Words Fitly Spoken: Part I

I confess. I'm a recovering political junky. It all started when I met Ronald and Nancy Reagan in 1980. Secret Service would not let Governor Reagan use my pen as we shook hands, but Nancy was kind enough to scrawl her name on my clipboard as we shared an umbrella in the rain. Ever since, I've been fascinated by Presidential races, and along the way I've gotten handshakes, photos, and autographs from many candidates and all three Republican Presidents. But so far this primary season I have deliberately avoided politics.

(Okay. Okay... I did write one tongue-in-cheek movie review last November, and yes it was a thinly veiled op-ed on Hillary. Sorry if that was too harsh. But other than that essay, I've held off until now.)

One of the reasons I enjoy reading comments at POI is that they come from a diverse gathering of "friends on the front porch." Some don't share my views, but you don't mind that I do. Some don't share my faith, but you don't mind that I do. (By the way, my blog header mentions that I'm a follower of Christ as reminder to myself not as an earned merit badge.) We come from across the continent and beyond—Canadian, American, Men, Women, Catholic, Protestant, Democrat, Republican, White, Black, Hispanic, Malaysian, Thai, etc. Old friends. New friends. People I see every week, and people I will never meet in this life. That's what I love about blogging.
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I'm saying this because politics can set people's teeth on edge, and I don't want to do that. Maybe it will help if I say up front that this series of posts is not about issues. Not that issues aren't important—they are—but issues will always be with us. This primary season, however, has already offered something that comes along perhaps once in a generation. If I were teaching a "public speaking" class again, my students and I would be immersed in this discussion. I hope you find it equally interesting.

“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.” Proverbs 25:11

Words Fitly Spoken: Part I
She Said He Said

On a July evening in 2004, this Republican was watching the Democratic Convention when a young legislator from Illinois delivered the keynote address. I had never seen his face before, and frankly did know his first from his last name, but after months of listening to John Kerry's haughty air, I turned to my wife and said, "Now here is a Democrat who's going to be President someday." It wasn't that I agreed with everything he was saying, but I was very impressed with his ability to say it.

Four months later Barack Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator, and four years later we all know his name. I still disagree with him on some very important issues, but I agree with the way he disagrees with me. His disarming tone is a force all its own. He's like Reagan in that regard, but his words soar above those of "the great communicator." He has MLK's gift of rhetorical rhythms, and JFK's ability to offset inexperience with themes of promise.

I don't mean to dash the hopes of Hillary's loyal entourage or McCain's reluctant mutineers or Huckabee's faithful few. This is not an endorsement; nor is it a prediction; it's simply a "hat tip" to one of the best public orators since... well, since the men he was falsely accused of plagiarizing this past week.

In last Thursday's debate, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton engaged not in a war of words but in a war about words--about their value compared to actions, their power to persuade, and their source when borrowed. Evidently Hillary knew she was no match for Obama as a public speaker so she began belittling the importance of "good speeches" a few weeks ago. To counter that attack, Barack added to the beginning of his stump speech a short string of famous quotations followed by "Just words?" He barrowed the device from a friend, Deval Patrick, who used it two years ago. See the comparison here, but keep in mind these lines are simply literary allusions.

So it seemed petty indeed when in the middle of the debate Hillary accused Obama of stealing that part of someone else's speech. Obama was speechless--no pun intended--but he eventually muttered, "The notion that I had plagiarized from someone who is one of my national co-chairs. This is where we start getting into silly season in politics..."

Hillary had this rehearsed line up her sleeve (we'll assume she wrote it herself): “Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in. It’s change you can Xerox.” She got booed. I'll admit, if Hillary could prove that many of Obama's orations are in fact the lip-synched words of lesser-known politicians (or if his book The Audacity of Hope was entirely ghost written), she'd have a point, but those particular lines have been "lifted" throughout American history.

For instance, Jefferson first penned "all men are created equal," and then Lincoln used the phrase in the Gettysburg Address, and then MLK used it in "I Have a Dream," and so on. One of the other lines Obama "lifted" from Deval Patrick's speech was the quotation attributed to JFK, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." BUT WAIT, perhaps Hillary should have also debunked Kennedy for "lifting" those words from Khalil Gibran who said in his 1925 published work, "The New Frontier" (36 years before Kennedy's Inaugural), "Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country?...." BUT WAIT... maybe she should also question Gibran's originality since Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in a Memorial Day address is 1884 stated: "It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to ... recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return."

See what I mean? In the world of politics, a quotation often gets attributed to the person who said it best not first.

By the end of Thursday's debate, Hillary was temporarily in a much better mood, as you can see in the first part of this youtube clip. Then two days later in Ohio (Saturday) her honor turned to anger as she pretended to challenge Obama to a "bring it on" debate (the one that's been scheduled for weeks). The next day in R.I. (Sunday) her honor turned to mockery in this speech.
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I'll post the second part of this series Wednesday or Thursday (after Tuesday's debate). In the meantime, if you haven't seen the following two videos, they will underscore what I'm saying about Obama's disarming gift with words fitly spoken.

The first is his Yes We Can speech delivered in New Hampshire. The second is the Yes We Can music video that inspired these artists after they heard the speech. This line seems to stand out as uniquely his own: "In this unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."

Now do you see what Obama means when he insists that there is a difference between momentum in a race and A MOMENT in history? This is not an endorsement. It is a study in effective rhetoric that Hillary will find hard to top and stop. Sore words rarely trump words that soar. Likewise, McCain (no matter how many "my friends" he inserts into his speeches) will have difficulty overcoming the face-to-face charisma of this young senator whose name is becoming easier for Americans to say with each passing day.
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Part II will attempt to distinguish between the MOMENT and OBAMANIA
by applying Aristotle's elements of rhetoric: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.