Oratorical Animal

Conventioneering

1. Five days at NCA is a nightmare. But five days did give us a chance to go see the USS Midway, which, let me JUST say, was way, way cool. There are times when I can become a twelve year old boy again. Wandering through an AIRCRAFT CARRIER for two hours with a self-guided audio tour and an additional human guided tour of the BRIDGE can do that. It really can. Wow. If you go back, go see it. 

2. I co-authored a paper with a former grad student and thus ended up as the only faculty member on a panel of grad students--to which a most distinguished faculty member responded. Then, I responded (at 8am) to a panel of grad students. The papers were not perfect, including my own. But I sure feel better about the future of the field. Nice people. Smart efforts. Intelligent conversation. These were not my own students (with attendant emotional attachments), but a nice cross section from around the country. Good, hard, professional work. It's nice to see. And I hope several of the students I chatted with this weekend, including those formally known as students of mine, will end up as students of mine! :)

3. Then, I presented some brief remarks on Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign with a distinguished roster that included really, really smart comments from Karlyn Campbell and Diane Hope. I like the fact that those who blazed my trail are still blazing my trail.

4. Don't eat shellfish at a convention. Not even in a port. Geez.

5. Why does a bar in the gaslight district of San Diego advertise itself as "THE place for Purdue football!" In San Diego?! Purdue? Football? Isn't that an oxymoron, anyway? At least, there wasn't a place for Indiana football. Or basketball for that matter.

6. San Diego was nice. But next year in Chicago will be better. Cause, well, it's Chicago. 'Nough said.

7. Putting all political talk aside for a moment, this was a bad convention motel. I didn't stay there. But the frolicking pastoral maidens paintings were reprehensible. The brag walls, with pictures of Manchester everywhere, were awful. The design was deeply confusing--I consulted my hotel map more than I have in years, perhaps since that terrible place in Atlanta. San Diego is a good convention city, one of my favorites. But why we couldn't be back at the Marriott was beyond me. 

7. One final thought. I respect those who created, participated in, and sustained the boycott. I'm not sure they made very good choices about tone and style; thus, it made very little impact on the convention. But I understand why they did it, although I did not agree.

Yet I also respect and salute the hard work of those who created this convention. I think they made a bad hotel choice for political and organizational reasons. But a great many people, from grad students doing their first papers to icons going to grad student panels on Sunday afternoon, from program planners donating their time and effort to respondents who read and wrote well, put a lot of work into this meeting. And as regular readers of this blog know, I appreciate good satire as much as the next person. But those who worked so hard on this last weekend don't deserve this. Like the blog, like the person, no ax to grind here. But someone ought to say out loud that it's just in bad taste and those who give a lot of effort to a flawed but necessary organization don't deserve this sort of ridicule. Jump in and change the place, people, if you don't like it. There's plenty of room to volunteer. Nominating committees are ALWAYS searching for volunteers. I know a certain public address division nominating committee chair would LOVE to see some help.

8. End on a happier note. Best thing about a five day NCA? Being greeted by your dogs when you come home.

Team of Rivals

Doris Kearns Goodwin has got to be thrilled beyond words. It's seldom that an author coins a title that enters the popular lexicon, but she's done it. Good for her. But as Barack Obama prepares to add Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, James Dobson, and Sean Hannity to his cabinet, let's pause and remember one salient fact. It's unlikely that the original team of rivals could have survived 24 hour cable news and the internet.

They fought constantly. Secretary of State Seward tried to take over the president's job (Hmmmm). Secretary of Treasury Chase moved against Lincoln and sought the 1864 "Union" party nomination. Secretary of War Stanton fought ferociously with both men. Lincoln once had to engineer a series of resignations, simply so that he could pocket them and keep everyone involved indebted to him. I'm trying to imagine what Andrew Sullivan, Matt Drudge, or even Keith Olbermann would do with these stories ("Mr. President, sir, you need to take control of your own Administration, sir!") Read the book; it's not a pleasant picture. No drama Obama, indeed.

