Oratorical Animal

Size Matters

The Republican presidential field surpasseth all reason. Not, let me hasten to say, in ideology or reason. In size. There are likely to be 15-20 "mainstream," loosely speaking, candidates by the time the serious campaign kicks in next fall. This is unprecedented in the modern primary era--or, perhaps, in any era. This has happened for several reasons. First, the growth of the conservative infrastructure has achieved such heights that running for office is a good career move, regardless of one's chances. Why not run? You could end up with a plum post at the Heritage Foundation or a nice talk show on Fox. The left simply does not offer such opportunities, which is why Secretary Clinton does not face a horde of eager "personalities" in the Democratic primaries. Second, in this new campaign finance era, all that's required to be plausible and make a real run, is one lousy billionaire. That's what Newt Gingrich did last time and Marco Rubio's life has but one sponsor. One billionaire. How hard can that be? Third, there is no one who is next in line. The Republicans always like to nominate a familiar guy (H.W., Dole, Bush, McCain, Romney) and, for the first time really since 1964, there is no next in line (Nixon did not run again, opening the door for Goldwater). That's over half a century for those counting. So, what will this mean? In no particular order:

1) The Republicans won't know how to manage this or be good at it. Nobody could, and particularly not a party so fond of precedent. There are traditional written and unwritten maxims for sorting candidates. Some still work but many don't. In the era of the interwebs and billionaires, fundraising simply isn't much of a measuring stick anymore. Most of these guys will find a way to ante up. Media attention will be a good indicator, too, but Tea Party conservatives hate the lamestream media so too much NYT attention might signal a particular candidate is one of "them." Poll standing matters but lots of early money, from that one lousy billionaire, could buy a temporary bump. It's a mess. Previous name will matter and help Jeb enormously, but he's not really next in line, despite his name. Too long since he last ran for Governor, too long (over a decade) since any Bush ran, and too much brother baggage.

2) How in Reagan's name will debates work? 17 of them on stage? It's insane. I suspect the RNC wants to get rid of this troublesome platform for charismatic crazy people (I'm looking at you, Ben Carson) so they'll cut way down (and already have) on debates for one thing. For another, they may have to consider poll or support cutoffs in the early debates, which would be unprecedented and, in past years, would have eliminated some eventual Democratic nominees. And do you use national or state polls? Do you limit a debate to a single topic in hopes of giving people more time? I think they may well end up, helter skelter, having a series of partial 10-12 person debates with a rotating cast. Kinda like American Horror Show.

3) Is there even enough time on Iowa or Boston tv stations for all these people to buy it? Srsly. How much time are they going to want to purchase? 

4) The traditional R strategy is to cut right in the primaries, then drive back to the center in the general election. The sheer size of the field may both help and hurt that effort. I'm honestly not sure how it will work out. On the one hand, unspoken agreements about where you'll debate and where I'll debate may end up sorting the field into "crazy" debates and "sane" debates, limiting the times when Jeb Bush is seen vigorously nodding his agreement with Ben Carson. Plus, the field will be such a mess that many, most, Americans may simply choose to ignore the whole thing until the winnowing is over, until they're only really paying attention, say, to Bush, Rubio, Walker, and a token extremist, maybe Cruz or Paul. That might make it easier to move back to the center.

On the other hand, a very small amount of votes--Ben Carson led a recent poll--could make a "winner" of someone or make a huge difference, so even the mainstream candidates may have to cater to some pretty petty interest groups. And, of course, everything and every step is recorded by someone, somewhere, somehow now, so any pandering will be caught and endlessly available. For instance, Walker is clearly not a bright guy and I'm guessing he'll really mess up somewhere or another.

5) The primaries will be covered by online entrepreneurs and the conservative infrastructure. The mainstream folks--the networks, the cable news networks, the NYT, Washington Post, etc.,--simply do not have the resources. NBC has recently had 1 correspondent covering the Rs--Kelly O'Donnell. What are they going to do, clone her? Their inability truly to cover and report this massive race means that the coverage will turn on ever more shallow, eyeball catching incidents--witness the Iraq kerfluffle of the past week. Not that it, in particular, is shallow, but it's the result of a gaffe, in the classic sense, and that's all they'll really be able to cover. Which will add to the general impression that this is a clown car.

6) Finally, it's important to note that the flood of candidates does not generally reflect any ideological fragmentation. Nearly all agree on big tax cuts for the wealthy, big cuts in social programs, increases in defense spending, more trade agreements, more military rather than diplomatic solutions to foreign policy problems, a purer "Christian" nation, a denial of climate change, etc. There simply is not much disagreement at all. Which means, in this array of people, the race will turn ever more, one suspects, on blown out of proportion minor issues, perceptions of electability, and who would you like to have a beer with?

Again, no particular order here nor am I wedded to any of this. But it is an unprecedented issue.

The New Rhetorical Hillary Clinton

HRC delivered a major policy address yesterday on criminal justice reform. I liked the content; many of you will not. That's not what concerns me here. The speech surprises me because it demonstrates a better grasp of the formal requirements of a campaign oration than I ever saw her display in 2008. Is our Hillary learning? Yes. Let me count the ways.

