rhetoric was unknown to the ancients. Plato’s dialogues were essentially critical response to the sophists, who were the ancient teachers of rhetoric par excellence. The sophists claimed that by teaching rhetoric and other forms of self-improvement they were teaching virtue. In the dialogue Gorgias, Plato disputes this idea by drawing a distinction between rhetoric and dialectic (or rational discourse). Rhetoric traffics in the manipulation of an audience via the flattery of popular opinion, and dialectic involves inquiry into the truth—and so is open to the refutation of commonly held beliefs and even common sense.

But in the Phaedrus Plato seems open to the possibility of a rhetoric that is grounded in dialectic. That theme is advanced by Aristotle, who claims that the two are in fact are intricately related. While dialectic is a method of theoretical inquiry, rhetoric is its necessary counterpart in public life, politics, and law, where persuasion is necessary but cannot be grounded entirely in reason. Rhetoric is the practical version of philosophical argument, with the difference that its methods and evidentiary standards are more expansive. Admissible are popular opinion, and anything necessary to establish common ground with a group of people who are not philosophical enough to be persuaded by reasons alone (and who, if they were sufficiently philosophical, might never be persuaded of anything). An orator may reason with his audience (logos), but to be persuasive he must also appeal to their emotions (pathos), often by the figurative use of language. That appeal is helped when the speaker’s character is testimony to his credibility (ethos).

While rhetorical methods are not entirely rational, their objectives can be as rational as we like. That is one rationale for the extension of the meaning of “rhetoric” beyond the pejorative sense. Aristotle pointed out that while words are not as reliable as deeds, ideally they are they are in harmony with them. If rhetoric were replaced purely by reasoning, no one would ever be moved to do anything—emotion is a prerequisite of action.

The great Roman orator Cicero thought that while political philosophy and law were necessary subjects of study for the politician, rhetorical ability was more important. Barring force, persuasion is necessary to political action. So abandoning coercion, democratic political systems have a problem. Political communities don’t spring into action because of well-founded theories. Policies don’t get implemented because smart people think them up. They don’t even get implemented by the sheer will and tenacity of an executive, unless he is commanding an army or a podium.

Hence when his opponents attack Obama for words, “empty rhetoric,” and “false hopes,” they are turning the classical argument on its head. It’s not words that are opposed to action but a lack of the right words. The gap between policy and implementation, the theoretical and the practical, is far starker than that between rhetoric and action. In fact, as a means of public reflection and discourse, rhetoric is meant to be the middle ground between the two. Cicero thought Cato superior to Socrates because the former was a man of deeds. It is the philosophers—in today’s terms, bureaucratic policy wonks and academics–who are farthest from the action.

Hillary Contra Obama – In Five Acts
The classical account of rhetoric should help us reframe the difference between Obama and Clinton. Since Obama’s rhetorical ability does not seem to be in question, let’s begin by analyzing the rhetorical arc of Clinton’s campaign. The account below follows a sequence that is more thematic than temporal. It is a tragedy, not a comedy.

Act I, Scene I: Enter Clinton, stage right, wearing coronation robes—grand, radiant, inevitable. In the beginning the thought of not winning no more occurs to her than the thought of being a peasant occurs to a queen. The audience knows as soon as she walks onto stage how brittle these great expectations can be—that she’s set up for a fall, that the tragic seed of the unraveling exists in the rigidity of the expectations. When there is just the slightest hint of resistance to these expectations, things do indeed begin to unravel.

Act I, Scene II: Clinton, early morning on the misty battlefield—she has turned in her robes for armor. After the near-coronation, Clinton will show us that she can fight for what is rightfully hers. And so she lets loose the dogs of war.

Obama is variously a drug dealer, ambitious kindergartener, pro-lifer, naïf, Reaganite, fairytale, niche candidate for African Americans, entertaining rhetorician incapable of real work, assistant slumlord, turban-wearing foreigner, and plagiarist. Minor policy differences on healthcare are turned into bitter feuds. She sets up a “fact hub” website that is largely a series of shrill, petty, and often questionable accusations—“Only the Obama Campaign is Encouraging Out-of-Staters to Caucus in Iowa”; “Sen. Obama Rewrites History, Claims He Hasn’t Been Planning White House Run”; “Sen. Obama Falsely Claims Hillary Called For A ‘Reality Check’ On What the Nation Could Accomplish.”