So, as the President-elect thinks about this--and as everyone thinks about it--let's actually read the book. A weird idea, I know. And if Senator Clinton does receive the appointment to Foggy Bottom, we should expect disagreements and not be shocked--shocked--when they occur. That would be what a Team of Rivals does.

Go Away

This is the latest from Sarah Palin:

BLITZER: Does that mean you want to come up with a new Sarah Palin initiative that you want to release right now.

PALIN: Gah! Nothing specific right now. Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

Does she know what a sentence is? Here's another one, this time from Maureen Dowd's column today:

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

These words make little or no sense. I'm in the middle of the second big grading binge of the semester and none--none--of my undergraduates write or sound like Sarah Palin. She literally could not earn an undergraduate degree from Corn U., if these two instances are representative. From what I've seen of her current media barrage, they are.

So, the party of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, Richard Weaver, and even Lynn Cheney and Diane Ravitch thinks Sarah Palin is their Moses? Really. And they were perfectly willing to place her a 72 year old cancer survivor's heartbeat away from the presidency. Really.

If there's better evidence that the Republican Party is not now fit to govern (like the British Labor and U.S. Democratic Parties of the mid-eighties) and needs time in the wilderness, I don't know what that evidence could be--apart, of course, from the last eight years. But she makes Bush look like an intellectual giant. He is literate. Is she? Seriously. Is she?

Hmmmmm

President-elect Obama gives great press conference and the transition thus far seems to have gone swimmingly. Today, he meets with President Bush and, given Bush's determination to be gracious, I expect very little news from that meeting.

Yet let's note my first moment of, um, unease. That was a respectable group of economic advisors gathered around the president-elect last week. Very respectable. As this list shows, all had reason to feel comfortable in this setting. Not a single disreputable Nobel Prize winner among them. No other scruffy, contentious academic sorts, either, unless you count Robert Reich. And no labor leaders. A Democratic president-elect assembles a transition economic advisory board and fails to include a single labor leader. More interestingly, I've yet to see anyone else notice that fact.  

Given the troubles in the automobile industry, much less American manufacturing as a whole, I think one would have been nice. You're a Democrat, Mr. President-elect. 'Kay?

Yuck

Ralph Nader really said that. Really. I didn't know that when I briefly wrote about him yesterday. I loathed him then. But now? If he was on fire, I wouldn't, well, you probably know. Family blog here. Sort of. Except when I link to this. Which made me smile all over again yesterday. Yep, he had it. In spite of "people" like Ralph Nader.

Forgotten Deep Thought

I shouldn't have forgotten this one. There's already talk about the ways that this campaign changed all campaigns. It didn't. But one change will stick. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight changed the way press and pundits will cover the horse race; heck, he'll change the way that managers run campaigns. 

This isn't just because I spent far too much time at his site over the last two weeks. It is because he was right. He predicted that Obama would win 348.6 electoral votes. Obama won 349 as of today. He predicted that Obama would win 52.3% of the popular vote. Obama won 52.4%.

Silver transferred the sort of statistical modeling he developed to assess the future performances of baseball players to politics. Probabilities, history, polling, etc. went into it. I don't pretend to understand it. But I do know this: Polls alone won't ever be enough again. This guy will become indispensable and he'll have a thousand imitators. We'll be talking "win percentages" in the same way that we now talk "margin of error." He'll have the same kind of effect on campaign horse race coverage that this guy did.

Given that he teaches us good things (exit polls suck), I'm happy about his effect on deliberation. A bit worried, however, about the inevitable imitators. Ugh. But congratulations, Mr. Silver. It's always nice to see geek success.

Random Deep Election Thoughts

*More elephants doing backflips in the circus. For weeks, Republicans insisted that Barack Obama was a socialist. So, one would assume, yesterday was a victory for socialism? No. He was actually a conservative, they now insist, who is poised to lead a center-right country. Good God.

*It was fun teaching JFK's June 11, 1963 civil rights address today. Much fun.

