Commenter Charlieford wants to put this to the EotAW community.
Last week I read a blog entry by a friend slamming Obama for, among other things, being our TOTUS, “Teleprompter of the United States.” He was offended by Obama’s use of a script (apparently) during his televised tribute to Walter Cronkite. Like a lot of conservatives, he was quick to pile on the criticisms—the delivery was cold and emotionless, not “from the heart,” the speech may not even have been written by Obama, and it included “large words embedded into the speech to ensure that only half of the Americans who heard the speech would understand it.”
That last one didn’t sound at all right and I went back and re-listened to the speech. I didn’t notice anything egregiously arcane or overly sophisticated in his vocabulary. I asked the author what had offended him in that regard, and he didn’t have a convincing response. Initially I concluded that he had simply over-reached, but now I think he was really imputing, without realizing it, his general reaction to Obama’s presidential discourse to this particular speech.
What makes me think so is watching Obama’s impromptu address on Gates-gate, or, more specifically, his comments on his earlier intervention (“stupidly”) in the affair. It also gave me a theory on Obama’s tendency to rely on a teleprompter.
The Cronkite speech, which he does seem to be reading, is a humble piece of oratory. A middle-of-the-road, ultimately forgettable, presidential testimonial on an occasion of national grief. It’s forgettability is entirely appropriate, I think (I tend to cringe when the rhetoric gets too poetic, as with Reagan’s Challenger address, or anytime anyone speaks about ceremonies of innocence being drowned).
But look at his impromptu, unscripted, comments on Gates-gate, this past Friday, keeping in mind the above-mentioned blogger’s sensitivity to “large words.” In comments that took a little more than five minutes to deliver, Obama uses the following terms: ratcheting, calibrated, maligning, resolve, garnered, extrapolate, fraught, teachable-moment, portfolio.
I submit to you that some or all of these terms are on the periphery of, perhaps even entirely outside, the familiar universe of discourse of most self-proclaimed “ordinary” Americans. You know, the kind that live in West Virginia and environs. The kind that voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries.
(I would also argue that the general tone of the comments—with its nuanced approach to the whole matter, self-aware and self-critical, calling on everyone involved, including himself, to step back, reflect, think deeper about it all—didn’t exactly embody the typical attitudes that class of Americans are attracted to, but that’s another discussion.)
What I’d like to hypothesize now is this: that Obama, alumnus of Columbia and Harvard, Obama the former professor of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago, above all, Obama the reader, lapses into a style of speaking that is susceptible to the criticism of being overly-sophisticated, even borderline incomprehensible, to ordinary Americans. And that he uses the teleprompter, not so he can deliver high-flying rhetoric, but so he can ratchet it down.1
We all have various ways of navigating these difficulties. Some of us simply give up reaching the ordinary folk. We find ourselves, deliberately or by accident, moving almost entirely in circles made up of educated people. Our exchanges with the ordinary folk occur primarily in the vicinity of a cash-register. Politicians don’t have that luxury. Some, particularly those from the South, have an almost preternatural ability to slip back and forth between discourses, from the vulgate to educated-ese with barely a hiccup, depending on the audience. Obama’s strategy, I’m guessing, is to write out what he wants to say, which allows him to calibrate his language, uh, more felicitously.
1Nice, Charlie—ed.
45 comments
July 27, 2009 at 9:39 am
Carl
That’s a good call. I suspect he may be guarding against two default codes: high academic and street, which is his default informal when he’s feeling like cool is called for.
July 27, 2009 at 9:52 am
Carl
“I didn’t notice anything egregiously arcane or overly sophisticated in his vocabulary.”
Indubitably, his diction was lexically jejune. I’m just sayin’.
July 27, 2009 at 10:27 am
ari
Great post. You should blog more often.
July 27, 2009 at 10:49 am
macon d
Thank you, interesting post, and convincing to me. Like, totally.
July 27, 2009 at 10:51 am
grackle
“…calibrate his language, uh, more felicitously.”
speak more simply and clearly?
Great post in a nice speculative genre.
July 27, 2009 at 10:53 am
Charlieford
Thanks guys. Carl, you may be right–he’s as comfortable on the basketball court as he is in the study, it appears.