Finally, there is the campaign’s primary theme: Obama is without substance. The election is about “talk versus action” and “actions speak louder than words.”

Act II: Clinton, soothsayer and scold, Tiresias to our Oedipus. The fundamental premise of her campaign narrative has now undergone a natural decomposition from inevitability into deflationary righteousness.. As the more “experienced” candidate, it is obvious that she is the best candidate, and everyone knows it. Even Obama enthusiasts acknowledge this in their heart of hearts—they just have to be reminded of it. She must ward us off our instincts the way bourgeois parents discourage their children from becoming artists, to protect them from themselves. She is the cautionary realist to the idealists, asking us in an aside, a rare moment of comic relief, “can we just have a sort of a reality break for a minute?” We are reminded of the stakes, the “stark choice.” We need to “get real”; “we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.” The world is a dangerous place after 9/11, and terrorists could be emboldened by the softer candidate— we need someone who is “ready to be commander in chief” “on day one.”

Because de facto inevitability has degenerated into doomsday prophecy, the campaign’s narrative never advances beyond its initial reversal—positivity has become its glaring lacuna. Clinton fails to advance arguments in her favor beyond the claim that the election is an obvious choice between experience and charisma, action and words.

Act III: Hillary, dawn, in nun’s garb, exhausted and beleaguered. Here the focus is on the delusion of Obama’s supporters. It begins with linguistic passivity—a way of indicating objective detachment, as if Clinton had no stake in the election beyond her fear for our safety. “So I think we have to be very, very clear,” “this is about a decision”; “I think it’s fair to say that really the most important decision is who would be the best president on day one.”

And here the campaign narrative really becomes a meta-narrative: it’s not about differences between her and Obama, because that question is a settled component of the theme of inevitability. The meta-narrative is about why voters are being swayed by words rather than deeds, why they are not making their decision in the manner of a human resources department, why they are deluded. A preference for Obama can be interpreted only as voter ignorance or as a failure to appreciate her substance: “I know there are comparisons and contrasts to be drawn between us, and I think it’s important that voters receive that information”; “we won’t achieve unity or fulfill our dreams by running away from honest discussion and debate.”

But above all the interruption of her inevitability is result of unfairness—not everyone is being “held to the same standards,” “held accountable.” The appeal to unfairness becomes a plea: “we’re asking [you] to compare our years of service,” “that is all we’re asking.” Her plea comes apparently only from a sense of what is good for us, as bitter a pill as it might seem to swallow: “Because it’s not just about my opponent and myself, this election is about you.” The communication of self-pity and martyrdom reaches its peak: “maybe because I understand how difficult this job will be and how lonely it is in the Oval Office”; “some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not. Some us know what we will do on day one and some of us haven’t thought it through enough.”

Act IV: Clinton, the day after, in the garb of a mechanic. Now the attack on rhetoric is enhanced: words are opposed to work: “Others might be joining a movement. I’m joining you on the night shift, on the day shift and I’m asking you to join me to shift America into high gear again.” The election is about “picking a president who relies not just on words but on work, on hard work.” Clinton is “in the solutions business.”

Here are the ideas behind this rhetorical disaster (night shift, gear shift, etc.): first, that because Obama is achieving his victory rhetorically, he is achieving it effortlessly, and so undeservedly. The second is that Obama’s entire career must reflect this effortlessness: he hasn’t gotten where he is with hard work. The third is that his presidency will be the same: Obama won’t be a hard worker.

Act V: Enter Lady Clinton, sleepwalking with a taper, unhinged. After all these tactics fail, there is a final meltdown, in which a schizophrenic collage of all these themes is yawped ever louder. First there is the incongruent juxtaposition of conciliation and attack—she is “honored” to be on the same stage as Obama and yet his campaign is about “change you can xerox.”