*Best minor thing about this election? It demonstrated, once and for all, the irrelevance of Ralph Nader. The man who gave us George W. Bush can now sink into deserved obscurity. When I think of Nader, I feel like an old Confederate. I will neither forgive nor forget him or his supporters. Neither will history.

*The Republicans control no New England House seats. In fact, Republicans are an endangered species north of the Hudson and not much more popular north and east of Pittsburgh. Between that area, the West Coast, DC, and Illinois, the Democrats now have a pretty reliable electoral base of about 200 votes. That's impressive.

*Really don't like it when Obama alludes extensively to King's last speech, his famous mountaintop effort in Memphis. Don't like that at all. Bad luck, if nothing else.

*Watching Governor Rod select a Senator to fill Obama's position could well be worth the price of admission. With that guy, anything is possible. Literally. Anything. Meet Senator Rezco.

*Despite giving the majority of their votes to McCain, the South is happy today. Why? This campaign has given the country a good look at Alaska, home of people who shoot animals from planes, lead the nation in rape and domestic abuse per capita, elect Sarah Palin Governor, and elect the seven-time felon Ted Stevens to the Senate. Deliverance II: First Dude Up a Creek is coming to a theater near you. Heck, if your First Family throws a combined baby shower and weddin reception, you might be an Alaskan. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, the South can laugh at someone else at last.

*President Barack Obama. Just sort of rolls off the tongue. President Obama today rolled back the gag order. President Obama today announced an end to recent Bush Adminsitration regulations allowing Interior Department officials to accept cocaine and prostitutes from the oil industry. President Obama today forced former Vice-President Cheney to disclose his location. Vice President Joe Biden, God love 'im, announced his location. Repeatedly. President Obama today announced that each of the first ten amendments to the Constitution would now be enforced. President Obama.

Whew

It may be the head cold that's starting to dog me, but mostly what I feel this morning is relief. Relief that he won. Relief that my country found itself--again. Relief that my civic trust is not misplaced. Relief that relatively sane people will again take charge and try to do what's right for this nation. That may be the biggest thing. 

I'm not entirely delusional; things will not be perfect. But I am, yes, relieved that this era is over. That I can trust the man in the White House and the people in Washington with my public life. Up will not be down there anymore. Cities will not wash away through neglect. Wars will require deliberation. Torture will be illegal. The president of the United States will, in short, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. That is no small thing.  

Closing Time for Barack Obama

Sharon Crowley and Debbie Hawhee tell me that kairos "suggests an advantageous time." It's related, they note, to the Latin opportunitas, which is opportunity. Its root, interestingly, is port--which means opening and leads us to the shipshape term "portal." In short, we might think of kairos or rhetorical timing as an opportune moment, an opening or a window that gives the orator a chance to brave the flood of time and circumstance, to intervene and make words and world matter.

Or so Barack Obama seems to believe. He calls his current stump speech the "closing argument," which suggests his knowledge that the opening grows smaller with time; it is indeed running out. A casual glance at the first version of the text (Oct. 27, Canton Ohio) reveals a near-obsession with time. "One week" starts the speech and becomes a refrain emphasizing his urgency, the closing of his window. In one week, there's a "defining moment"; in one week, we "can turn the page"; in one week, "you can put an end to policies that would divide a nation." But he's not done with time. We "began this journey in the depths of winter nearly two years ago"; "we've come so far and so close"; "that's why we can't afford to slow down, sit back, or let up for one day, one minute, or one second in this last week. Not now. Not when so much is at stake." That's the first page. The later policy section is organized by "When it comes to..." Obama's rhetoric has always concerned time; in recent days, it's become the centerpiece of his discourse. Three notions of time dominate.

