Bush -- The Great Communicator

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Registered: 06-17-2004
Bush -- The Great Communicator
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Sat, 09-25-2004 - 8:52pm
Could this explain why Kerry's losing the support of women & men of all ages including the young ( http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/29205.htm )? 

The Candidates, Seen From the ClassroomBy STANLEY FISH

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/24/opinion/24fish.html

Published: September 24, 2004
HICAGO — In an unofficial but very formal poll taken in my freshman writing class the other day, George Bush beat John Kerry by a vote of 13 to 2 (14 to 2, if you count me). My students were not voting on the candidates' ideas. They were voting on the skill (or lack of skill) displayed in the presentation of those ideas.


The basis for their judgments was a side-by-side display in this newspaper on Sept. 8 of excerpts from speeches each man gave the previous day. Put aside whatever preferences you might have for either candidate's positions, I instructed; just tell me who does a better job of articulating his positions, and why.


The analysis was devastating. President Bush, the students pointed out, begins with a perfect topic sentence - "Our strategy is succeeding"- that nicely sets up a first paragraph describing how conditions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia four years ago aided terrorists. This is followed by a paragraph explaining how the administration's policies have produced a turnaround in each country "because we acted." The paragraph's conclusion is concise, brisk and earned: "We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer."


It doesn't hurt that the names of the countries he lists all have the letter "a," as do the words "America" and "safer." He and his speechwriters deserve credit for using the accident of euphony to give the argument cohesiveness and force. There is of course no logical relationship between the repetition of a sound and the soundness of an argument, but if it is skillfully employed repetition can enhance a logical point or even give the illusion of one when none is present.


The students also found repetition in the Kerry speech, about the outsourcing of jobs, but, as many pointed out, when Mr. Kerry repeats the phrase "your tax dollars" it is because he has become lost in his own sentence and has to begin again.


When he finally extracts himself from that sentence, he makes two big mistakes in the next one: "That's bad enough, but you know there's something worse, don't you?" No, Senator Kerry, we don't know - because you haven't told us. He is asking people to respond to a point he hasn't yet made and, even worse, by saying "don't you?" he is implying they should know what this point is before he makes it. As a result, the audience is made to feel stupid.


And if that wasn't "bad enough,'' consider his next two sentences. Up until now Mr. Kerry's point (insofar as you could discern one) had been that current tax policies reward companies for moving their operations overseas. But he goes on to add, "it gets worse than that in terms of choices." The audience barely has time to wonder what and whose choices he's talking about before it is entirely disoriented by the declaration that "today the tax code actually does something that's right." Excuse us, but how can getting something "right" be "worse"? It turns out that there is an answer to that question later in the speech - Mr. Kerry says that while the tax code now rewards companies that export American products, Mr. Bush wants to eliminate that good incentive - but it comes far too late for an audience discombobulated by the sudden and unannounced change in the argument's direction.


Senator Kerry, my students observed with a mix of solemnity and glee, has violated two cardinal rules of exposition: don't presume your audience has information you haven't provided, and always pay attention to the expectations of your listeners. They also felt that when he concludes by declaring that "when I'm president of the United States, it'll take me about a nanosecond to ask the Congress to close that stupid loophole," he undercuts the dignity both of his message and of the office he aspires to by calling the loophole "stupid" (instead of "unconscionable" or "unprincipled" or even "criminal"). "Stupid," one student said, is not a "presidential kind of word."


So what? What does it matter if Mr. Kerry's words stumble and halt, while Mr. Bush's flow easily from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph? Well, listen to the composite judgments my students made on the Democratic challenger: "confused," "difficult to understand," "can't seem to make his point clearly," "I'm not sure what he's saying," and my favorite, "he's kind of 'skippy,' all over the place."


Now of course it could be the case that every student who voted against Mr. Kerry's speech in my little poll will vote for him in the general election. After all, what we're talking about here is merely a matter of style, not substance, right? And - this is a common refrain among Kerry supporters - doesn't Mr. Bush's directness and simplicity of presentation reflect a simplicity of mind and an incapacity for nuance, while Mr. Kerry's ideas are just too complicated for the rhythms of publicly accessible prose?


Sorry, but that's dead wrong. If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are. Words are not just the cosmetic clothing of some underlying integrity; they are the operational vehicles of that integrity, the visible manifestation of the character to which others respond. And if the words you use fall apart, ring hollow, trail off and sound as if they came from nowhere or anywhere (these are the same thing), the suspicion will grow that what they lack is what you lack, and no one will follow you.


Nervous Democrats who see their candidate slipping in the polls console themselves by saying, "Just wait, the debates are coming.'' As someone who will vote for John Kerry even though I voted against him in my class, that's just what I'm worried about.



Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.



Renee ~~~




Edited 9/25/2004 10:11 pm ET ET by cl-wrhen

Renee ~~~

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Registered: 06-17-2004
Tue, 09-28-2004 - 12:40am
Debate Preparation Began With a Professor at Yale

By ELISABETH BUMILLER http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/27/politics/campaign/27letter.html

Published: September 27, 2004
People may think they have heard enough about the things that President Bush and Senator John Kerry have in common - Yankee ancestry, distant relatives, Skull and Bones. But there is one more shared experience, if readers can bear another ramble down the byways of Yale, which is of no small relevance in a week when the two presidential candidates face off in their first debate.


It turns out that Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, two years apart in New Haven, shared the same oratory teacher and debate coach, Rollin G. Osterweis. Their training in speaking and thinking under Professor Osterweis influenced the kind of candidates they became, and will be part of their performances in Coral Gables, Fla., on Thursday.


Professor Osterweis, who died in 1982, was a courtly Yale professor who taught a popular and easy class, History of American Oratory, for a quarter-century. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry took the course, which consisted of studying famous addresses by William Jennings Bryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, among others, as well as delivering a speech to Professor Osterweis and the class. Mr. Kerry, as is well known, went one step further and became a star on the Yale debate team, with Professor Osterweis as coach.


Aides say that Mr. Bush, who never tried out for the team, nonetheless took from the class lessons that he uses today: the importance of direct language, organized speeches and connecting with crowds.


"He actually gave me a lecture once," Karen P. Hughes, Mr. Bush's close adviser, said at the White House last week. Ms. Hughes was referring to the president's demands on his speechwriters, who get drafts of major addresses sent back with heavy markings from the president's Sharpie marker. Mr. Bush is not known for his elocution on the stump, but he has clear ideas about how his speeches should sound.


As Ms. Hughes recounts in her book, "Ten Minutes From Normal," Mr. Bush calls at all hours with small-bore speech instructions: "Paragraph five on page two says the same thing as paragraph four on the page before." "This whole page is too repetitive." "That section is way too passive; I'm not bobbing along like some cork; I want active verbs."


Ms. Hughes writes that she was once so frustrated that she asked Mr. Bush how a speech should be written. He scrawled out for her, she recounts, that it should have "an introduction, three major points, then a peroration - a call to arms, tugs on the heartstrings," then a conclusion, which "is different from a peroration." When Ms. Hughes asked how he knew all that, Mr. Bush replied, "The History of American Oratory, at Yale."


David Boren, a former United States senator and a 1960's Yale debater who is now the president of the University of Oklahoma, said that Professor Osterweis, his mentor, taught students two main lessons. "First, you have to have substance - values and principles that are worth conserving," Mr. Boren said. "Then you have to communicate them in a way that makes the audience feel that they have ownership of the ideas. It's almost like you have to become part of the crowd, and have them go away adopting the ideas as their own."


Mr. Boren, a Democrat who knows both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, said that the president, with his colloquialisms and regular-guy style, had clearly learned the second lesson. "Bush puts himself inside the head of the person listening to him," he said.


In contrast, Mr. Boren said, Mr. Kerry is all policy and expertise. "I think Kerry obviously uses his speeches to be a teacher and to go into the nuances and complexities," he said. Professor Osterweis, he added, "saw the role of the president in part as being a teacher."


So far, no record has surfaced of the speeches Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush delivered in the Osterweis course, and neither campaign was forthcoming over the weekend.


But Professor Osterweis's daughter Ruth Osterweis Selig said her father had often talked of Mr. Kerry, whose most well-known Yale debate was in February 1966, when he defeated a previously unbeaten traveling British team with a topic he may well have to revisit Thursday: a defense of the United Nations. Mr. Kerry's argument 38 years ago was that the organization had "supplied a meeting place for harmonizing differences."


Not incidentally, Mr. Kerry's accent in those days was far more upper-class than it is now, at least according to Aaron Zelinsky, a current Yale debater who has spent the past month studying the campus oratorical history of both candidates.


"He ditched the Brahmin lilt a while back," said Mr. Zelinsky, a Kerry supporter. "Now he just has to stop speaking in semicolons."


So what will happen Thursday? As James Fallows wrote in a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Bush will get high marks for personality and Mr. Kerry for substance, but the spectacle will amount to "asymmetric warfare" between two wildly dissimilar candidates, neither of whom has ever lost a debate.


One thing is certain: Professor Osterweis, had he lived, would be watching.


"He would be so proud," said Ms. Selig, his daughter. "He would be like a father of newborn twins."



Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

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Registered: 04-23-2004
Tue, 09-28-2004 - 12:45am
So interesting. Thanks for posting these.

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