Then there is a reversion to self-pity and martyrdom—the “hits” she’s taken are nothing to the travails of ordinary people, and by implication to the hits that they will take if she is not elected president. Obama’s campaign uses “tactics that are right out of Karl Rove’s playbook.” The scolding reaches a shrill crescendo: “shame on you Barack Obama.”

Finally, the condescension to Obama supporters over their delusion becomes anger and outright mockery: “let’s have a real campaign; enough with the speeches and big rallies”; “maybe I’ve just lived a little long … you are not just going to wave a magic wand … I could stand up here and say, let’s get everybody together, let’s get unified; the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing. And everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect.”

Narrative and Meta-Narrative, Style and Character

The narrative arc of the Clinton campaign has oscillated wildly in its tone and message—between outright attack, passive aggression, martyrdom, and conciliation. Its one consistency is a focus not on narrative but on meta-narrative: there is no case to be made concerning Clinton, because that should be obvious. Rather, her campaign has centered on her own bafflement over the success of Obama—her shock that the prodigal son has been favored over her cautious conformism; that that words have trumped deeds.

The most visible sign of that bafflement is her campaign’s attempt to offset her robotic personality by doing what they think it is Obama does. If Obama is inspiring, they seem to reason, then Clinton must project energy and optimism. The form of this projection is a perpetually raised voice and a smile that seems never to leave her face regardless of the situation. Where she is making promises to voters, she crescendos into troches of emphasis: “let’s make college affordable for EVERY! … YOUNG! … PERSON! … AGAIN!”

Meanwhile she seems to fail to take note that Obama is not always smiling, that he rarely raises his voice. In fact, he is often subdued and calm. Inducing excitement does not always mean getting excited. In debates and press-conferences Obama seems to stumble a little too thoughtfully over his words. These qualities might be a serious weakness in a political culture that demands caution and slickness, prepared speeches and canned lines, ahead of rhetorical engagement with an audience. Hence Obama’s appeal, far from affirming the conventional political wisdom, contradicts it: authenticity is supposed to sink a campaign, and for a politician a gaffe means telling the truth about something.

The Clinton campaign has tried, in its attempt to have it both ways, to integrate some of Obama’s narrative of hope into their meta-narrative of deflation, ignoring the hobbling internal contradiction they have introduced into their own story. Here’s a strained paean to dreams that devolves into dreary reality: “Dreaming keeps us hopeful, it lifts our spirits, it sets our sights high. Without dreams you can’t aspire to be great but without action, we cannot turn those dreams into reality.”

What these attempts at integration ignore is that Obama’s inspiration is more about showing than telling, as well as engaging the electorate in his project: the future is framed in terms of what “we” will do, not how he will minister to his constituency (and this “we will” is a frequent refrain in speeches). Obama emphasizes the difficulties ahead, the magnitude of the challenge: “even after we win the general election, it’s going to be hard to bring about change.” And he makes demands of his supporters: “students, you’re going to have to do something in return.” The “hope” here has little to do with consequence and more to do with process; not with promises to be delivered, but a project demanding collective engagement. So when the Clinton campaign attacks “hope” as if constituted the substance of Obama’s speech, they are directing their energies towards an ineffable and frustratingly elusive target. The inspirational element of Obama’s campaign is about form, not content. And the unifying element here is about the nobility of shared struggle: its fundamental premise, ironically, really is “work.” But for the concept of “work” to work, it must be more about showing than telling, and more about the audience than the candidate. When Clinton talks about “work,” she means a top-down, condescending provision to her subjects.

So the styles of these speeches have psychological implications, clues about character. We can remind ourselves here that Aristotle lays out three methods of persuasion: reasons, emotions, and character. We know that con-man can provide us easily with the first two, but only the real experts can pull off the appearance of the last. The fact that Obama’s and Clinton’s policies are largely the same heightens the importance of the character criterion. Voters are looking not just to a record or emotional appeals, but to clues to the authenticity of a candidate.