First, there is a cyclical view of time, one more apparent in some of his earlier discourse, such as the riff that gave rise to the famous "Yes, We Can" video. Obama subscribes to an old view of revolution, a notion that revolutions come round periodically, revolving to us again, circling around in time. There is a long arc of history, it seems, but it bends--repeatedly--toward justice. Obama speaks of the hope whispered from slave to abolitionist in his early speeches; in this one, he initially pulls in his rhetorical horns (perhaps because of the omnipresent video) and we get this instead: "I know these are difficult times in America. But we have faced difficult times before. The American story has never been about things coming easy--its been about rising to the moment when the moment was hard. It's about seeing the highest mountaintop ["I've been to the mountaintop..."] from the deepest of valleys ["yeah, though I walk through the valley of death.."]. It's about rejecting fear and division for unity of purpose. That's how we've overcome ["We have overcome"] war and depression. That's how we've won the great struggles for civil rights and women's rights and worker's rights."

If the Yes We Can version asserted inevitability for an electorate that doubted his chances and needed assurance, this version asserts agency; it's not easy, but we'll make it happen. Within this agency, however, is a heavenly promise. If King's been to the mountaintop, perhaps, just perhaps, we're living what he saw in that promised land. Not that Obama would say that aloud. But allusions are wonderful things. By the end of this speech, he preaches the old time religion: "Hope!...It's what led immigrants from distant lands to come to these shores against great odds and carve a new life for their families in America; what led those who couldn't vote to march and organize for freedom." So, this is the first view of time--time as cyclical, revolutions for justice assuredly coming around again, just as they did in 1787, 1862, 1933, 1954, and 1968.

Second, Obama seeks to make the time in his text the time in our world. If the change is to come round again, then the times as he defines them in his text need to become the times we experience. The revolution has come around again and he can prove it. He does this through establishment of his authority to define the times (and remember its generally presidents who get to do that in the US). He creates the authority in two ways. One is evidence--he says we face urgent problems and so we get "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. 760,000 workers have lost their jobs this year." Given the wrong track #'s in polls, we don't need much evidence. But Obama uses evidence both to establish the problem and to outline his plans.

He also uses multiple allusions to Americans past. It is a choir. Obama's choir of voices, its multiple harmonies, establish the young Senator's authority to speak for the nation. It's not just Barack Obama who defines the times. It's MLK, LBJ, and the 23rd Psalm, as I note above. It's Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter: "Understand, if we want to get through this crisis, we need to get beyond the old ideological debates and divides between left and right. We don't need bigger government or smaller government. We need better government--a more competent government." It's Eugene McCarthy: "It's about a new politics." It's Abraham Lincoln: "a politics that calls on our better angels instead of our worst instincts." It's John Kennedy: "one that reminds us of the obligations we have to ourselves and one another." It's Ronald Reagan: "Now, I don't believe that government can or should try to solve all our problems." It's Ron again: "That's what this election is about. This is the choice we face right now." Yep, this is a time for choosing.

That, in turn, is the third sense of time. If revolutions periodically come round, and this is the time for such a change, then we have to make it happen--now. Those past changes didn't pop into place; people worked and bled for them: "Don't think for a moment that power concedes. We have to work like our future depends on it in this last week because it does." This is Chaim Perelman's locus of the irreparable--a typical campaign argument. If we don't change now, we lose the chance: "If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run away from. You make a big election about small things [What great prose--the reversals are lovely]. Ohio, we are here to say 'Not this time.'" He continues, "It's time for something new. The question in this election is not 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' We know the answer to that. The real question is, 'Will this country be better off four years from now?'"

The question concerns the future, not the past. He asks the audience to choose their future and now  is the only moment they can choose--choose now or forever hold your peace: "In one week, we can come together as one nation, and one people, and once more choose our better history." A lovely phrase, that. Our better history. It's in the past, so it's guaranteed better because it's happened and we know it--but somehow we still choose it. As we have chosen it before. Seldom have contingency and necessity been so beautifully tied together in three words. They add up to the irreparable--take this moment to "change this country."

If John McCain's closing argument is all about status--be once again, one more time, that person you have been--then Barack Obama's closing argument is all about time. The time has come because we made it come so make it come again. We can make a better history. And our one week is just about up.

Flames! Flames Everywhere! Oh the Humanity!

So, the Animal fires up his birthday cake on the same day as Pat Buchanan and k.d. lang. There's an interesting combo at a party.