The Triumph of Style over Substance

Politics has been all about oratory at least since the Lincoln-Douglas debates. God knows, the interminable gibberish spouted by the like of William Jennings Bryan is as bad, possibly worse than the stuff we hear today. Try reading Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech. I'd be surprised if you could stay awake through the first half-dozen paragraphs.

Yet in this presidential primary, I think we have reached a new low in political speechifying: changing the message to suit the audience, without regard to consistency. Say what you will about The Great Commoner (that's W.J. Bryan, for those of you who are college-educated), at least his message on the gold standard was consistent. What happened to him at the Scopes trial, God only knows. He seemed to have slipped his moorings altogether, and seeing that he died only a few days later, perhaps there was some underlying medical condition. A brain hemorrhage, perhaps.

This year, we have Hillary Clinton, who speaks in tongues. Depending what audience she is addressing, she adapts her style to the vernacular. This is especially demeaning when she speaks to a primarily black audience and attempts to affect ebonics. Forty years ago, she would have been booed off the stage for this, but not today.

Still a better example is Barack Obama. A few nights ago in Grand Rapids, John Edwards came out as an Obama supporter. He gave an impassioned introduction during which he pleaded so convincingly for the plight of poor and "working class" people that you'd almost forget how much money he has made by driving people into poverty with legal judgments.

This was followed by the O-man himself, who with the crowd already warmed up, delivered a genuine stem-winder. He kept hitting all the liberal statist talking points with no supporting information, and even without regard for whether what he'd said in one sentence would be incompatible with what he'd said in
the sentence before that. The crowd was eating it up.

Meanwhile, the press largely ignored the speech that Senator McCain delivered the very next day, in which he outlined some specifics of what his first term in office would be like. Too boring; not "sexy"enough.

Unsatisfied by Wednesday's spectacle, Senator Obama has now decided that President Bush's speech in front of the Knesset about the dangers of appeasement was directed at him and him alone.

This demonstrates as nothing else has the political callowness of Obama. If he over-reacts this way to some generalities uttered by the President, how can we expect him to react when Hugo Chavez calls him--by name--"Satan" or "Hitler"? One of the greatest things about Ronald Reagan was his ability to shrug off this kind of stuff. But Obama, who has been raised to believe that everything he disagrees with is a personal slight, it's a different story.

If the shoe fits, Senator Obama.

tags: obama  bush  edwards  election  hillary  

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