What Mayors Can Teach Us About Public Discourse

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Pittsburgh Post Gazette
  Ed Rendell/Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Mayors must function in a political world that is far closer to what the ancients in Greece and Sicily had in mind as the model for a democratic life.

There is no level of public office quite as consequential to the domestic lives   of urban Americans as the leader elected to run a city. Mayors usually stand out as particularly accessible effective communicators. By contrast, legislators savor deliberation and the arts of self promotion, often with heads in policy clouds rather than the delivery of specific services.  Legislating is measured in increments that would seem pathetically unproductive to mayors who must meet payrolls, collect taxes, and carry on the myriad life-sustaining operations of a city.  And while presidents plainly carry the heavier burden of executive leadership, the presidency is now so “imperial” as to be cut off from contact with the lives of most constituents.  Indeed, the rhetorically challenged George W. Bush rarely moved beyond the white house unless encased in a bubble that limited access and assured he would not be burdened by the visage of a disenfranchised constituent.   

Mayors must function in a political world that is far closer to what the ancients in Greece and Sicily had in mind as the model for a democratic life. They are never very far from their voters and their problems, and their leadership more directly affects the quality of life of their constituents.   Mayors are expected to be on the ground and engaged, dealing with a staggeringly long and well-known list of challenges:  finding money for schools, garbage collection, snow removal, sewer and water repair, health care, police and fire protection, social services, roads and public transportation.  To achieve a level of coverage for these basic needs they must run a human gauntlet that seems to always include virulent city council members, local businesses ready to flee to less expensive locales, and—in the unluckier of the nation’s cities—members of the press who add to the challenges of governance by treating municipal politics as a shooting gallery.  Mayors must also have the staying power to tackle endless community meetings, defiant unions, indifferent state legislatures, disproportionate numbers of the nation’s poor, and drop-everything visits to heartbreaking scenes of urban mayhem.  Their budgets require that they do more with less as tax bases erode, and as suburb-dominated legislatures back away from funding the essentials of city life. 

Perhaps the difficult political challenges of the cities are why many academics and journalists ostensibly interested in governance focus on the presidency. There is an allure to the Oval Office and the journalistic stars that cover it. The Washington-based mass-media “communitariate” has many of the same inducements that feed the parallel world of Hollywood journalism.  Events in these datelines happen in nicer settings.  Everyone involved is better dressed and convinced they are dealing with great ideas rather than a broken and distracted polity.  And like the celebrity watchers who live near the glitter of northwest Los Angeles, those safely at home northwest of the National Mall can pretend not to notice the paradox of urban disintegration amidst a city of ostensible leaders.

An emphasis on the political glitter of Washington D. C. is unfortunate, since there is a more vital political culture on display in the nation’s city halls.  Many mayors are unusually good matches for the colorful gadflies attracted to neighborhood politics.  Effective municipal leaders seem born to the challenge of engaging the weak and the powerful alike.   Biographer Carl Solberg described the “prairie progressive” Hubert Humphrey as “possessed and effective.”  His description of the one-time Mayor of Minneapolis could have been applied to other leaders of cities that were once the engines of the nation’s wealth and identity.  “He couldn’t shake enough hands, join enough lodges, send enough Christmas cards,” Solberg recalls.  “He was forever late on the [campaign] trail because of his desire to please his last audience—end all their doubts, answer all their questions, convert them totally to him. Wanting to be loved, he was unable to be cruel.”

So let’s call it a “theory of mayors” and admit its exceptions up front.  As the example of Toronto’s Rob Ford reminds us, not all succeed.  A few are a poor fit for the forced optimism the job demands.  And many of the best move on to less tumultuous work in the Congress or private consulting. But it is instructive that, while we may be lucky to get one good president in a generation, a replenished cadre of rhetorically gifted civic leaders always seem attracted to the messy front lines of American political life. A list of recent leaders who were often superbly suited to the communication demands of municipal leadership should include Humphrey in Minneapolis, Gavin Newsom in San Francisco, Cory Booker in Newark, Harold Washington in Chicago, Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, and Michael Bloomberg in New York City.  If we want to teach learn from the past about political persuasion and occasional political courage, we would do well to skip the press conferences of the presidents in favor of the more incisive encounters of mayors such as New York’s Ed Koch or Philadelphia’s Ed Rendell.

