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.
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.
Our 45th President was especially shameless at shifting the blame for our national woes to everyone but his followers. A sandwich of invective laced with lies is his thing. This may be a natural human habit we all have from time to time, but rarely has a national leader so consistently sought favor by rhetorically degrading others for the obvious benefit of excluding them from the tribe. The targets are as familiar as the overblown language: “the radical left,” the current president,” “the liberal media,” “recent immigrants,” and so on. Trump is one of a long line of American demagogues, from Huey Long to James Curley to Joseph McCarthy. The surprise to me after 45 years of studying political rhetoric is that the nation has not outgrown its love of political flamethrowers. Paraphrasing an insight from the Netflix’s series, The Diplomat (2023), perhaps it is not enough to be a decent person “in a time when decency has lost its hold on the public imagination.”
So we usually opt for the second choice: we scapegoat the problem to others. It’s easier to blame Bill or Fred because doing so is an act of personal redemption. In this form our words are all too familiar: “Things are not going very well in my life right now and it’s her fault.” Like a fast-acting pill, the shifting of unwanted effects to others lifts us from the burdens of self-examination. In Burke’s language, we have “cast out” the problem. Perhaps this is why we have parents, pets, uncles, Republicans, socialists, and college professors. We can feel better when we believe that others are worse.