Oratorical Animal

The Wise Woman

In 1968, Lyndon Johnson called on Clark Clifford, Truman confidante, Democratic Party fixer, and all-around wise man, to take the reins of the Pentagon. Clifford soon became convinced that the Vietnam War was lost and persuaded Johnson to begin the end. Had Hubert Humphrey squeezed out a few more votes, it's likely that Clifford would have stayed in the job and helped to end the war long before January of 1973.

Clifford was a charter member of the postwar Democratic party foreign policy establishment and, as his generation left the scene, many thought the Establishment itself was gone. I thought of Clifford--and Averill Harriman, John McCone, Dean Acheson and the other "wise men"--when I read this piece on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. There are several intriguing items.

First, note that not a single member of her campaign inner circle made it to the State Department. They were generally incompetent. They were also slimy. They are gone. Yes, she does learn.

Second, the article hints at the multiplier effect, but doesn't draw it out. Rodham Clinton possesses star power. This multiplies the Administration's effectiveness. She isn't a Warren Christopher. She deploys "smart power" of her own, not simply derived power from the president. Together, they have more than they would separately.

Third, there is no daylight between the two principals. Or anyone else. Unlike poor Secretary Powell, who needed constantly to check his back for Cheney's knife, Obama and Clinton work together.

Finally, this is her role. She is not a politician; she is not her husband; she is exceptionally unlikely to be president. She is a wise woman, one who possesses an extraordinary understanding of American foreign and domestic policy and an ability to work well in offices, corridors and nonvoting publics to advance good policies. She is in the mold of John Hay, Henry Stimson, Harry Hopkins, Averill Harriman, or, yes, Clark Clifford. 

The fact that she is who she is and serves where she is serving at this point in our history is a very good thing for the country.  

Attention Span Alert

President Obama's Cairo speech sparked a number of interesting reactions, but Steve Benen notes this oddity from Richard Cohen--he denounced the president for failing to denounce anti-Semitism. But Obama did--in pretty unequivocal language. Cohen could not have misunderstood those words, so he must have missed that section. Similarly, I noticed that some commentators claimed Obama did not extoll democracy--he did. At some length.

He spoke at even greater length yesterday. On the NBC Evening News, Brian Williams twice labeled it the president's "longest" speech, the NYT qualified that by saying it was one of his longest speeches, the Huffington Post noted that it was lengthy and so on and so forth. It was roughly 50 minutes long. It was a length of a typical MWF college class. But the media commentary pretty much implied that the experience made them feel as if they had joined Lance Armstrong on the Tour de France.

So, what do these two paragraphs suggest? This president assumes that journalists possess an attention span as long as college students. Looks like he blew that call. 

One of These Things Does Not Cause The Other

I like Rachel Maddow. But this segment on last night's broadcast didn't show her at her best. Similarly, I've often linked to Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly. But this post doesn't impress me much, either. Sadly, they're not alone.

In the last few days, a disturbingly large number of my fellow liberals have muttered about "hate speech" and "incitements to violence" and "books read by shooters." Benen puts it this way, "After Jim David Adkisson started shooting people at a Unitarian church last fall, police found books from Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly at the killer's home. We don't usually hear about lunatic killers who have Paul Krugman or Bill Moyers best-sellers on their coffee tables."

Five words, people: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this, otherwise known as the sequential fallacy. If X precedes Y, that does not mean X caused Y. James von Brunn did not believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. That did not lead him to murder, Rachel, any more than it might lead the other people you rather freely associated with that killer to take up arms. As odious as the books of Michael Savage are, they do not necessarily lead to shootings at a Unitarian Church, Steve. Oh, both always toss in the obligatory caveat, as do the others. But the point they're making is pretty clear.

Moreover, there's also the guilt by association problem slithering through this discourse. Bill O'Reilly is an ass****. He is not a murderer nor is he responsible for murderers. George McGovern (not to mention Barack Obama) was not a Weatherman nor was he responsible for them nor were "liberals" responsible for Susan Smith's murder of her children, Newt. To paraphrase JFK, for while this week it may be a Sean Hannity against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other weeks it has been, and may someday be again, a Keith Olbermann.

