Beyond the 'Rhetoric of Reaction'

By John Greenwald
(NOTE: This was originally published on Politico on March 11, 2009.  John is a member of the Gotham team.)

President Barack Obama’s sweeping plans to restart the economy and expand the federal role in education, health care and energy will either backfire, prove futile or destroy American values. Or maybe all three at once.

Sound familiar? It should, because these conservative lines of attack have been around for centuries in one form or another. Economist Albert O. Hirschman mined hundreds of years of right-wing polemics to show this in his 1991 book, “The Rhetoric of Reaction,” which sheds a revealing light on today’s political discourse.

Any reform can have both good and bad consequences, and which will prevail is uncertain at best. Yet both die-hard advocates and opponents of new policies tend to profess absolute knowledge of their outcomes and thereby create what Hirschman calls a “dialogue of the deaf” in which neither side hears the other.

Hirschman, now a 93-year-old professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., uses the neglected art of rhetorical analysis to expose standard conservative arguments as hoary “contraptions specifically designed to make dialogue and deliberation impossible.” He says the same holds true for knee-jerk liberal calls for government action. These contraptions come in three flavors, which Hirschman terms “jeopardy,” “perversity” and “futility.”

Take Rush Limbaugh’s claim that if Obama succeeds in getting “nationalized health care,” it will mean “the end of America as we have known it.” Limbaugh leveled this charge in a recent interview with fellow conservative talk show host Sean Hannity. The dire warning was a textbook example of complaints that a new course of action will have disastrous consequences — Hirschman’s jeopardy argument. Nineteenth-century British conservatives used the same rhetoric to oppose expanding the right to vote to the commercial and industrial classes on the grounds that it would jeopardize good government.

Limbaugh restated his point recently in an address to the National Conservative Political Action Committee, televised by Fox News. What is so strange about wanting Obama to fail, Limbaugh asked his cheering audience, “if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation?”
For another form of conservative argument, consider the refusal of a handful of Republican governors to accept money from the $787 billion stimulus to extend unemployment benefits to more people. The defiant governors say this will force them to raise taxes to continue coverage when the stimulus runs out, which will in turn drive employers out of the state and worsen joblessness — the exact opposite of what Washington intended.

This is clearly a minority view, since most governors are delighted to get the money. And if a recovery is under way when the stimulus expires, the extra coverage will no longer be needed. But the unhappy governors nicely illustrate Hirschman’s perversity argument, which asserts that progressive policies always boomerang. To insist on this in all cases, however, is like claiming that seat belts and speed limits increase traffic accidents by making drivers less vigilant.

The libertarian Cato Institute launched another type of attack in a full-page ad in The Washington Post and elsewhere that challenged the need for aggressive government programs to jump-start the economy. Hundreds of economists signed the January broadside, which prescribed tax cuts and less, rather than more, federal spending. The economists offered the failure of government policies to lift the country out of the Depression or Japan out of its 1990s slump as proof that new programs won’t work, either.

This invokes Hirschman’s principle of futility: the notion that proposed actions will crack up against a law of nature that negates them. But this assumes that the cases are precisely parallel and that policymakers will simply ape what was done during the Depression. It also ignores the lasting benefits of New Deal legislation, including Social Security, federal deposit insurance and the minimum wage.

Is there any hope of moving beyond the dialogue of the deaf? Columnist David Brooks recently took a step in that direction in a New York Times piece that invoked another side of the futility argument. Brooks said Obama’s agenda seems doomed from the start because governments aren’t smart enough to engineer large-scale social and economic programs that work. But for the good of the country, Brooks added, he hopes Obama can prove him wrong.

This was a stab at putting aside what Hirschman calls “the rhetoric of intransigence,” which finds conservatives and liberals “on the lookout for arguments that kill.” By opening our eyes to these rhetorical practices, Hirschman hopes to replace the dialogue of the deaf with a more constructive and “democracy-friendly” discourse.

John Greenwald is a former senior writer for Time magazine.

Literary Events this month at 92nd Street Y

By Blog Runner

Thursday, March 12 - Rae Armantrout and Cole Swensen

Friday, March 20 - Ann Beattie (1 p.m.)

