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A Lion in Winter

Reviews, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , ,

Pliable, accommodating, and conscious of the trail of impressions they leave, ‘rhetorical personalities’ are intrepid seekers of approval, even in ‘hostile’ social settings.

It has been a few years since Bill Clinton has been in the news. But it should have been no surprise when he showed up at the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For years Clinton has been the go-to guy to rally the troops. In this case it was to sing the praises of candidate Kamala Harris and ding the opposition. Still a commanding figure with a full head of white hair, it perhaps should not have been a surprise when his voice had thinned and grown a bit softer. But he was still interesting, even if he lacked the swagger that made him a special case in the annals of political communication.

For me, the fun of seeing Clinton is that it was a good reminder that I had not so long ago put forward a theory of the “rhetorical personality,” making the case that this former Governor of Arkansas represented the best available example of person reveling in his role as a public advocate. For most of his life, connecting with others was everything: the source of his energy, effectiveness, persuasiveness, and some occasional missteps. I wasn’t alone in making this assessment. Clinton was the subject of a Mike Nichols film Primary Colors (1998), depicting the roller coaster of the 1992 presidential campaign. Chris Hegedus’ and D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary about that campaign, The War Room (1993), is also now a classic. At the time, “creatives” sensed that Clinton was someone who could deliver the drama and rhetoric to match his considerable ambitions. In short, he is a masterful politician and a brilliant rhetor. Very few people willingly left in the middle of a Bill Clinton speech.

Perfect Response book cover

I started the book with the subtitle “Studies of the Rhetorical Personality” with a tribute by the veteran reporter, Joe Klein, who wrote the definitive study of Clinton’s early life and considerable charisma.  Appropriately, Klein titled the book The Natural (2002), explaining its meaning in the Preface.

“His ability to talk, to empathize, to understand; his willingness to fall behind schedule, to infuriate his staff, merely because some stray citizen on a rope line had a problem or a story that needed to be heard—will doubtless stand as his most memorable quality. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota . . .once told me a story about a friend of his, a schoolteacher named Dennis Wadley, who was dying of cancer in 1994. “Dennis was a political junkie,” Wellstone recalled, “and I arranged for him to meet the President just before he died. We met at the end of the day, at a local television station in Minneapolis. Clinton came right over to us and he immediately sized up the situation—Dennis didn’t want to talk about his disease, he wanted to have a policy discussion.  And the President stood there, for forty-five minutes, and gave Dennis the gift of taking him seriously, listening to him, responding intelligently. He never mentioned the illness. It was an incredibly gracious act, entirely natural.”

Pliable, accommodating, and conscious of the trail of impressions they leave, rhetorical personalities are intrepid explorers even in potentially hostile social settings. Their lives gain purpose in deeds executed through interactions with others. They seem permanently situated in a kind of southern exposure, drawing energy from their surroundings and giving it back even when others have cooled. As Bill Clinton’s many critics have reminded us, being a rhetorical personality does not make an individual a better person. Nor does it say much about their political judgment. It simply means they are better tuned to pick up and react to the vibes of others. In short, they are other directed, filled with genuine empathy, and loquacious.  We’ve seen these features in the lives in figures as diverse as the recently deceased tv host Phil Donahue, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, the recent Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and former U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright. All used their positions to expand their reach to a larger audience, at the same time remaining open to the challenges of different kinds of stakeholders. Donahue might seem an odd choice, but his easy transactional style was used to good effect in a week in 1987 when he moved his show to Moscow.  The host’s willingness to risk his popularity shows the confidence and pleasure a rhetorical personality gets from direct exchanges from others.

As to the model of Clinton, we see his adaptation to a group in one of the 1992 presidential debates against George W. Bush.

And here’s a clip from his 2024 DNC appearance in Chicago. A slower pace and thinner voice is evident, but the pleasure of making a point still comes through.

Making Sense of it All

Problem Practices, Reviews, , , , , , ,

Too often political reporters are reluctant to use the kind of everyday language we might apply to people who have lost touch with reality.

American journalists covering this political campaign are facing the challenge of reporting on one of the candidates who repeats fictions that are sometimes so ludicrous that they probably should be reported as the ravings of a man who has lost touch. The problem is that strait journalism in the legacy press—sources ranging from CNN to the Associated Press—tends to grant rough equivalency between candidates running for office.  Does it violate journalistic rules to call out the one who no longer lives in the reality-based world?

Too often these days candidate Donald Trump does not feel tethered to even an approximation of the truth in the observations and accusations that show up in a typical stump speech. For example, he recently noted that his crowd size was up to 30 times larger than his competitor’s rallies. That implies numbers larger than would fit in a stadium for the Superbowl. In addition, he has asserted that the Harris campaign is using A.I. to make her crowds look bigger. As we all know, the former reality show star puts a lot of stock in audience sizes. Other recent fictions include the statement that thousands outside a half-empty hall were still trying to get in (not so, according to the Associated Press), or that he has spoken to the biggest audiences in American history, including those that crowded the national mall to hear Martin Luther King in 1963.

Trump is a fantasist. The lies stack up like so much cord wood at a lumber mill. But except for a few set pieces with the latest lists of “bizarre claims” most of his muddled thinking gets lost in routine synoptic coverage.

A Bias Toward Coherence

The problem here is an old one for those assigned to describe various sides of a dispute. As The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg has described it, journalism has a “bias toward coherence,” where reported events are cleaned up in the retelling. He recently noted that we get “careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines” that might better account for all the fantasies that get passed on as fact.

Trump escapes the full effects of fully revealing journalism by being protected by two norms of journalism: a bias for equivalency, and a second and natural norm to frame most events as stories, which curbs the impulse to let the actual incoherence of an event remain. This is partly Goldberg’s point.

The first norm of equivalency assumes two matched sides to a campaign or—for that matter—almost any event. Each side is presented in a seemingly neutral form to preserve the appearance of objectivity and neutrality. If one driver goes over the speed limit by 10 miles per hour, and a second has exceeded it by 70, both can be described as scofflaws. Recently a Vice Presidential candidate misspoke by describing carrying a gun in combat, which he later noted was not accurate. He carried guns in his military service that spanned more than two decades. But he did not see combat. So maybe it seems to even out the coverage at any point in time if the GOP campaign fudges the numbers on actual audience sizes. This is norm keeps audiences placated, but it is intellectually dishonest.

The second norm is to reorganize events into a story format with a framework of actors, action, purpose, and scenes. Campaigns are normalized by filling in the blanks to make each story a complete account of another day. Never mind that the contradictions represent incoherent acts. Few editors want to pass that incoherence on to their readers or viewers. You have maybe experienced the sensation of attending an ordinary event like a city council meeting– a meeting that was bewildering and aimless–that has since been transformed by the local press that into a more conventional narrative discussions followed by action.  Our instinct is almost always to make sense of it all, not to let the nonsense show through.

These are basic themes are played out in more detail in what is sometimes called “media frame analysis.”  But what it often reveals is that a person unfit to run for the highest office in the country is protected—as CNN demonstrably in 2016 —from an uglier and non-sensical process.

This problem of constrained journalistic norms is doubled by the fact that reporters are reluctant to use everyday language we routinely apply to people who seem less grounded in reality. Columnists may talk about the “delusional” and even “pathological” candidate. Goldberg uses the term “bonkers” to describe Trump’s ideas: an everyday term that hits the mark, but still sounds odd coming from a journalist. In fact, most reporters are reluctant to use terms that suggest the abnormal responses of a person barely able to adapt to their world.