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Appalachian Man: He Is Hurting
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- June 15, 2008 – 1:03 pm
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See George.
George is our handyman. As the owners of a 1780 stone house in Virginia, my husband and I have seen George a lot in the past five years. This year, we have seen his already sorry lot in life change for the worse.
It hit a new low last week when Kevin, his new partner, decided to start his own painting and home repair company. He had replaced George’s brother-in-law, Billy, who had quit in November and taken the license plates of the reconditioned ice cream truck that they used to haul their ladders, painting equipment and tools. Petty and pity.
Billy quit at the same time as George’s wife, Amber, decided that she wanted to go it alone, taking their young son Carter. Amber, who is not a well woman, is just about holding onto her low-pay, no-benefits job. And Gayle, George’s unmarried daughter, has just had a baby boy and lost her job, which had some benefits. Last week, Gayle asked her father to pay her rent. Her partner, Jed, who works at a hardware chain store and a chain restaurant, can only pay for food, car fuel, and some of their baby’s bills. So George is now paying child support to his estranged wife, and helping out his grown child.
For now, George is living with a nephew, Mark, who he hopes will work with him. George can’t work alone, because his health is collapsing from a combination of heavy physical work in his present and past job in an auto body repair shop, and from Type 2 diabetes and lung disease. Over the last five years, George has gone from a burly man to barely a man, almost child-sized. Needless to say, he has no health insurance.
I know exactly what Sen. Jim Webb was talking about when he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” that “Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings. They both have a long history, and they both missed the boat when it came to all of the larger benefits that a lot of other people were able to receive,” the Virginia Democrat added: “There’s a saying in the Appalachian Mountains that they say to one another and it’s ‘if you’re poor and white, you’re out of sight.’ ”
George typifies these poor, working people–white and black–who fall out with each other but who need each other to survive. A nephew has a room, or couch, you can use for a while; a sister can pick you up and drive you to a job, or pick up a paintbrush, when your van, or partner, is out of sorts; and a high-school buddy can take your wife to the hospital, when she becomes ill at work, pick up your son from school, and watch him until you can get home.
So when the presidential candidates toss off references to the struggle of working-class people, they should see George in their minds’ eye. And when elected, the president should not toss these people into a desk drawer in the Oval Office.
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Alas, by Their Gaffes We Will Know Them
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- May 11, 2008 – 4:07 pm
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Just a month ago, the Washington press corps was still enthralled with this presidential election year. It was packed with firsts: For example, it is the first time since the 1952 election that neither an incumbent president nor an incumbent vice president is a candidate in the general election; the first time a woman is running for president; and the first credible African-American candidate is on the stump.
Now, the joy has gone out of the thing. Rather than covering great events, most reporters I know feel that they are on a kind of gaffe watch. Gaffes are important in presidential politics, and a single misstatement can change the odds dramatically. John McCain may yet rue that he seems to be confused by the Sunnis and the Shiites, and Iraq and Iran. Barack Obama must wish that he had never diagnosed the white working-class male as “bitter.”And Hillary Clinton, a lady with an eye for her place in history, must loathe the fact that she was the first to play the race card.
Because of the shallowness of this phase of the presidential race, trivia dominates.
Reporters hate, but they are also partly responsible for, the mid-election doldrums. They are sanctioned by tradition to question the company a candidate keeps, but they are not sanctioned to press that candidate on how he or she would staff their administration. So we know all we want to–and more–about their preachers, their spouses, their finances and their pastimes.
But to a much lesser extent, we know the policies that the candidates are predisposed to pursue. McCain, for example, favors a comprehensive health care system built around private insurance. Clinton leans towards a government-mandated system. And Obama, who has yet to clearly define his plan, seems to lean towards government mandates. But we do not know whether they could get their plans through Congress, or who would be the health care czar. In fact, we only have a hint of the direction in health care that the new president would like to go.
We really do not know how any of the candidates would pursue peace in the Middle East, or react to an increasingly bellicose Russia and an aggressive China. The candidates dare not tell us what they feel, for fear it will become a contentious part of the election.
The system demands that the candidates tell us what good people they are, not how they will govern. A soupcon of an idea, like suspending the gas tax, becomes a surrogate for a real energy policy.