Monday, March 23 - An Evening of Shakespeare: Hamlet

Thursday, March 26 - The Critic's Voicer I: Daniel Mendelsohn on Cavafy

*Monday, March 30 - Gogol at 200 with Ken Kalfus, Gary Saul Morson, and Gary Shteyngart

For more details, check out:

WWW.92Y.ORG/POETRY

A Poet's Shrine Destroyed

By Blog Runner

(NOTE: This post originally ran today on The New Yorker's blog, posted by Shahnaz Habib)

I had never heard of Rahman Baba before militants blew up his shrine in Pakistan a few days ago.  I now know that he is a beloved Pashto mystic and poet.  He lived in the seventeenth century and, legend has it, wept so profusely that there were wounds on his cheeks.  Though he did not compile his work, it survived the ups and downs of history and continues to be recited today.

Taliban members are suspected to be behind the attack, having previously objected to women visiting the site.  Would Rahman Baba have cared about the destruction of his tomb?  As a Sufi who wrote verse after verse about craving the annihilation of the self that occurs when the human encounters the Divine, he probably would not have had strong feelings about a pile of stone erected in his memory.  On the other hand, it is the fundamentalists who, in their search for religious purity, become obsessed with the materiality of bodies and shrines.  And by banning, by destroying, by killing, they make the material immortal.

Hours before the attack, a blogger on a Web site dedicated to Rahman Baba's poetry asked, "Are there a few people in Pindi right now who would be interested in meeting together over chai and reading Rahman Baba in a group?"

This is how poetry survives -- over chai, on YouTube, in spirit.

Barack Obama, Writer-in-Chief

By Dan Gerstein

(NOTE: This column originally ran on Forbes.com on the morning of the Inauguration)

To speechwriters like myself, Tuesday's inaugural address is the "Super Olympics" of public rhetoric--combining the intense, high-stakes expectations of the Super Bowl with the once-every-four-years pageantry and poignancy of the Olympic Games. As in past years, we'll order pizza, stock the fridge with Red Bull and tune in to William Safire's wordplay-by-play.

But this year will be different, extra-special--and not just for the obvious reasons or only for our fraternity of metaphor masters. For the first time since the advent of the professional political speechwriter under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president giving the inaugural address will himself be an accomplished, literary writer. Which means that, for most Americans, this will be the first president in their lifetimes who they can plausibly believe personally came up with the lofty words of renewal coming out of his own mouth.

How's that for a change--especially after the verbal dissonance and distrust coming out of the White House for the last eight years?

The ramifications of having a writer-in-residence as commander-in-chief, though, go much deeper than that. Barack Obama's extraordinary linguistic abilities are arguably his most powerful political advantage at a time of grave economic insecurity. And they may well be what enable Obama to capitalize on his transformational potential, elevating him from an author of great turns of phrase to an author of great turns of history.

To understand why, it helps to first deconstruct the myth of Obama the speechmaker. That's how most people believe he became a phenomenon, by mobilizing and inspiring masses of disaffected Democrats (and more than a few independents and Republicans) with his words of hope and change. But the reality is that Obama was doing something much more profound than acting as a vessel and giving rousing speeches--he was trying to write the next chapter of American democracy.

We have grown cynically accustomed to political consultants and message-meisters creating pre-fab campaigns. But as I learned from some of Obama's political advisers, the Obama campaign really was Obama's campaign. It was his vision, his message, his arguments--and not least of all, his understanding of what the American people were feeling at this unsettling time and how they were yearning for a new politics as well as new policies.

More than anything, Obama sensed that most voters were exhausted by a generation of hyper-partisan political fights; they were desperate for an honest, respectful, grown-up dialogue about how to restore America's eroding greatness. So more than just launching a campaign, he set out to start a conversation. And to do so, he quite wisely chose a platform that maximized the utility of his intellectual and authorial gifts. Big speeches at big rallies were his best opportunity to communicate big ideals and big ideas.

These speeches, which for the most part Obama himself conceived and often wrote, also served a fundamental strategic purpose: to quickly and viscerally authenticate the biggest unknown entity to ever head a major ticket.

People who heard Obama's words did not just genuinely believe what he was articulating. They believed in his genuineness, that these were actually his thoughts and arguments. And that helped build a powerful bond of trust with millions of Americans that only intensified over time. It was the kind of connection that no number of TV commercials ever could forge--and one I doubt the first African-American president could have been elected without.

The best example of this, I believe, is the speech on race Obama delivered last April in the wake of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright debacle, which he wrote himself and insisted on delivering against the advice of his advisers. (To read the full text of the speech, please click here.)

I recently attended a political forum where it was discussed, and an audience member called it the greatest political speech he had ever heard. Not because of its eloquence or its arguments, the audience member said, but because it was real. Here was a mixed-race politician talking candidly about how his white grandmother would sometimes cross the street when she saw a young black man walking her way. This was an atypical display of courage, to talk on such a loaded subject. But it was also an atypical show of respect, showing white voters he understood them and was not judging them.

George W. Bush could never have conceived or written such a speech, which helps explain why he never formed the bonds of trust Obama already has with the heart of the American polity and why Bush was never able to rally the country to his side.

True, Bush did make some beautiful speeches in his presidency, none more so than his acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention. But it was painfully obvious even then, and much more so as we got to know him as president and listened to his faltering answers to reporters' questions at press conferences, that too often Bush wasn't leading but following--and mouthing the thinking of others.

Compounding Bush's inarticulateness was his inattentiveness. He spoke in black-and-white terms that glossed over the nuances of many important issues, leaving many to question his understanding of them. Even worse, at least half the country never believed Bush understood them or even cared enough to speak directly to them. Some attributed that behavior to arrogance, others to cluelessness. Either way, it led to a massive confidence gap, which rendered Bush's presidency inert for at least his last two years in office.

A big reason that Obama has been able to soar above that gap--and to convince millions of Americans that a rookie senator, four years removed from the Illinois state legislature, is the right man to lead the country at a time we are enmeshed in two wars and our economy has collapsed--is his unique training as a constitutional law professor.

That experience, beyond giving him an understanding of the complex tensions inherent in our system of self-government that few politicians ever approach, taught him to appreciate different perspectives on complicated issues. It also taught him how to think and write precisely and persuasively to skeptical audiences.

It's no accident, then, that independents and Republicans who disagree with him on many issues have nevertheless warmed to Obama's leadership style. Or that Republicans in Congress have been so receptive to his entreaties for cooperation on his economic recovery package. He knows how to speak their language. And, more importantly, he knows, much like his rhetorical role model Abraham Lincoln, how to engage us all in the common vernacular of democracy.

That will be the central focus of Obama's address on Tuesday. Whether history will little note or long remember the actual phrases the new president uses in his speech is immaterial. His challenge is one of will, not words. That is, he must galvanize the country--not necessarily around a specific agenda, but around a set of shared values and a common sense of purpose.

His immediate goal will be to get us to sing from the same civic hymnal and re-familiarize us with the culture of consensus-building. That's the only way he--and we--can break the politics of paralysis and rescue the economy, wind down the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan and regain our standing in the world.

Our writer-in-chief's longer-term goal, I suspect, will be to cement his bonds of trust with the American people and deepen the stores of political capital he will need to hold the country together through the trials ahead. The kind of fundamental change Obama is promising won't happen overnight; his talents for persuasion and mobilization will continually be tested by future events as well as by old political fault lines and bad partisan habits.

If Obama can get the country to buy into a new era of responsibility and resist the pressures of division, he will guarantee his reelection in 2012. Further, he could very well write his own ticket into the small circle of America's greatest presidents.

Dan Gerstein, a political communications consultant and commentator based in New York, is the founder and president of Gotham Ghostwriters. He formerly served as communications director to Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., and as a senior adviser on his vice presidential and presidential campaigns. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.com.

Feeblepoint

By Bill Dunne

Memo to those on the fast track, or who’d like to be on the fast track: Beware of using PowerPoint as your main vehicle for presentations. Don’t take our word for it. Here’s Bill Lane in his memoir of his twenty years as speechwriter to Jack Welch at GE: "There is a way to be quickly taken for the opposite of a leader, and to be typecast within seconds as a dork, a dweeb, a jargon-monkey, a bore . . . It's called PowerPoint." Lane adds another warning: “Bore a stock analyst or a portfolio manager, and you represent a boring stock.”

Okay, he may be blunt — even brutal — but he’s spot on. There are few better ways to bore an audience than to “talk to” a succession of slides. As a means to excite or inspire or motivate, which normally is the goal of most high-level speeches or presentations, PowerPoint (or any similar slideware) barely beats smoke signals. Testaments as to its failings pop up all the time — including in prominent articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. A cartoon in the New Yorker magazine has an executive sitting behind a desk and saying to an underling: “I need someone well versed in the art of torture — do you know PowerPoint?” But, like the Energizer bunny, PowerPoint’s reign as the presentation medium in today’s corporate world keeps going and going and going.

If you really want to be on the fast track, forget slide decks. Think story instead. We’ll get back to that in a moment. But are we saying slideware is useless? Not at all, not if used well; it’s just that it is seldom used well.

So how to explain the PowerPoint Syndrome? Expedience is certainly one explanation. You’re on the hook for a presentation due next week but haven’t had time to prepare? Just dive into the corporate server and pull up a collection of slide decks, tweak a bullet point here and there, and, voilà, pressure’s off. Only thing remaining is actually delivering the presentation.

But there, friends, is the rub. For the nature of PowerPoint — or “cognitive style,” as Yale’s renowned graphics professor Edward Tufte puts it — makes it fatal to a memorable, or even a coherent, presentation. Tufte even points to one instance in which the over-reliance on PowerPoint to convey information may actually have had catastrophic results.

He refers to the study-commission report on NASA’s Columbia shuttle disaster of 2003. The report suggests that the disaster might have been averted if mission controllers had had a full, narrative description of the situation they were looking at. Instead, they got a PowerPoint deck. The commission highlighted one crucial detail in particular that NASA had apparently overlooked in making the decision to go ahead with the shuttle’s re-entry into the atmosphere. And why wouldn’t it be overlooked? It had been buried as a cryptic sub-sub-bullet item at the bottom of one slide in the large PowerPoint deck.

Inherent Defects

Charts by themselves are lousy at telling a story. That’s one problem. Another is that they’re lousy at distinguishing the more important from the less important or the unimportant. Slideware language typically consists of incomplete thoughts or meaningless fragments. The connective tissue that might persuade the listener to buy into the speaker’s position — the transitions, explanations, elaborations — is missing.

A third defect is divided attention. The human mind doesn’t do well in processing multiple sources of information at the same time, and yet you’re trying to force the audience to read bullet points and simultaneously to listen to you. Ain’t gonna happen. A chart is either a distraction from what you’re saying, or you are a distraction to those who are struggling to read a chart.

A fourth defect, from a pure performance standpoint, is that a speaker is left to wing it when it comes to weaving a coherent narrative from a list of abbreviated, acronym-plagued bullet points. A coherent narrative is one that not only makes sense but is also free of the “ums” and “uhs” and other verbal ticks that, instead of keeping an audience interested, makes them flee to their BlackBerrys and Treos. Captive audiences are a thing of the past.

Chock full

So here’s the lesson in all this: When you’re on tap for a presentation, first develop the story you want to tell. “Story” means a narrative that stimulates basic human interest or emotions and draws people in to your message. It means connecting with your audience on a gut level. If you succeed in that they will follow you anywhere and not worry much about the details. If you don’t succeed in that, it doesn’t matter how much detail you shove at them.

Any organization populated by humans is naturally full of stories — whether inspiring, motivating, or simply entertaining. If anyone doubts it, he can look up a past article in the Harvard Business Review written principally by Gordon Shaw, a strategic planning executive at 3M Corporation, along with business professors Robert Brown and Philip Bromiley.

