Nitpicking political speech

Neal Whitman, guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, graciously gave SC a mention on account of a recent post on recursive acronyms. Since, as Ryan Gabbard recently noted, Eugene Volokh prefers links back to other forms of recognition, as does SC -- there will never be a tip jar here -- it seemed appropriate to come up with a post on some recent Volokh topic. It didn't take long.

Despite the fact that SC didn't make it to a second post without referring to Slate, and despite the fact that your host cited the publication in his recent comments on Samuel Huntington and scale-based humor, the truth is, SC doesn't read Slate very often. So until he saw how annoyed Eugene Volokh is with "Kerryisms", he had no idea that Slate was even running such a feature.

The ostensible point of Slate's Kerryisms feature, as set out in the opening column, is as follows:

Since 2000, Slate has poked fun at George W. Bush for his torture—some say it's merely abuse—of the English language. Our "Bushisms" collection captures (as Editor Jacob Weisberg explains in his latest volume) the president's ignorance, incuriosity, laziness, and thoughtlessness expressed in frequent gaffes. Now that Democrats have settled on a presumptive presidential nominee, it's time to cast an equally cold eye on the pomposity and evasiveness of John Kerry.

Now, the controlling opinion on this genre of journalism is indisputably Mark Liberman's line:

You can make any public figure sound like a boob, if you record everything he says and set hundreds of hostile observers to combing the transcripts for disfluencies, malapropisms, word formation errors and examples of non-standard pronunciation or usage. It's even easier if the critics use anecdotes based on the perceptions and verbal memories of equally hostile listeners.

SC considers this view of "(politician)-isms" dead on, and has previously applauded Prof. Liberman for lighting out after some fairly ludicrous attempts to make "Bushisms" out of perfectly reasonable pronunciations. Since nobody at Language Log has yet taken a similar hack at the Kerryisms feature, and since Semantic Compositions attempts to be a rigorously nonpartisan blog, it seems appropriate to apply the Liberman philosophy to Slate's efforts to be bipartisanly asinine.

The red flags went up for SC as soon as he read Will Saletan's description of the methodology employed in parsing Kerryisms:

Here's how to read a Kerryism. The text below is Kerry's quote translated into plain English. Kerry's actual quote, however, is full of caveats and pointless embellishments. To read these, click the numbers above the text, which will take you to the caveats and embellishments, presented as footnotes. (Words in brackets before a number are what a normal person would have substituted for the ornate phrase Kerry delivered. To see the ornate phrase, click the number and read the footnote.) To return to the main text, click the number at the beginning of any footnote. To see the whole quote as Kerry delivered it, with all the caveats and embellishments, click here. To get back to this Kerryism, click "Return to English version."

A mercifully short example of the genre goes like so:

Question: But no regrets about those votes [for NAFTA and the China trade agreement]?

Kerry: [1]Sure.

—Democratic presidential primary debate, Milwaukee, Feb. 15, 2004

[1] I regret the way that they haven't been enforced,

Verbatim:

I regret the way that they haven't been enforced, sure.

Even the most uncharitable observer should have no problem determining what Kerry's opinion is in this case. Inferring from other examples of Saletan's attempts at deconstructing Kerry's speech, "Plain English" is just English without adjectives, adverbs or subordinate clauses:

Plain English: Let me just say that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is unacceptable.

Verbatim: Let me just say very quickly that the horrifying abuse of Iraqi prisoners, which the world has now seen, is absolutely unacceptable and inexcusable.

So intensifying a statement is what passes for evasiveness? Apparently, SC has spent the last quarter-century under the erroneous assumption that emphatic rhetoric indicates particularly clear agreement with the point being made. Guess not, at least in Saletan, a dialect of English which SC will claim dibs on having identified and added to the generally agreed-on body of languages.

It's not terribly hard to figure out how this feature was cooked up. As political speech goes, the canonical example -- "I actually did vote for the $87 billion—before I voted against it." -- is what Talleyrand might have had in mind when he reputedly said "This is worse than a crime, it's a blunder". Like any politician not intent on going down in flaming defeat, Senator Kerry tried to frame his position as being something that both pro- and anti-war voters could support.

The problem with a statement like this, especially since there have been other examples, is that it's erroneous to characterize voting for drafts of bills as constituting a meaningful voting record, when only the vote on the final bill really matters. Neither the ACLU nor the American Conservative Union, both of which have long published annual scorecards evaluating legislators' fidelity to liberal or conservative principles respectively, counts procedural votes in their analyses, and SC would be surprised to learn that any other organization with serious lobbying clout behaved differently. But all that a few examples like this proves is that John Kerry is a politician. Is it really the case that no other prominent politician has ever made a statement trying to claim credit for being on both sides of an issue? SC rather doubts it.

This sort of thing wouldn't happen if media hacks didn't seek, as Prof. Volokh puts it, to fit stories into "stock plots". As soon as one incident occurs that has even the faintest whiff of prospective "meme-hood" about it, politicians are tagged for life. Dan Quayle couldn't spell to save his life after the infamous "potatoe" incident, a point which must surely rub him raw every time he sees a newspaper run a spelling correction. Gerald Ford, an all-American football player at the University of Michigan, had a reputation for clumsiness derived largely from a famous picture of him slipping on a staircase (in the rain, no less!) as he exited Air Force One. Michael Dukakis couldn't shake an image as a wimp after another famous photo of him looking rather uncomfortable while taking a ride in a tank.

Perhaps some sort of guilty bipartisanship motivates Slate's writers to feel that they have to push a storyline about Kerry's language problems in order to even the score with the overdone story about Bush. It would be far better for political journalism if they came to a different conclusion about maintaining balance, and dropped their quixotic pursuit of both "isms" altogether.

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