–Adapted from Gary C. Woodward, The Perfect Response: Case Studies of the Rhetorical Personality (Lexington Books, 2010).

The Impoverished language of Communication Description

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In communication analysis, personal dispositions are often mistakenly converted into an ersatz psychology of the other.  

One of the ongoing challenges of talking about communication is that the language we use to describe effects and outcomes is hopelessly narrow.  Unlike other disciplines that have the obvious advantage of describing the material world, the language of rhetorical description seems relatively static and impoverished.  If we believe someone had a strong reaction to something said to them, we talk about the message’s “emotional” power, as if we were saying something important and decisive. But there’s rarely been a more useless word invoked as an ostensibly meaningful term of description.  Aristotle awkwardly used the idea 2500 years ago in one of the first rhetoric texts, and it still hangs around like an unwanted guest.

I’m as guilty as the next.  For over forty year, my own works of communication analysis have been filled with words like “expressive,” “media,” “interactions,” and “feelings,” as if these ideas were precise or even proximate units of meaningful exchange.  At best, such terms are mostly empty placeholders, begging for refinement and at least some operational detail.

We clearly need a richer lexicon that more thoroughly suggests the many nuanced responses that messages can elicit from receivers. Perhaps this is an essential function that is better carried by narrative film and literature. Poetry, the novel, and even music may often give us more precise pictures of the inner mental states we produce when we address others.  Even the standard “reaction shot” that a film director chooses when one character delivers bad news to another more clearly communicates authentic effects.  A face can register what our sometimes hackneyed language misses.

For example, take the challenge of naming intentions: a subject vital to understanding what individuals can possibly mean by their actions and words.  As I noted in The Rhetoric of Intention, the resources of ordinary English language seem inadequate to address the uncertainties and possibilities of reasons behind acts. There can be no question that we possess a rich vocabulary of feelings and affective states (“upset,”  “annoyed,” “excited,” and the like).  But we have no similar linguistic depth that would give us a lexicon of rhetorical intent.  We describe another’s likely reasons in an endless variety of available verb forms (i.e., “asserted,” “argued,” “pleaded”); but there are no exact counterparts for what should be the complementary “whys” of motivation. Instead attributions are made mostly by inserting imprecise qualifiers in front of clumsy and inexact interpretations of attitude. For instance:  “He may want her to make the first move,” “She doesn’t seem to be motivated by the money,” “Maybe he’s depressed,” and so on.

It’s not difficult to explain this mismatch between an important communication principle and its paltry vocabulary. This deficit is partly a consequence of the natural human compulsion to think deterministically. In our hardened presumption to find a language of first causes that can match the sciences, we mostly fall back on the inadequate language of psychological disposition.  The lexicons of psychology function as ill-fitting surrogates used to label all sorts of personal attitudes.  It’s as if every clinical word of description—common terms like “paranoid,” “depressed,” or “anxious” –is its own self-defining effect. The idea of jealousy, for example, is explained when we conclude that it springs from “envy,” or perhaps a “sublimation” of some sort arising from within. Personal dispositions are thus mistakenly converted into an ersatz psychology of the other.  In the process, we hardly notice that the rhetoric behind these labels remains mostly unnamed.

In practical terms, we could reform our usage by promising ourselves to depend less on empty but popular fallback terms of communication description, among them: “emotion,” “media” “feelings,” “rational,” and so on.  In their place there might be better terms that incrementally move us a little closer to naming the processes of communication with more precision.  My own preference is for a lexicon that would favor terms like “meaning” and “understanding:”  what is our best estimate of what we think receivers took away from a message?—“empathy” and “acknowledgement:” can we make a judgment about whether the needs of receivers were understood by the sender?—and was the message functionally “dialogical?”—meaning that we want to know if its source strived to make the receiver a true partner in the exchange. These attempts at greater precision are small steps, to be sure.  But they are a useful start.