Shaw notes that slide presentations are essentially lists, and that lists present only an illusion of clarity. “If you read just bullet points, you may not get it, but if you read a narrative plan, you will. If there’s a flaw in the logic, it glares right out at you. With bullets, you don’t know if the insight is really there or if the [presenter] has merely given you a shopping list.”

In contrast, he says, “Stories give us ways to form ideas about winning.” And it doesn’t matter how seemingly dry the underlying topic is. 3M’s Post-it Notes? Delightful story. Masking tape? Ditto. Sandpaper? Ditto. They all have basic human-interest angles to them. People remember stories. They don’t remember lists.

Reeling Off
Conflict or tension is the heart of a good story, and that’s what Hollywood screenwriting coach Robert McKee teaches in another Harvard Business Review article directed at executive speechmakers. McKee explains why your pitch shouldn’t be a matter of just reeling off facts and statistics and citing a few authorities. “[T]he people you’re talking to have their own set of authorities, statistics, and experiences,” he says. If you don’t connect with them on some emotional level (or “gut level,” as we said above), they are questioning and arguing with you “in their heads.” No connection, of course, means messages don’t get through.

Says McKee: “If you look your audience in the eye, lay out your really scary challenges, and say, ‘We’ll be lucky as hell if we get through this, but here’s what I think we should do,’ they will listen to you.”

How, then, do you connect? How do you develop a story?

First: Make it personal. Think of something that has happened in your life that can be related to the message of your talk. Something about yourself or your kids, your spouse or your uncle, a friend, a colleague, anybody you know. If it’s about some failure or misstep on your part — some doubt or fear or confusion — so much the better. They’ll be vastly more receptive to what you say next.

Maybe your message involves a subject you fear is too dull, too arcane. Say, for example, computer visualization. Well, tell how you, or somebody you know, first realized that you or he or she was color-blind. That kind of stuff can’t be put on a chart.

Second: Develop and organize your presentation — in writing. This, together with the subsequent expansion into a full draft, is — naked commercial plug here — what a professional speechwriter can help you do. A written narrative forces you to think through the logic and persuasiveness of your argument, enabling you to spot any flaws or weaknesses, and correct them, before the audience gets its shot.

Third: Only after that process has begun should you start thinking about what charts and visuals might be used to reinforce your main points. And that’s what their proper role should be, to reinforce, to punctuate your main points. Whatever visuals you choose, try to make them impactful — like big animal pictures, or cartoons and the like. Along with the smallest number of words possible.

Fourth: Refine and rehearse the narrative — aloud — until you’ve got it internalized. (Note: We didn’t say memorized.) Once comfortable with the flow, the logic, and the messaging, you may then choose to use the full script as your podium or Teleprompter support. Or you may shrink it down to a set of notes, to whatever level works for you. Whichever way you do it, you want the audience focused on you and your ideas.

Is this hard? Hey, no pain, no gain. The preparation may indeed be harder than sorting a slide deck. But the rewards? There’s the real bottom line.

Or as a senior GE executive told Bill Lane to pass along to other GE executives: “Tell them they are going nowhere in the General Electric Company if they can’t do a great business presentation.”

If nothing else, that means story first, PowerPoint, if anywhere, last.

Dunne, a Gotham team member, is managing partner of Dunne & Partners, LLC

Unconventional Wisdom XII: How McCain Can Seize the Creative Middle

By Mark Penn Name

Some advice for John McCain from a moderate Democrat on how to connect with non-Republicans watching at home:

1) Don't call Obama a "young man." It's borderline insulting, and it was the worst moment of Joe Lieberman's speech.

2) Use cards, not a teleprompter. (This is a radical suggestion, I know, but I stand by it. You come off better this way.)

3) Re-up your town hall challenge. It's not too late. Why should we settle for three debates in the final two months?

4) Say something genuinely challenging that the zealots in the hall can react to only with silence. Your brand is courage, so demonstrate it. Don't worry, there will be enough applause lines when you attack big spending, champion tax cuts, sing the song of the surge and the like.