Look, the oratorical animal believes words matter, but not in the cause-effect ways that are starting to pop up all over the liberal blogosphere. It's wrong to make these sorts of assertions. There is so much wrong with contemporary conservative arguments (Tax cuts create revenue! Spending cuts boost the economy! Gays and lesbians are by definition immoral!) that we don't need to run around making stuff up. Let's continue to be better than that, 'kay?

The President's Mind; or How to Persuade Barack Obama

Yesterday's New York Times ran a front page story on health care costs that told us more about our president than it did about the topic. "President Obama," correspondent Robert Pear began, "recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country's most expensive place for health care."

Turns out Obama didn't stop there. Everyone at the White House decided they had to read the article; Obama cited it in a meeting with two dozen Democratic senators; one of them, Ron Wyden (an expert on health care) claimed Obama "came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically."

My sweetie happily shouted across the table at breakfast, "That's the New Yorker article I was telling you about! You need to read it." Not surprisingly, it's now the most popular essay on the site. It's an interesting piece, but, for now, I want to set aside its topic. This essay clearly persuaded the president to listen. So, what rhetorical strategies characterize this piece? What persuades Barack Obama? Of course, we can't know for sure, but here are several non-mutually exclusive options.

First, the essay uses a residues structure. This is a bit of an old-fashioned term I use to refer to a form of inductive structure that follows the advice of Sherlock Holmes: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?" Atul Gawande, the author (a physician, writer, and professor--the sort of insider/outsider source Obama likely respects) wants to find out why McAllen Texas has the highest health care costs in the nation. He considers and eliminates a series of options before reaching the conclusion that we possess a system that pays doctors as individuals for the quantity of their work. So, at least some individual docs will order as many tests as they can to make as much money as they can and, if that becomes the norm in an area, that area will be far more expensive than other areas. Hence, McAllen, Texas.

An inductive structure engages the reader by heightening suspense (that's why mystery novelists use it) and inducing participation. You work with the author as the two of you consider possible answers. Are people in McAllen less healthy than other Americans? Is that the reason? No. It also closely resembles the empirical method of modernity; rather than beginning with a conclusion and discerning reasons for it, one looks at a series of cases to discover the pattern. Now the orator usually knows where s/he is going from the get-go, but the inductive structure recreates, streamlines, and makes formally appealing the discovery process, like the way a true crime novel recreates reality. Finally, it tends to work better than other options with a reluctant or hostile audience that may not be willing to consider the improbable at the start, but realizes it's the only option at the end. 

Our president does not like didactic orators. No, he does not. He likes to think through problems, he wishes to participate in the process, he wants to be engaged, and if you want to engage him, you better include him. Through induction.

Second, Gawande lionizes information and education. He goes to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN (the most rational people in the world live in MN, or so I've been told. Sadly, their Senate election seems to prove otherwise.). Mayo created a system in which 1) all monies are pooled and everyone receives a salary, so no one has a "commission incentive" for ordering tests; 2) patient welfare, and not profit, is the institutional goal and; 3) teamwork is the means to achieve that end. Everyone meets regularly and passes along information to each other. No lone wolf docs.

In a larger sense, that model infuses the piece. The essay is an enactment of it. If everyone knows how the larger system works, and what the best practices are, then everyone will behave better and put those practices to work. Sure, there are docs abusing the system for pay, but that's not because they're nasty, evil, money-grubbing vultures. It's because the current health insurance system rewards them for it and because the occasional bad apple establishes a precedent (a bad person becomes, he notes, the equivalent of an "anchor tenant" in a mall). People are generally good and they will reform, if you provide them with the information and education they deserve. Like this article.

Our president is a John Dewey liberal. Perhaps it's no accident that Dewey worked at the University of Chicago; how long does an ethos linger at a place? This essay is filled with the markers of pragmatic reason: cases, options, analysis, statistical evidence, "reality-based" argument. It reflects both a faith in empirical reason and in human nature. It is, in fact, the sort of thing that John Kennedy would have loved.  

Yet Obama has updated it. Austin Goolsbee is a key advisor, from a school of thought variously labeled social economics, behavioral economics, or, from the book, Freakonomics. These economists have discovered, gasp, that social factors often affect economic choices. People operate by rules of thumb rather than strict logic. So, if one bad doc takes hold in an area, his practices will grow, etc. It's a bit like the famous qwerty effect. If we create new, postive qwerties, we can recreate a better health care system.

Again, however, the rhetorical appeal of Freakonomics rests in the new, the unusual, the refusal to take reality as a given, but rather to dig beneath the surface for the "real reason," much like an inductive structure leads you to the however improbable. Our president likes the novel explanation that is somehow rooted in the quotidian.

Finally, there's the love of analogy. Analogies, theorists tell us, connect the unfamiliar to the familar, thereby clarifying the unknown or persuading us to adopt it. Some go so far as to argue we think by comparison, constantly collating old situations so as to compare them to the new. Analogies put forth a scheme of interpretation--here's how you should think about this. So, if this situation is like that other one, that's how you should treat it.

This essay has two big analogies. As I mentioned earlier, bad practice or a bad doc is thought of like an anchor tenant in a mall. Anchors play a major role in determining community norms. This is, of course, an analogy within an analogy. Gawande also has an extended analogy: "Providing health care is like building a house." In each case, the analogy becomes a scheme of interpretation, a new or novel way to look at a situation.

I suspect those who are persuaded by analogies love connections; they like to see how one thing resembles another and how the world itself is a series of interconnected forces. That, I also suspect, describes our president.

So, he's a liberal in the tradition of John Dewey, one who thinks information and education matters enormously, one who believes that a presdient should discover reality before seeking to change it, one who is comfortable with complexity, who likes connections, who wants to think along with you, who is likely impatient with an argument that doesn't include him. He also thinks people are reasonable, but not in the classic logical sense--they use rules of thumb, community norms affect them, stuff happens. Yet they will change if one can craft reasonable explanations. And he likes the striking, the new, the unusual, the sharper explanation. 

So, the moral? Sometimes, it's helpful to examine not what a president does, but how he learns.   

Prosecuting Terrorists

Now that the Obama Administration has started to transfer some suspected terrorists to the United States, Republicans have begun to go bonkers. Steve Benen surveys the latest nonsense put forward by Representative Eric Cantor (He's the great hope of Republicans? Really?). But that's not quite what I wanted to examine.

Benen links to a Justice Department report on terrorism prosecutions and that's what's impressive. I know they're probably tooting their own horn, but for about the last twenty years, amidst the political clamor of two different Administrations, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has quietly gone about its business, ignored the politics, obeyed the Constitution, and put away bad guys. Lots of them.

Kudos. We complain about the government a lot. But between these guys and Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, I sleep better at night. Thanks, guys.

A New Beginning: President Obama at Cairo University

President Obama's speech at Cairo University is a nice example of the recurrent nature of presidential public address. Faced with the rhetorical task of generating trust after decades of anger, the president consciously or unconsciously turned to an appropriate model: John F. Kennedy's June 10, 1963 American University Address.

Both presidents addressed distrustful foreign audiences: The Soviet Union and the Muslim world. Both spoke with a careful eye to their right political flank. Both found it useful to venture to universities to make their speeches. Both spoke after sobering, even frightening events: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Iraq War (or 9/11). Most important, both sought to reconstitute relationships in ways conducive to American principles and interests. Here are four common strategies.

First, like Kennedy, Obama emphasized the time and place. Al-Azhar, he noted "has stood as a beacon of learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress." Those values, tradition and progress, infused the sort of relationship he wished to cultivate between the United States and Muslims around the world. Yes, he acknowledged "We meet at a time of tension" but, he said, the "cycle of suspicion and discord must end." Like Kennedy arguing that American U was a place that revered the truth, so, too did Obama say that this was the time and place "to speak the truth as best I can." So, the two presidents defined the time and place as the best moments to break old cycles and speak the truth. Their goals were embodied in the time and space. For the nonacademics among you, rest assured that universities always live up to these stereotypes. Yep, truth and learning r us. 

Second, each emphasized the fact that it is a small world after all (awful earworm alert!). To put it another way, each defined the stakes. After recounting the dangers we faced, Kennedy asked us not to be blind to our differences but to pay attention also to our common interests and urged us to "help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." My favorite Kennedy lines.

Obama did not meet that high rhetorical standard, but he nicely noted interdependence in a parallel structure: "For we have learned that when a financial system weakens in one country, prosperity is hurt everywhere. When a new flu infects one human being, all are at risk. When one nation pursues a nuclear weapon, the risk of nuclear attack [and Obama can pronounce "nuclear"] rises for all nations. . . .[several more parallel examples] That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings."

Third, each emphasized the rational and analytical; their strategies included division and dissociation, as well as the deployment of "rational" god or positive terms. Both wanted people to think clearly and logically, not emotionally and associatively. So, both numbered big sections of their speeches, both emphasized the limits of speech itself, both amplified the complexity of the questions at issue, both exalted learning and progress. Most important, both warned against irrational stereotypes carried by both sides. Obama decried "negative stereotypes of Islam" and considered it his presidential duty to combat them. But he also said "Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire." Similarly, Kennedy asked us to "reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union." He quoted a textbook to reveal their stereotypes of us, but then warned us not to repeat that fault: "not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side." After all, as JFK said earlier in the address, "I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men."

Finally, each saw American principles and interests as entangled in traditionally liberal values. This is both an idealistic and realistic stance. On one level, both call for tolerance and freedom. On another, both seem implicitly to understand that, if all accept these principles, America will be the better off. We're very good at liberalism, but we also believe that the rest of the world would benefit from it. Kennedy cannily understood that, if both the US and the USSR engaged in a peaceful competition--which system worked best for its people?--the US would (and did) win.

Similarly, Obama embedded liberal principles as universal principles: "I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles--principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings." The peaceful coexistence of Muslims and America, from this perspective, would look much like the peaceful existence of Muslims in America: "The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores--that includes nearly seven million Muslims in our country today who enjoy incomes and education that are higher than average." Right Makes Might in the Kennedy lexicon as well--our principles are good for our interests and your interests as well. That tends to be the liberal argument for human rights and economic development. That's been particularly true of late for women's rights, which Obama hits hard in this speech.

So, this has been long enough. But when presidents want a "new beginning," they pick a symbolic time and place, emphasize the interdependence of supposed adversaries, amplify the rationality of political actors, and complement rationality with the rest of the liberal canon: progress, tolerance, natural rights, peaceful competition/cooperation, and reasonable, calm, reflective self-interest. Because self-interest, as selfish as it sometimes seems, makes for a more peaceful world than crusades.

Obama and Public Address

Later on, I'll post a substantive reaction to the president's speech today, but I wanted to make one quick point to my professional colleagues. Most commentators breathlessly anticipated this speech. The NYT now has five articles up on its home page concerning the speech, including reactions from lots of folks. Virtually every blog has written about it. Andrew Sullivan appears to be posting on the speech every 40 seconds or so. All this--for a speech.

If we can't get our students enrolled in public address courses during this presidency, then it's pretty much time to find another line of work. Seriously.

Image, History, and Collective Memory

On June 2, 1967, student, husband, and nearly father Benno Ohnesorg joined a protest in West Berlin and was shot in the back of his head for his civic trouble. He died. The policeman, Karl-Heinz Kurras, claimed he had been threatened by knife wielding protestors, which did not quite explain why he shot Mr. Ohnesorg in, again, the back of the head. It was enough to win Kurras acquittal at his trial. The exoneration drove many to despair; Gudrun Ensslin, for instance, announced, "The fascist state wants to kill us all" and went on to become head of the Red Army terrorist faction. She died in prison in 1997. Another terrorist group, the Second of June, obviously took inspiration from the killing.