1) A simple, straightforward harms, inherency, solution structure. Bad things are happening, they flow from a lack of trust, here are a couple of ideas that would both rebuild trust and make material change. Boom. When she spoke on the Bear Stearns collapse and the economy in 2008, I believe she offered a 78 part solution. I am barely exaggerating.

2) Parallel structure. She establishes the need to speak through anaphora--"yet again, the family.., yet again...yet again," reminding us of the killings now so hauntingly familiar, from Ferguson to Baltimore, over the past months. The structure links them, formally establishing these not as random occurrences, but as a pattern, implicitly creating the need for a policy response.

That is followed by another anaphora organized around, "There is something wrong.." Here, Clinton takes advantage of the complementary qualities of examples and statistics. Examples are psychologically powerful and, strung together as I note above, make a profound emotional impact. But a series of them suggest a pattern and Clinton's subsequent anaphora uses statistical evidence to prove the wide inherent disparities between black and white in the American criminal justice system.

The examples move her audience; the statistics convince her audience. America, we have a problem.

3) She sees the problem due to her personal commitment and life experiences. Campaign speeches are different from other addresses because ethos--character--does not support the persuasive claim (believe x because I am y) but is the thesis--Vote for me. HRC begins by identifying with the audience in this urban university (Columbia), praises former NYC Mayor David Dinkins (the occasion is for him), recounts her long history with him, happily notes the panel discussion that will follow, and moves into the body. She is of this issue. After that, she expresses her pain as a mother and a grandmother, notes that she first learned about these inequities "as a young attorney just out of law school" when she worked "for the Children's Defense Fund" and studied "the problem then of youth, teenagers, sometimes preteens, incarcerated in adult jails." She was then director of "the University of Arkansas School of Law's legal aid clinic [and] advocated on behalf of prison inmates and poor families." She sponsored legislation as a Senator. She's no Hillary come lately. She has lived this issue.

4) God terms. "growing bipartisan commonsense solutions." Who's going to hate those? "Smart strategies," "families," "best practices," on and on. 

5) Ritualistic disparagement of rhetoric: "Now of course it is not enough just to agree and give speeches about it--we actually have to work together to get the job done." The world will little note what she says here, but will long remember what they do together. She will get the job done.

6) Startling stats and analogies that people will remember--from a front page article in USA Today (yes, our Hil was doing her research, cares about the issue): "At a conference in 2013 at Johns Hopkins University, Vice Provost Jonathan Bagger pointed out that only six miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and Hollins Market. But there is a 20 year difference in the average life expectancy." Yowza. Great way to make disparities of all sorts concrete in one horrible analogy/statistic.

7) She nicely builds on but surpasses Obama's efforts. That's the relationship she wants to draw. So, she consistently says something like he's proposed money for, which is great, and we can expand that by...He has led the way by, and I hope to....The linking phrases are occasionally a bit obvious but they craft a useful relationship: She is the next natural step.

8) Nice close. Two more parallel structures, a quotation from Dinkins, the honoree, and a request to pray for Freddie Gray and all those hurt.

This is nothing like the defensive, massively overly detailed, policy wonk addresses I saw so often in 2008. This is a confident, clear campaign oration that establishes her as the person to address this issue. I don't want to speak too soon, but she finally may understand the genre that makes presidents. 

 

Way to Go, Senator Rubio

Marco Rubio's announcement address this week easily ranks as one of the most effective conservative speeches I've heard in a long time. Announcement addresses generally announce one's candidacy (duh), justify it both in terms of the needs of the times and the qualifications of the candidate, and forecast a shining future if only the American people will pull the appropriate voting lever. Rubio's address nicely accomplishes these tasks.

He chose a symbolic location for the event, Miami's Freedom Tower. It served as a processing facility for refugees from Castro's Cuba in the 1960s and it represented both Rubio's life history and the broader immigrant narrative. That story occupied the first part of the speech, as Rubio adopted a typical challenger's structure. He defined the nation as a land of opportunity, made that vision concrete (metonymy) in the story of his family, lamented the nation's current decline, and offered a bright path to a new American century. He justified his candidacy through his immigrant narrative; as Obama once did, Rubio claims to embody the nation's aspirations.

Two additional strategies marked the speech. He nicely contrasted the problems of the 21st century to the solutions of the 20th century, implicitly attack Hillary Clinton as old and outdated. The times demand a new approach. He did so, however, without making those claims explicit, which dispersed what could be the nastiness of such attacks. He nicely used narrative, showing a powerful facility for telling personal stories, and then linking those stories to broader national narratives. That ability characterized the campaign discourse of both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, two nice role models.

In addition, Rubio's stories offered a clear and succinct alternative to the current administration. It impedes opportunity; he offers it. It degrades education; he enhances it. It embodies elitism; he rejects it. He is, in nearly every possible sense, the anti-Romney.