Rhetorical Force and Actual Peace

While the appeal to minds and deeds over hearts and words is a strategic blunder, today it is a tempting strategy. Rhetoric as a noble pursuit—and its place education—did not fare well after the enlightenment. Scientifically minded philosophers such as Bacon and Hobbes pitted clarity and simplicity of language against more traditional stylistic flourish. A Liberal Arts education had become closely connected to Catholicism, and so shared its setbacks after the protestant reformation and French revolution. For obvious reasons, Puritans were especially keen on minimalism of every sort. Add to this the primacy of the deed to the American pioneer, and you have a society in which any appeal to action ought to resonate: as a politician, your ace-in-the-hole is always an appeal to American misology, pragmatism, and work-ethic.

We know that there are broad consequences to such values when coupled with power. We see one consequence in American policy, and its, intermittent isolationism and machophilia. We see another in the tone of American public discourse, which is rhetorically inept and hard-selling. Misology and love of war have reached a peak with the Bush administration’s disdain for diplomacy and compromise, its use of torture and rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and many other illegal and anti-constitutional measures.

Nominalism begets nihilism. It is because we are concerned with the “real world” to the exclusion of inner life that we can leave our principles and humanity behind. We ought to remember that an attack on “words” has serious implications if we take “word” in its larger sense (as in Ancient Greek logos): the persuasion of an electorate, diplomacy with an enemy, public discourse, legal proceedings, due process, constitutional provisions, and so on.

The use of words in these examples is supposed to provide some structure to an otherwise violent and chaotic world. They’re meant to be a middle ground between idea and action, defenselessness and violence, contemplative detachment and brutish immediacy. That rhetoric can be used for ill does not imply that it is always “empty.” As potentiality, as a middle ground between thought and deed, rhetoric is a receptacle for retaining and storing power instead of discharging it upon every impulse. As we have seen, the alternative to persuasion, in the world of political action, is force.

That is fine with those who embrace Machiavellian realpolitik—of late, our neoconservatives. The world is a tough, scary place, we are told, and only force will do. Words are for the weak. There is a relevant similarity between the Clinton campaign’s implication that Obama isn’t tough and cynical enough—whether for the campaign or the presidency—and the idea that Constitutional principles are too fragile for the real world, the world full of threats and enemies. Early in the campaign there were suggestions that Obama’s nuanced responses could easily be exploited in a national campaign—that the lifting of the level of intelligence in politics was positively dangerous. The same might be said of diplomacy.

I am reminded of the long literary and philosophical tradition that ruminates on the question of the experience versus innocence. At its best, it defies the conventional wisdom that cynicism and paranoia is superior to openness. Plato’s Socrates advances the idea that being the victim of injustice—and harm—is better than being the perpetrator, because of the internal deformity of character surrounding the latter role. The events of the last seven years show that we can say the same for a nation: if terrorism has a method, it is certainly not the direct destruction of lives infrastructure, but rather the induction of institutional self-destruction from within. Cynicism and toughness may not be so durable after all. Realpolitik can be self-immolating. This may sound like a dangerous form of pacifism (today “anti-war” is practically an epithet). But one need not be opposed to defense—psychological and national—to take a realistic measure of its costs, in order to use it wisely—and in the case of war, very rarely.

The Roman orator Quintillian noted that where rhetoric is in decline, a society has opened up a perilous gap between word and deed, emotion and thought, the academic and the practical. The lame and passive jargon of our academics, bureaucrats, and politicians is testimony to this division. These are the “irrelevancies” that Twain rails against—irrelevant because to stray from the point is to conceal the fact that even when they aim at the truth, words are motivated by feelings. So is the electorate. The non-pejorative sense of rhetoric is important because it is not just about inducing admiration and hope, but about preserving the dialectical component of speeches—the sense in which persuasion is a public dialogue with an audience, and not just a monologue of reasons. That dialogue is important not just to fostering national cooperation, but to a genuine and peaceable engagement with the “real” world. That is how people are moved, and that is how things get done.