Hundreds of very good reporters now feel frustrated. They feel they must write about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., when they know he will have no bearing on the way that a President Obama would govern. Likewise, they must dutifully cover Clinton riding in a pickup truck to prove her bona fides as a representative of the working class, when they know perfectly well that she has been riding in limos for decades and living the elite life, even if she is not an elitist.
Then there is McCain—the candidate that more reporters know personally than the other two–who is doing the Republican rounds, right hand extended, left hand clutching the talking points. The Straight Talk Express has become the Schmooze Local.
If reporters and commentators seem to want to show Clinton the door, it is no wonder. They do not dislike her personally, but they are desperate to get on with the main event. While they are on gaffe watch, they know that big issues are in abeyance, and that the Democratic contest has become a distraction and a bore.
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Obama and the Return of the Great Political Speech
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- March 24, 2008 – 11:56 am
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In this extraordinary political season, last week introduced a new dimension: a minute examination of one candidate’s rhetorical skills. Barack Obama was put under the microscope to see whether he could produce a transcendental speech that would nullify the excesses of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
That this should be is extraordinary in itself. We have heretofore judged politicians on their religious affiliation, but not on the utterances of a particular clergyman.
More, as a people, we have shied away from lofty rhetoric, favoring meat-and-potatoes speech. Our best orators have not played well with the electorate, although sometimes they have handed down memorable thoughts. William Jennings Bryan comes to mind as the preeminent orator of his day. We still remember his mesmerizing “Cross of Gold” speech, but we also remember him as being baited and brought down by Clarence Darrow in the “Scopes Monkey Trial.” Today, we adore the cascading cadences of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But his was a voice of protest, a cry of pain, not a solicitation for votes.
One of our best orators was Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who filled the Senate chamber with speech but changed no minds. In that, he was like Winston Churchill before World War II. According to Roy Jenkins’s detailed book on Churchill’s parliamentary life, members of the House of Commons revered Churchill’s eloquence but resisted his logic. Jenkins reports that when it was known that Churchill was to speak, the House would fill up with enthusiastic members who came for the show. But that was all they came for.
Rhetoric had its birth, and maybe its finest hours, in the ancient Greek democracy. The ability to argue brilliantly in public was revered as established as an art form. It continued, but was modified, in the Roman Forum. As the Roman state became more important than the individual, the nature of public oration changed: disputation surrendered to the triumphalism of Julius Caesar.
Through history there were great speakers from the thrones and the pulpits. But the growth of parliamentary democracy in England brought the art of public persuasion back to life, as it had been in Greece and Rome.
Initially, when British parliaments reflected only a small part of the population, debate was erudite with many references to the classics. As the franchise expanded in the 19th century, the language was modified to be more comprehensible to the public.
The House of Commons provided an arena, and rhetorical success there meant success in politics, witness H. H. Asquith, David Lloyd George, F.E. Smith, Charles Parnell, and Daniel O’Connell. The Liberal William Gladstone and the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli, the great rivals, went about it with scholarship and wit, enhanced by their personal antipathy to each other. Gladstone was the greatest orator (he could speak without notes for four hours), but Disraeli excelled at repartee—the quick thrust and the lethal turn-of-phrase were his weapons. So popular were Gladstone’s speeches that he had to employ shouters: men who stood just in earshot and repeated the great man’s words so that people could hear them.
Broadcasting has banished the thundering speech in favor of a more intimate conversation between politician and voter. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this and changed political speech from big, bold oratory to a crowd to intimate communication to individuals. He also understood the value of scarcity and addressed the nation infrequently, compared to today’s presidents who broadcast once a week to an inattentive nation. Ronald Reagan, always referred to as a great communicator not a great orator, followed the FDR example of delivering big ideas in soft, informal language.
Whether Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and president or not, he has raised the rhetorical stakes. He has melded something of the eloquence of the 19th century with the collegiate delivery of today. He has also raised expectations for his future speeches. People will expect them to be as well crafted and as nuanced as his Philadelphia speech. As a speaker, Obama will always be compared to himself—and that is a high standard.
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers