Featured Writer: Ben Wildavsky

From time to time we highlight the work of writers from our stable or who are friends of the firm.  Today we call your attention to a thought-provoking piece from Gotham Friend Ben Wildavsky on the globalization of higher education in the latest edition of the New York Academy of Sciences Magazine.

Ben has a new book coming out this year on this subject, The Great Brain Race, and uses this article to preview his core argument that we have nothing to fear from collegiate border crossing.  We hope you'll check it out and look out for Ben's book in the coming months.

More Speechy Perspective on Obama's First Year

In case you missed it, the Washington Post ran a long feature last week on Obama's top foreign policy speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, that is another must-read.

Besides detailing Rhodes unconventional path to scribe power, it provides some valuable additional perspective on the Speechifier-in-Chief's first year in office, appropos of our post on Friday.

Gerson Speech-Critiques Obama

By Dan Gerstein

Michael Gerson's latest Washington Post column this week critiquing President Obama's rhetorical performance in his first year in office is a must-read for speech groupies and political followers alike.  The former Bush speechwriter (and Gotham friend) gives a particularly thoughtful voice to an increasingly common complaint about the Speechifier-in-Chief — that Obama's speeches as president have not been nearly as inspiring or effective as his campaign oratory.  More important, although it was not Gerson's intent, his analysis also explains why the Obama speech mythology and the Olympian expectations it created were both unfair to him and unsustainable in office.

Gerson uses that myth as the peg for his argument, noting early on that New York Magazine had set up Obama as "our national oratorical superhero — a honey-tongued Frankenfusion of Lincoln, Gandhi, Cicero, Jesus, and all our most cherished national acronyms (MLK, JFK, RFK, FDR)." He goes on to write that Obama's rhetoric as president, by comparison, has been workman-like, unmemorable, and unmoving, pointing to two of Obama's highest profile addresses (his inaugural and his fall Afghanistan speech) as examples.  Even worse, Gerson says, Obama's cool-headed, intellectual style has too often come off as simultaneously too academic and arrogant, even veering "toward messianism."

Early State of the Union Advice

President Obama's first State of the Union address is not even officially scheduled yet, but the advice is already flowing fast and freely.  Former Clinton domestic policy advisor Bill Galston, one of the smartest minds in the biz, offers some same guidance in the form of his ideal speech.  A must read for speech groupies and politicos alike.

Reid It And Weep

In his weekly political column for Forbes.com out today, Gotham President Dan Gerstein breaks down the Harry Reid race scandal, and argues that Democrats have a lot more to be embarrassed about than their Senate leader's latest gaffe.

Knucklerap Corner: Where a Red Hand is the Mark of an Improved Mind

By Lauren Weiner

In our second installment, we keep on keeping them on their toes. Why, you ask? Because that is how we learn (and how we amuse ourselves). 

Let’s Hector Harvard

“I have been the enormous beneficiary of a time of great change.” Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University, speaking to the Washington Post, February 7, 2008

We beg to differ. We have seen photographs of the lady and she is normal-sized. She meant to say that she has benefited enormously.

# # #

New York Times, July 5, 2009. Clark Hoyt: “Dilemmas like the Rohde kidnapping put editors in excruciating positions.”

“Editors” is plural, but pluralizing “positions” to match is overly punctilious. Sounds better to say the editors are put in an excruciating position. The people he’s talking about are all in roughly the same position: caught between the desire to publish the facts and the desire to avoid angering kidnappers. What Mr. Hoyt wrote encourages a reader to picture things that (we assume) lie outside of his intention entirely.

Washington Post, August 14, 2009. Dan Morse: “A Hyattsville man who instituted what prosecutors called a ‘reign of terror’ in parts of Montgomery County was sentenced to life in prison without parole.”

“Instituted” is kind of formal. Such gentility goes against the sense of the sentence.  “Inflicted” or “imposed” would have been more apt. Or the man could be said to have “brought a reign of terror to” parts of Montgomery County. He’s a murderer not a mayor.

Baltimore Sun, May 14, 2009. David Zurawik: “He plays an unscrupulous attorney facing disbarment unless he goes back to school and earns an authentic undergraduate degree rather than the bogus one he had been passing himself off with.”

No, we are not going to bug Mr. Zurawik about ending a sentence with a preposition. At Knucklerap Corner we recognize that the prohibition against that has eroded so much that it’s okay to do it. “Passing himself off with” is what drew the foul. You pass yourself off as something you are not. And you get away with fraud. He seems to have conflated the two idioms.

Washington Times, June 18, 2009. Stephen Dinan and Christina Bellantoni: “If confirmed, he likely would face questions during a Senate confirmation hearing over how his nomination would square with the military’s policies on gays – though as a civilian position, he would not run afoul of the policy.”

He isn’t a civilian position; he’s a civilian.

USA Today, August 4, 2009. Gregg Zoroya: “War and separation is historically hard on families.”

No doubt he meant the separation caused by war, but still – if they are presented as two things, they need “are” not “is.”

thedailybeast.com, July 19, 2009. Caryn James: “But the film gains a sharper-than-ever edge as the fumbling turns sinister, as active deception on both the British and American sides manipulate the path to war.”

“As” is being overused, to be sure, but that’s not a grammatical error. For the sentence to be grammatically correct, “manipulate” has to become “manipulates.” The “active deception” manipulates the path to war. On second thought, does it? A path is not really that manipulable. Metaphor doesn’t work.

# # #

Dangle Alley: Where Modifiers Roam the Streets Forlornly

American Conservative, September 2009. Bill Kauffman: “Like Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges, Oates’s films in these years were consistently interesting -- soulful, often literate contrasts to the brain sludge for cretins that fills theaters today.”

It is Warren Oates who is said to be like Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges, not “Oates’s films.”

# # #

Helping Helprin

New York Times, May 20, 2007. Mark Helprin: “Booksellers that publish their own titles benefit not from escaping the author’s copyright, but the previous publisher’s exercise of a grant of rights (limited, authors take note, to 35 years).”

The word “not” is misplaced. Parallelism demands that it go like this: Booksellers benefit from escaping, not the author’s copyright, but the previous publisher’s exercise of a grant of rights.

That was from an op-ed that Mr. Helprin expanded into a book called Digital Barbarism, which contains this sentence: “He did not share with those who now wrongly expropriate him a contempt for what they would call the bourgeoisie.”

He was speaking of Jefferson and he meant appropriate, not expropriate. Diction error.

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Got a mistake or infelicity to report? Send it to: info@gothamghostwriters.com

 

Weiner, a Gotham team member, is a speechwriter for the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

So Long, Uncle Walter

By Mark Frankel

I wonder how Walter Cronkite would have responded to the tsunami of coverage and commentary sparked by his death last week at 92. Certainly, his obituary earned its place above the fold on The New York Times. (To anyone under 40: That’s a newspaper term, referring to its placement on the top-half of the front page). My guess is he would have expressed wry bemusement at the heaps of low-calorie pontificating and punditry his death inspired. He always regarded himself as simply a reporter doing his job.

But make no mistake: Presenting the news from the anchor’s chair on The CBS Evening News during two of the most volatile, combustible decades in recent American history, Cronkite was a journalistic—and ultimately national—institution.

His privileged spot as one of the handful of men (yes, they were all men) heading up one of the three networks’ evening news shows made him a dinner guest (or after-dinner speaker, if you ate before 7 p.m.) in millions of homes, five nights a week. In an era when Americans were hungry, desperate, for facts—about the confusing and unwinnable war in VietNam; about the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr; or the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon—he supplied them in a sonorous, Midwestern baritone that so many people prefer their news (and late-night monologues) to be delivered in.

Yet, unlike today’s parachuting anchors, whose presence on the scene signifies an unfolding Big Story, Cronkite never portrayed himself as somehow bigger than the events he covered.

No one who has come of age since 1981, the year Cronkite retired and a few years before the networks commenced their slow, unrelenting slide into irrelevance, can truly comprehend the social sway that the Big Three network news anchors once wielded. (Though as someone whose father and brother worked at NBC News for decades, I’d like to loyally point out that Cronkite only fully inherited the mantle of “Walter Cronkite” after The Huntley-Brinkley Report, the dominant news broadcast for most of the 1960s, went dark in 1970, when Chet Huntley retired.)

To a degree unimaginable today, the network anchors once set the national conversation. While Woodward and Bernstein became folk heroes for uncovering Watergate in Washington Post, it was Cronkite, in his role as CBS Evening News managing editor, who decided to devote 14-minutes—an eternity-plus-a-day of time, in broadcasting terms, then as well as now—to explaining the scandal and its full implications, to his TV audience. Doing so, Cronkite boosted public awareness of Watergate to a new level, and bestowed upon a flagging newspaper story new legs and significance.

Ditto for his 1968 broadcast that labeled the VietNam War unwinnable, and urged Washington to negotiate with Hanoi and the Viet Cong. Afterwards, Lyndon Johnson fretted to an aide, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

For the life of me I can’t imagine Barack Obama saying the same thing about either Charlie Gibson or Brian Williams.


Mark Frankel is a former Marketing Leader of Communications at Mastercard Advisors.