Who Shall Speak for Us

Links for this Post:

Raise the Rafters -- What Barack Obama Needs to Prove in His Democratic National Convention Speech New York Magazine, the Summer 2008 issue

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters July 12, 2007, The Atlantic

Arianna Huffington Sunday Roundup July 20, 2008, Huffington Post

In addition to my blogging which you know about and my writing and my academic pursuits which I post about here, for the past 20 years I have been a businessman.

At one point in my business career, I had 18 employees and a company that I hoped to take public. I no longer have those aspirations but I'm still a business man in my way of thinking and found the experience of trying to get a startup funded for years and having to file payroll takes every quarter something that gives me insight into the world.

One important piece of wisdom most business men acquire is their appreciation of having a good public relations  policy including having PR as part of internal marketing and hiring a good agency.. The company's image and eruption is essential ever thing that it does.

Ever thing that has gone down in US Foreign Policy since George W. Bush took office contradicted this wisdom. After all, in many ways the US Government is a like a big company. Some might say like too big a company but like a company nevertheless.

I always thought Republicans identified with the world of business. Up until now, most of them did. All of a sudden when he took office, PR did not matter, our world image did not matter. All that mattered is our power. If anything, we seem to want to make the rest of the world think of us like kids in elementary school think of the big, strong but dumb neighborhood bully.

The article I have posted about above spends a lot of time talking about Barack Obama's literary gifts. The writer part of me admires this. Here is a two paragraph exert that speaks about this.

A major reason that Obama’s rhetoric seems to soar so high is that our expectations have sunk so low. In a new book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin T. Lim subjects all the words ever publicly intoned by American presidents to a thorough statistical analysis—and he finds, unsurprisingly, an alarmingly steady decline. A century ago, Lim writes, presidential speeches were pitched at a college reading level; today, they’re down to eighth grade, and if the trend continues, next century’s State of the Union addresses will be conducted at the level of “a comic strip or a fifth-grade textbook.” (“Iran’s crawling with bad guys: BAP!”) Since 1913, the length of the average presidential sentence has fallen from 35 words to 22. Between Nixon and the second Bush, the average presidential sound bite shrank from 42 seconds to 7. Today’s State of the Unions inspire roughly 30 seconds of applause for every 60 seconds of speech. Although it’s tempting to blame the sorry state of things on the current malapropist-in-chief, Bush is only the latest flower (though, obviously, a particularly striking one) on a very deep weed. Our most brilliant presidents, Lim says, often work hard to seem publicly dumb in order to avoid the stain of elitism—amazingly, Bill Clinton’s total rhetorical output checks in at a lower reading level than Bush’s. Clinton’s former speechwriters told Lim that their image-conscious boss always demanded that his speeches be “more talky”; today, he’s widely remembered as a brilliant speaker who never gave a memorable speech.

Obama seems to have taken the opposite tack: He’s a Clinton-style natural who flaunts the artifice of his speeches and refuses to strategically hide his intelligence. Compared with his rivals, Obama’s skill-set seems almost otherworldly. His phrases line up regularly in striking and meaningful patterns; his cliché ratio is, for a politician, admirably low; his stresses and pauses seem dictated less by the usual metronome of generic political speech than by the actual structures of meaning behind his words. He tolerates complexity to such an extent that he’s sometimes criticized as “professorial,” which allows him to get away with inspirational catchphrases that would sound like platitudes coming from anyone else. His naïve-sounding calls for change are persuasive largely because he’s already managed to improve one of our most intractable political problems: the decades-old, increasingly virulent plague of terrible speechifying. The signature project of his candidacy—before health care or housing or Iraq—seems to be the reuniting of presidential discourse with actual, visible thought. It is not a trivial achievement.

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Too often, style is dismissed as merely a sauce on the nutritious bread of substance, when in fact it’s inevitably a form of substance itself. This goes double for the presidency, where brilliant policy requires brilliant public discourse. If you can think your way through a sentence, through the algorithms involved in condensing information verbally and pitching it to an audience, through the complexities of animating historical details into narrative, then you can think your way through a policy paper, or a diplomatic discussion, or a 3 A.M. phone call. Bush’s difficulty with basic units of syntax has not been trivial: It signals a wider habit of mind that has extended to every corner of governance. Hillary’s tendency to express herself in distant clichés very likely lost her the nomination—and, one might argue, rightfully so. Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn’t tell us in a year. It’s silly to downplay the importance of verbal intelligence to a job that makes you the mouthpiece of arguably the most influential nation in the world. As Ezra Pound once wrote, “The mot juste is of public utility … We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate.”

The businessman part of me sees Barrack Obama's gifts in a different way. Writing good copy and  hiring the best PR man we can hire.  In my estimation, Obama is that guy.

Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan first discussed at length the PR aspects of an Obama presidency in his essay, Goodbye to All that written more than a year ago. Speaking of Obama's positive attributes he said:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

This latter point is the most salient. The act of picking the next president will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq.

John McCain and his Republican cohorts try to frame this election in terms of experience. But just the fact that McCain such a poor communicator (although maybe a tad better than George W) disqualifies him for the job.  American are tired of having the rest of the world think of us at the dumb but tought neighborhood bully

But in addition to the gift of gab that Obama possesses, he has consistently made the point that more than experience what is important is that a President have good judgement and make good decisions.

Arriena Huffington points out that on this score, recent events point to Obama's advantage in this areas as well.

Republicans love to portray Obama as naïve when it comes to foreign policy. Let's go to the scorecard. Iraq: Prime Minister Maliki just announced he supports Obama's troop withdrawal plan. Afghanistan: Obama has long argued that Iraq has been a dangerous distraction from what should be the real focus of the war on terror, Afghanistan, and has recommended sending additional troops there. McCain, who has opposed sending additional troops, did an about-face on Tuesday, all but yelling "Me too!" Iran: Obama has taken a lot of GOP fire for his willingness to negotiate with Tehran. This week, we learned the Bush administration has decided to send a top diplomat to a meeting with Iran's top nuclear negotiator, and is planning to open an "interests section" in Tehran. Score three for naiveté.

You can read the full articles quoted in this post by visiting the links at the top.