Posted on 04/21/2015 9:32:36 AM PDT by Kaslin
Once upon a quite different time, Americans debated politics; we didn't just trade videos of politicians making gaffes on the campaign trail. As when Barack Obama tells those who built their own businesses, "You didn't build that." Or the hapless Mitt Romney described the 47 percent of Americans who were expected to vote for his opponent in the last presidential election as "takers." As he put it: "My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
What fun -- letting the political figures we love to hate embarrass themselves. It's so much easier than actually analyzing their more thoughtful political positions.
But there was a time when Americans listened to each other, wanted to know what the opposition had to say for itself, and paid close attention to its case. As when the voters of Illinois followed Lincoln and Douglas around the state in that fateful year 1858 to hear them debate the momentous issues of freedom and slavery -- week after week, courthouse square after courthouse square.
Or go back to 1830, when Webster and Hayne took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to debate the very meaning of the American union, and whether it could or should endure.
Try to imagine today's electorate, accustomed to television sound bites instead of thought, following such arcane constitutional arguments -- hour after hour. Unimaginable. Not in a country that seems to have come down with a nationwide attention-deficit disorder.
But as late as the middle of the last century, there were still speakers -- and thinkers -- who set out to talk sense to the American people. And did. My model in these matters would be Adlai Stevenson's remarkable campaign speeches of 1952. Americans didn't have to agree with Gov. Stevenson to be thrilled by his speeches; they raised the level of political discourse in this country. As when he described what it meant to be an American in his time -- or any other:
"It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity, a condition of survival. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect."
Has there ever been a better definition of the American spirit?
Nor has it been just those presidents who blazed new trails whose words comforted and sustained us. Think of Calvin Coolidge, a much derided president, whose puritanical counsel stood the nation in good stead as the Jazz Age dawned and the country needed a good strong dose of New England wisdom and self-discipline to maintain its contact with the old copybook maxims and reality itself.
Yes, there have been long, fallow seasons in our history when American rhetoric seemed to settle for mediocrity, repeating platitudes as if they were insights. We may be in one now. Ask anyone who has had to listen to a speech by Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton of late.
Nor do Republican orators like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz sound any better as they echo their listeners' partisan prejudices -- rather than challenge them to rise above the usual, conventional polspeak.
Yet when they were most needed, this country has brought forth leaders whose words soared, and lifted the country's spirits with them. Like a president who was sworn in at a time when the Great Depression was reaching its depths, and fear stalked the land. That's when Franklin Roosevelt stepped forward on his paralyzed legs to say:
"First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." And the clouds parted. Such is the power of the right message at the right time. Again and again, through war and peace, FDR would display the same indomitable spirit and put it into words all could understand.
Time and again, American rhetoric has revived the American spirit, and reminded us that ours is not just a country but the hope of the world. As when Daniel Webster summed up the essence of what the nation required as Americans were told we had to appease the slave states to stay one country. No, replied Webster -- "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" And so it would be. Till this very day.
Americans have heard the words we needed to hear from our leaders at every critical juncture of our history. That's when a great leader would emerge to seize the day and our hearts. Like the incomparable Lincoln of the Gettysburg Address and the biblical cadences of his Second Inaugural:
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
And the country became one again. As it will once this season of discontent, of partisan prejudices and small-minded passions, gives rise to the words we are all waiting for. They might even come from one of next year's just emerging presidential candidates. Stay tuned.
The constant name calling and identity politics of the Left are responsible for the decline in the quality of rhetoric. Leftists instantly drag everyone into their gutter.
I would put Ronald Reagan right up there with any of the Pols he mentions.
And Abraham Lincoln thought nobody would remember the words he said at Gettysburg one day in 1863.
It's like the long, heart felt letters quoted in Ken Burns' Civil War, written in beautiful English by the lowliest of privates. He didn't show the scribbled letters saying: "Maw and Paw, Send me some kofee cause the koffe her is bad".
I would as well. Reagan wrote his own book; 0bama did not, and neither, for that matter, did JFK. That's the difference.
I certainly do NOT detect anything of the sort on the liberal side of the spectrum. Hillary is lucky if she can string two cliches together, and Obozo can't say "hello" without a teleprompter.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
If we were to render Lincoln's address in their voices ...
Odingus: Look. I don't need any haters. All right? Haters, no. And I myself am a charitable kinda guy. I'm a firm believer in this work we're doing here, this work that George Bush and his administration left uncompleted. There was lot of damage done there, folks, and I'm here to see to it that those folks the Republicans let down are cared for, and that we will sacrifice whatever American values we have to achieve the illusion of peace in our time. Now pass the bong."
Shrillary: "The Bushes screwed up bigtime. Chelsea darned near cried when she heard about all those horrible killings in Iran or Iraq or whatever that place is over there. All I could tell her is "Honey, I'll do my best to help the poor women of those countries and to come to the aid of the working people so they can feel good about themselves once again." This nation has made a lot of mistakes and has a lot to apologize for. Especially in its treatment of women and gays and minorities. Now get out of my way and shut the f__k up.
I also note that the best book ever written by a U.S. President was the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a man never noted for soaring rhetoric but admired for being able to immediatly convey whatever point he was trying to make.
I used to teach a course in basic public communication, and one of my assignments was for the students to analyze Reagan's farewell address. Though it is difficult to discern the distinction, I didn't assign it because I agreed with it, even though I agreed, and still agree, with it; I assigned it because it was probably the most succinctly rhetorical address ever given by a U.S. President, with the possible exception of FDR before Congress on Dec. 8, 1941.
Grant had one heckuva editor for that one. Mark Twain. But even Grant’s written orders show the clarity and concision of a mathematics professor, which is what Grant really wanted to be until that war thing came up.
That is a very beuatiful reminder, of how correspondence used to be.
Actually, that point has been overstated. For years people tried to say Twain ghoasted Grant's memoirs but the second half of the manuscript was written in longhand by Grant (his throat cancer had progressed to the point where he couldn't dictate it to his secretary anymore.) The handwritten manuscript is in the Smithstonian and it's pretty much verbatium to the final published work.
LOL, it's a Cruz-normalizing essay, to deny Cruz is doing exactly what the essay claims to hold high, because compared to Cruz everyone else sounds juvenile.
Never, ever trust the press.
Ted Cruz: "A president under a constitutional system doesn't have the ability to pick and choose which laws to follow. And that's the same pattern you see in dictatorial societies, where a leader says, 'Ignore the law, go with the power of the president instead of the written law."
A good point. This had a major impact on the war in an era before radio communication. Lee often wrote overly vague and often contradictory orders which could cause major problems, especially in the battle of Gettysburg. One of Grant's top Generals (can't recall which one right now) once remarked that it was impossible to read an order from Grant and not know exactly what he wanted you to do do.
He’s full of carp about Cruz and Paul. But I do miss Everett Dirkson.
Of course Mitt wasn’t making a speech...he was talking in a private meeting with advisers and didn’t know there was a Democratic plant in the room surreptitiously recording what he was saying.
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