Only one clanging note echoed throughout the speech and that was his neocon foreign policy. In all other areas, he sounded much like the legendary Reagan--eager, clear, affable, open, and inclusive. Clearly, he also tried to sound like the Cold War Reagan, accusing Democrats of appeasement and weakness. But it's a different era; Cuba is no USSR; he sounds belligerent and unpleasant, John McCain at his worst.

Of course, he'll face other problems as he goes, primary among them the ever present Republican need to tack right in the primaries and left in the general election. The ideological chasm between Republican primary voters and the general electorate has grown so large that this rhetorical task confounded both John McCain and Mitt Romney. Rubio's announcement indicates the potential to finesse that gap.  

Why the HRC Email "Scandal" Matters Very Little

Much to my dismay, much of the political discourse over the past week or so has concerned Hillary Clinton's email practices. Friends, pundits, and countrymen have advanced a series of reasons why this should or will matter to voters. I've found none of them particularly convincing.

One set of reasons revolves around the claim that her use of a personal server threatened national security, broke the law, violated regulations, or was simply a bad idea. It's pretty clear at this point that she violated no law or regulation with her email. In fact, by using a private account, she followed the practice of every SecState since the advent of email. John Kerry is the first to use a State account. Nor does it seem as if she threatened security in any way. So far as we know (and I'm guessing we would, to say the least) no one has hacked her account. Hackers apparently live in the State Department server. Finally, there's just the notion this is a bad idea. She agrees. If asked again, I suspect she'll repeat these words: "I followed precedent. I wish I hadn't and I know more now. I sure wouldn't do it again but, y'know, this stuff was new to me."

In addition, there is nowhere for this to go. She's turned over 55,000 pages. She's left out personal stuff and given examples of that stuff. The proportion of work to personal seems plausible. No one is pursuing any particular set of emails that might relate to any particular controversy that matters to anyone. For instance, when W. allowed former presidents to hide what they wanted basically forever, he was covering for Dad. We know from other sources that H.W. met with all the key players in the illegal Iran/Contra scheme and historians would very much like to know what he knew and when he knew it. There's a specific claim on our attention there. There is nothing like that with Clinton, unless you're a Benghazi conspiracy theorist (more on that later). No one can possibly get legal access to anything; there's no legal cause; there will be no next development; there's nowhere to go.

On a substantive level, there's no smoking gun, no evidence of bad faith, nothing, nada, zero.

On a process level, there are several issues.

First, some claim she's been slow or weak in her response, my friend Andy Heaton in particular. Maybe. But she didn't say, "I'll have to punt on that one." And it's early. If I made Andy give an Extemp speech today, he'd suck. If I gave him a couple of months, told him his career depended on it, then he'd do as well as ever, I suspect. She needs to get back in the flow and planning to run, thinking about running, etc. is not being in the flow. Responding to this is being in the flow. It'll come. I'm confident of that because....

Second, HRC has been the spouse or the candidate in elections in 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1990, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2006, and 2008. She's 9-2. In 08, she ran a very tough, strong campaign in which she (barely) lost to a once in a generation phenom. As an Obama supporter, I vividly remember the way she kept coming back, coming back, coming back. She's used the web as well as anyone but Obama and she has a much--much--better sense than he does of the ways one can use negative media attention to one's benefit--note the 2008 NH primary, for instance. I suspect she'll soon be turning this incident to her advantage. She can run a major campaign. And she's got the Obama web folks onboard.

Third, this sort of thing is already baked into the Clinton cake, as his philandering was. If you believe she somehow conspired something about Benghazi in some way to get something, that she murdered Vince Foster, that she's Lady MacBeth, etc., then you'll think the worst of this. So what. She's not going to reach you anyway. The polls haven't moved on her, so far as I've seen. They'll probably drop a bit after this, and then bound back up when she announces.

That leaves those who might support her and wonder whether this signals something bad or those who do support her and want to feel good about it. The former is a vanishingly small species. The country is so polarized politically that the true undecideds # is very small. But she does need to hold the Democratic presidential majority.

Again, it's early. I suspect over the next year, she'll nicely meld the Clinton/Obama agenda. She'll set forth a series of opportunity policies, from expansive child care to early education to strengthened Social Security to infrastructure to tax reform, etc. all designed to convince the massive middle that the Rs take away opportunity and she'll make opportunity. She'll argue that H.W. made a mess, and Bill cleaned it up. W made a mess and Obama cleaned it up. Now, you want to give Jeb a chance to make a mess? Srsly? This is our chance, the progressive chance, the American chance, to build a better nation, to build on accomplishments, to build on what is likely to be (God willing and the creek don't rise) 5-5.5% unemployment, cheap energy, no big wars, a low budget deficit, etc. and make something rather than waiting again to clean up a Bush mess. She'll claim we can make a future, we can make history with the first woman president and, as her 2008 electorate shows, she's got a better chance than Obama of cutting into R majorities among married white women and lower class white men.

Finally, of course, it's not a referendum on her, it's a contest between her and a Republican. By the start of 2016, we'll have a much better sense of that person's identity and then it'll be time to worry about HRC if events warrant that. So far, they haven't. This is simply catnip for the tiny minority who follow this stuff all of the time, not for people who will decide the election.