The murder was photographed and the pictures, dare I say it, became iconic in German history. You can see one version here and numerous others here. To the 21st century American eye, they bear a striking resemblance to the most famous images of Robert Kennedy's assassination and the Kent State massacre. I do not mean to trespass on the ground of First Efforts or BagNewsNotes or No Caption Needed, but it's pretty easy to see why this image had such terrible power. Pretty easy to see that soldiers are gunning us down.

Only they weren't. It was not an agent of the fascist state that shot Ohnesorg. It was an East German spy. Historians have found 17 volumes in Stasi files detailing Mr. Kurras's career. There's no evidence Stasi ordered him to shoot the student, but he could have shot the boy thinking it would be helpful to his primary employer and, indeed, the East Germans were pleased. Kurras, still alive, is not talking.

The NYT article on the killing noted the verdict of Germany's collective history: It was the "shot that changed the republic.'" The left protest movements that emerged from this moment, although long in gestation, changed the conservative, postwar regime into a social democratic republic. It would be as if we learned that Sam Adams colluded with the British to open fire on Lexington Green so that the war might start or that the Democratic National Committee somehow inveigled the National Guard to open fire at Kent State in order to discredit Nixon.

I have no real answers here, but the story has intrigued my professional self for two reasons.

First, it causes me to think about the relationship between image and word. Do we now view this image differently? What does it say to us? During innumerable comprehensive exam meetings at my old employer, I heard one colleague repeatedly assert that meaning was meaningless, that only the "force" of an image mattered, and that images stood purely alone, absent any words, in conveying that force. This story makes such a perspective problematic to me. It changes as the words around it change.

Second, it also causes me to think carefully about collective memory. As rhetoricians, we tend to exalt the notion that collective memory is a purely discursive action; people make of the past what they want. That suits us because it puts rhetoric in the foreground. Yet history corrects collective memory on occasion, and this appears to be one of those moments. How does this story and picture help us to think about those issues?

I can't quite explain why the story intrigues me, but it does. The legendary moment that inspired the German left to rally against a fascist murder and a right political order was, in fact, the moment that an evil Communist spy shot a peaceful community activist. Wrap your head around those two polemical renderings. 

Try Again, Mr. President

This was the president's statement on the murder of Dr. George Tiller:

I am shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning.  However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.

Thank you for playing, Mr. President, but that really sucked. Let's try again, shall we?

I am shocked and outraged by the cowardly murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church this morning. This was an act of terrorism. I intend to commit the full resources of the federal government to the investigation of the suspect and his associates--those who may have harbored or assisted him as he planned and carried out this attack. The Department of Justice will provide any and all assistance asked of it by local prosecutors. 

This administration commits itself, here and now, to the defense of those constitutional rights now under violent assault. As I have said many times before, this is a nation of laws. Terrorists, whether foreign or domestic, will face justice under the law.

Not perfect. But one helluva lot better than a mealy-mouthed statement that pretends profound differences over difficult issues matter at all in this context. Tiller was murdered. He was murdered by terrorists who wish to intimidate other doctors. If necessary, these cowards will murder those other doctors as well, or so they say--or so Randall Terry pretty much said. This isn't an issue of "profound differences," Mr. President. It's a matter of murder. Obama needed to 1) Define this as murder; 2) Remove any hint offered by Randall Terry, Megan McArdle, and others that any shred of legitimacy attaches to this murder; 3) Make crystal clear that profound differences do not justify murder; 4) Indicate the actions his administration intends to take to fight these terrorists. He accomplished only the first goal.

Between the Notre Dame speech, a SCOTUS nominee with no obvious or clear commitment to a privacy right with all that entails, and this statement, President Obama is busily proving true what candidate Clinton said about his indifference to women's rights last year. Time to step up, sir. Or I'll sure feel like an idiot.