So challenge the party on immigration. Say we need to close Guantanamo. Say you know how much they disagreed with you on campaign finance reform and the gang of 14--but you'd do it again if you could. Return to your principled stand against torture. Catalogue a couple of the ways in which your party has lagged: on tackling climate change, on confronting corruption. Palin will send the base to the moon; you need to bring them back down to earth a little if you want to woo the middle and chart the course to victory.

5) Say something that sounds honest and real about health care. You're utterly tone deaf on what is many Americans' top domestic concern. Your refrain is that you're going to "bring down costs." Say you'll work with Democrats and Republicans to expand coverage to those who need it. If you can't summon even a twinge of your trademark moral outrage about the fact that millions of Americans can't afford a visit to the doctor when they need it, you'll lose millions of people like me.

6) Make clear that you understand earmarks--your whipping boy--are more symbolism than substance when it comes to bringing down the deficit and enormous debt. Most analyses say you're less responsible than Obama in tackling multi-trillion dollar long-term liabilities and borrowing costs. So acknowledge that you understand the enormity of the problem and will demand that everyone make sacrifices to get the country out of hock.

7) Say that you can work with a Democratic Congress, if that's what the people deliver (and they will). Say you expect it will be a sometimes contentious but ultimately productive relationship. But a Democratic Congress unrestrained by Obama will be dangerous. Or at least that's your argument.

8) Define your foreign policy. Sure, Bush's "humble but strong" promise evaporated like a puddle in the West Texas summer. You've surrounded yourself with neocons and those of the "American greatness" school. Is that really your animating philosophy? Or are you going to be tough and realistic in ways Bush hasn't been?

In picking Biden and repeatedly passing on chances to deviate from Democratic orthodoxy, Obama has painted himself as a typical Democrat. In a Democratic year, that may be enough. But it gives you a huge opening to seize the creative middle. Cite not only Reagan and (Teddy) Roosevelt, but a couple of Democratic heroes (and I don't mean Joe Lieberman).

Penn Name is a former Capitol Hill speechwriter

Unconventional Wisdon XI: McCain Has More Reconciling To Do Than Just With The Base

By Matthew Dallek

I would look for three things from John McCain in his acceptance speech this week. First, he must decide how vicious he will be in attacking his rival Barack Obama. McCain has already staked much of his campaign on trashing Obama and making him unelectable. When he takes the stage in St. Paul, Americans should watch to guage whether McCain has truly embraced that strategy and made it his own--or simply let his aides cut ads that attempt to destroy their opponent as un-American and too weak to lead.

Second, McCain must somehow pay tribute to a deeply unpopular incumbent president. After all, the hall will be filled with George W. Bush's diehard defenders. A lot of McCain's senior aides hail from Bush's camp, and McCain badly needs to fire up the Republican activists who believe that Bush has been a strong commander-in-chief and a solid steward of the nation's economic future.

Third, perhaps most importantly, McCain needs to walk a fine line: while championing many of Bush's policies (from tax cuts to Iraq to energy) in his convention address, he also needs to find a way to reinforce his image as a political maverick. This will not be an easy thing for him to do. While the John McCain of 2000 had a true claim to the "maverick" title, this year's incarnation not only has run a relentlessly shrill anti-Obama campaign; he has also embraced Bush's signature policies, and most tellingly, McCain has abandoned many of his positions that once had put him at odds with his own party and made him a maverick.

Instead of opposing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, McCain has now made tax cuts the centerpiece of his economic agenda. Instead of criticizing the administration's inept handling of the war in Iraq as he once did, McCain has praised the president's wartime leadership and hailed the surge for helping achieve victory in Iraq. And rather than denounce the intense partisan divide and acidic rhetoric in American politics, McCain has taken Bush-style attacks to a whole new decibel level, even questioning Barack Obama's loyalty to the United States.

This is the fundamental contradiction in McCain's presidential candidacy -- he is simultaneously trying to assert his maverick bona fides while wrapping himself in President Bush's controversial and relatively unpopular policies. How McCain addresses, and whether he can overcome, that contradiction is probably the central challenge he faces in his all-important convention acceptance address. It will go a long way towards determining who becomes the next president.

Dallek, a former Capitol Hill speechwriter, is the author of The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics