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A Lion in Winter

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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.

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The Certainty of Narrative Form

Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , ,

We think and produce our thoughts, necessarily coming to terms with the requirements of the story format.

An academic rhetorician gets to be absolutely certain about very few things.  But there is one core concept of human communication that is mostly unchallengeable. Simply stated, it is that our world is mostly understood and communicated to others through the structure of narrative.  As the essayist Joan Didion once noted, “We tell stories in order to live.” We may have myriad theories of “ways of knowing,” but few can match the simple story structure as a representation of how we process events.  The story format is nothing less than our primary way to process nearly all human events.

kenneth burke

Building on the work of master critic Kenneth Burke, we can count on a story structure to generally have five parts that are either explicit or sometimes assumed but not said. His “pentad” formalized the structure. Narratives come with:

Agents—those engaged in an action—often verbal
Acts—what is actually attempted in a given situation
Agencies—the specific terms and locutions sources of narratives choose to use
Scenes—events or locations that give the action meaning
Purposes—known or assumed intentions of agents for their actions.

Name almost any human transaction and it is possible to spin out the stated or implied elements of the pentad. When the leader of North Atlantic Treaty Organization recently chose a public setting (scene) to announce Turkey’s agreement to allow the admission of Sweden to be a member, all of the pentadic elements were in their place. Every member must agree on new members, with Turkey holding out for a year. So, when they finally agreed, it was important to put on a show of unity (purpose). The NATO leader stood next to both presidents, in front of the three relevant flags on an otherwise sparse stage. And the announcement (act) used diplomatic language (agency) to emphasize the sought after unity that had been the goal of intense private negotiations. Burke would have noted that the expected elements of the pentad were all confirmed in the moment. The scene was as it needed to be to satisfy various international audiences. The three leaders were the necessary agents fulfill the act.  It also meant that one of the principals could not be absent. The addition of an American flag would have been out of place. And the President of Turkey kept his about reservations about Sweden mostly to himself.

This is all obvious. But that’s the point. This simple form is embedded in virtually any news reporting across all media. Narrative form requires how certain rhetorical acts will be played out. No element is missing or out of place. One could swap out any of these elements with different choices and the nominal unity of the moment would begin to unravel.

We read the components of narrative almost intuitively. And we reserve most of our criticisms for those acts that seem to be in tension with any other part of this pentad. We know how to behave at a wedding or funeral. We know how to be “diplomatic” around a person with a short fuse.  And we guess–endlessly–about the motives of others. In short, we study or produce rhetoric, coming to terms based on what Burke described as the normative “ratios” between the pentadic elements. This is usually life as we wish it to be. If an event is unsatisfying, we can look for a tension that may exist between any two of these five elements. In the unlikely event that we should we want comedy, then we can go ahead and misalign scene and act, agent and agency, or act and purpose. If a comedy of failed expectations does not follow, embarrassment surely will.

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