I watched three speeches last week, Elizabeth Warren’s, Bill
Clinton's, and of course Barack Obama. Of the three, I was surprised to find
Bill Clinton's speech the most compelling. I had anticipated that I would have
found Elizabeth Warren’s speech most interesting, her politics are closer to my
own than those of Clinton or Obama. Nonetheless, her speech contained little
more than soundbites which is typical for these convention speeches. This
doesn't negate my report for her as a candidate, nor my belief in her potential
to use her intelligence and values as a politician. We are simply talking about
rhetorical power at a given moment. President Obama, is more of a known
quantity as an oratory. We've also had a good look at his politics over the
last few years, both for good and ill. I did not have a lot of expectations for
Obama's speech, but it seems conceivable that he could have put together
something compelling or inspiring, what we got I think was middle-of-the-road
Obama orientation, which is middle-of-the-road Obama politics. The power of
Clinton's speech was in his ability to create a convincing narrative, and his
ability to flush out the facts in a way that countered the Democratic parties
opponents in the Republican party. He
was almost professorial, and there are plenty who don't like that in a
political speech. For my part I appreciate an appeal to the intellect as well
as emotion.
There was a time that I only thought poorly of rhetoric, it
was the window trappings of ideas. But ideas do not live only in the realm of
the ideal. I see now that ideas, particularly political ideas are valuable only
to the extent that they can be communicated. But there is still the problem of
political rhetoric where words sound good and actions ring hollow. I enjoyed
Clinton's speech both for the story he told, and for his art as a storyteller, and
he is not running for anything, so he can no longer disappoint us if he doesn't
live up to his words. Perhaps we will leave that job to Barack Obama, or even
Elizabeth Warren, the politician for whom I'm still a fan.
For those of us who sit at the left end of the Democratic
Party, or to the left of the Democratic Party, if we wish to draw attention to
our ideas we need the rhetorical skills that Bill Clinton displayed. Whatever
our issue focused, how do we tie it into a narrative that can be or could
potentially be broadly embraced, how then do we also demonstrate with the
narrative that counter narratives are misguided or dishonest. Then the hardest
part is the transition from revolution to governance, the best ideas whether
rhetorically beautiful or not can be terribly difficult to implement once the
opportunity is present.
