The Political Rhetoric of Election 2008
Given the heated campaign season, here is a quick overview of my personal generalizations regarding political rhetoric: first, rhetoric, viewed as the effect of a particular text (broadly defined) upon a particular audience, is a political, cultural, and pedagogical practice. In this presidential election, I see four rhetorics: 1). There are practices – the oration, the ad, the papal encyclical, which possess a heresthetic dimension to strategy 2). There are institutions – political, legal, religious – which place constraints on practice 3). There is the communicative, such as television and the Internet (cognitively, the most effective is the written word by an admired or enviable person) 4). There is the cultural – dominant, residual-traditional, and emergent views of the ideal future – which a candidate seeks to exploit. Rhetorically, I myself am sympathetic to Platonism: acknowledging a need for public persuasion, but distrustful of the passions and factions of the demos. I am, in other words, “afraid” of the mob, not the elite or natural aristocracy. (In Greek, demagoguery means “leader of the people.” Like prejudice, it’s a “good” term made “bad.”) Plato’s writings on rhetoric offer us two powerful images: the points of triangle A are reason, to stand apart and see objectively; the appetite, driven by the needs of the audience; and the thymos, “the spirited.” Triangle B, correspondingly, is philosophy, the masses, the “spirited leaders” (who must be under guidance to serve the whole). The ideal is cooperative harmony. But in the context of today, I think a powerful political communicator takes what he wants the masses to believe and connects it, symbolically, rhetorically, and substantively, with what they already know and believe. Therein is the power of Obama and Palin.
Comments are closed.
Rove realizes that the new soap opera of Palin’s life is the only thing that can change the subject for McCain’s otherwise listless campaign.
She’s “As the World Turns”, with a touch of “Erin Brokovitch.” Of course, this one reads nasty speeches from Bush’s writers, and won’t do any interviews.
I like this post. Sort of guide to meta-rhetoric while focusing on the particulars of rhetoric in our election.
There are also plain deception and prevarication to consider, though I suppose those can be found in all four of the categories you mentioned. For example, Michael I. has a post right after yours admonishing McCain/Palin about rising suicide rates among military personnel. He has closed comments, but perhaps it would not be too much of a digression here to note that suicides and mental illness have declined in times of war, at least for the populations involved, though perhaps for soldiers as well. (Apparently, the struggle to survive gives a purpose and clarity to life, however illusory.) Indeed, the article Michael cites implies that the suicide rate for military personnel was lower in previous years than for the general population, and I will leave it to the rest of you to guess why the writer didn’t bother to elucidate that particular anomaly.
In any case, as the number of deaths from IED’s and suicide bombers goes down, the suicide rate will likely increase to that of peacetime military personnel (or somewhat higher, given that PTSD will come into play for those who have seen combat). I have no idea what that rate is, but comparing it to the civilian populations as the writer does — as opposed to gender- and age-specific groups — seems like another way of lying with data, reminiscent of the “Killer Iraqi Vet” story that embarrassed the NY Times early in the year.
I’ve come to a conclusion from reading Vox Nova. Obama is not the anti-Christ, Karl Rove is. :)
Obama needs to stop running against Karl Rove and against GW Bush and run against John McCain.