At the Beginning I was Spoiled

   I listened to Obama’s State of the Union message some days ago. It was a well-stated account of what he proposes to do, Congress going along or (mostly) not. But, given my interest here  in style rather than content, his message was clearly stated and the prose was at various points quite eloquent. Such formal messages are of course not single-author products, but are composed by professional writers and professional helpers of writers. Still, the final version has to be approved by the boss and what is approved is an indication of the approver’s taste. In my view, Obama does OK; he clearly has a sense of style—corroborated by speeches he made in his 2008 campaign, when he was more on his own.

   Obama’s superior prose style, if not outright eloquent, takes me back to my earliest years as a follower of American politics.  I came to the United States early in 1939 at the age of 12. But by the time I was sixteen or so, I became alert to politics and was reading The New York Times in the subway on my way to and from Brooklyn Tech, that paper artfully folded as a narrow vertical strip that made it possible to read it in a crowded GG, as the Queens-Brooklyn train was then called.                          

   Franklin Delano Roosevelt was then president, who not only introduced me to politics, but to

political discourse—by reading about him in the NYTimes, but also by listening to his Fireside Chats on the radio. I don’t remember those “chats” to be rhetorically flamboyant, but they were literate and occasionally truly eloquent. I certainly did not know then that I would never again hear as eloquent—even as literate—presidential discourse. The  only time we came close was with Adlai Stevenson, a candidate for the presidency who never made it.

   Betwixt between, mostly blah—not meaning nonsense, of course, (we’ve not had a stupid president in my day) but, say, prosaic. What makes this noteworthy—if not very—is the fact that any one who makes it to the White House has the wherewithal to buy eloquence; there is no doubt in my mind that they have the resources and staff to employ exactly the speech writers who put out what is wanted.

   What’s to be learned? A couple of things, if  not important ones. First, those recent American presidents have themselves not been particularly articulate. (There is not likely a Pulitzer Prize book on a recent presidential speech to match Garry Wills’s essay on the Gettysburg Address.) So, if you are not very musical you’re not going to pick the best musicians. Perhaps more importantly, candidates of office are mostly not judged for their verbal prowess. Indeed, articulateness may be regarded as glibness and be a handicap rather than an advantage. In short, Americans are suspicious of eloquence, making a Garry Cooper “aw shucks” a quite acceptable mode of discourse.

   All this makes us in the US quite different from politics in Great Britain and France and certainly other countries I am ignorant of, where style matters more or even a lot. There may be studies of the relationship of degree if eloquence to political effectiveness, though I don’t know of any; indeed, I believe it would be difficult to devise such an investigation. Still, it would be interesting to know more about the relationship of (call it) verbal facility and political success.