July 27, 2009 at 12:00 pm
George Tirebiter
I voted for hillary in the NY primary. But then I only have a Master’s degree.
July 27, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Barry
“Last week I read a blog entry by a friend slamming Obama for, among other things, being our TOTUS, “Teleprompter of the United States.” He was offended by Obama’s use of a script (apparently) during his televised tribute to Walter Cronkite. Like a lot of conservatives, he was quick to pile on the criticisms—the delivery was cold and emotionless, not “from the heart,” the speech may not even have been written by Obama, and it included “large words embedded into the speech to ensure that only half of the Americans who heard the speech would understand it.””
To me, his complaints (BTW, where is that blog? On the Secrenet?) are pure Freudian projection; a classic right-wing dishonest technique:
(a) I’d love to have heard Bush without a teleprompter. His first language was definitely not English.
(b) Hasn’t your friend ever heard of speechwriters? Ever heard of Frum, Gerson?
(c) Not from the heart? Bush’s trademark was heartstring-tugging BS.
(d) Codewords? How about right-wing evangelical codewords?
July 27, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Li'l Abnor
In defense of the little people, a lot of us use a ratchet now and then and can put two and two together when the President gets high falootin about what it does.
Is it possible that the word “ratchet” seems to you to be on the periphery of, perhaps even entirely outside, the familiar universe of discourse of most self-proclaimed “ordinary” Americans because you gentlefolks don’t know what a dang ratchet is?
While calibrated, maligning, resolve, garnered, extrapolate, fraught, and portfolio aren’t used south of the tracks, resolved is familiar to quite a few proud honyockers.
And Obama didn’t say “teachable-moment”, whatever that ugly construct might signify, but “what’s called a teachable moment.” Some of us put two and two together on that one too.
As Obama might imply, this may be a good time to to step back, reflect, think deeper about this all— even if it doesn’t exactly embody the typical attitudes that a certain class of Americans are attracted to.
July 27, 2009 at 12:26 pm
jazzbumpa
What strikes me about everything from the right wing – and I won’t call them conservatives, because they aren’t – is that their default position is a mindless knee-jerk against. Against what doesn’t matter in the slightest. If it comes from Obama, it must be denigrated: manner of speech, SCOTUS nominee, heath care reform concept, budget proposal . . . yadda, yadda.
All they care about is being against. They have no alternatives, no character, and no integrity.
July 27, 2009 at 12:44 pm
aschup
I would submit that this friend is not representative of “ordinary Americans,” whatever the hell that means, but rather has been conditioned by endless wanking punditry to equate ordinary with stupid and intelligence with elitism. This post inadvertently seems to fall victim to the same thing. This:
I submit to you that some or all of these terms are on the periphery of, perhaps even entirely outside, the familiar universe of discourse of most self-proclaimed “ordinary” Americans. You know, the kind that live in West Virginia and environs. The kind that voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries.
is bordering on Chris Matthews/Timmeh Russert-level condescension. I suppose it’s not incorrect, though, given how pervasive (big words!) the elitism/normal Americans meme has become in our political discourse.
July 27, 2009 at 12:47 pm
jmb
Conservatives dislike a president because he is “borderline incomprehensible” to most Americans. . . Surely there is some irony here?
July 27, 2009 at 1:21 pm
dana
Do these guys think that all the other Presidents gave off the cuff speeches? Charlieford makes some interesting points, but I’m still stuck on the idea that it’s somehow remarkable that a politician sometimes gives prepared remarks.
July 27, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Ahistoricality
Politicians don’t have that luxury.
Neither do teachers. I got some very negative comments on my “highbrow” vocabulary in my first few semesters teaching. My fix was not to eliminate the high-level vocabulary, but to add a rephrasing tic, so when I catch myself using a term my students might not understand I follow up with an almost identical phrase replacing it with another, more common expression meaning (as close as I can get to) the same thing.
If I had speechwriters and teleprompters, I could do it the other way, but my budget request ….
July 27, 2009 at 1:33 pm
DaKooch
Although I’m sensitive to your concern for that “anti-intellectual” streak out there, one would think that the last administration did much to disabuse many that “any idiot” can run this country. Nuthin’ wrong with a bit of the professor creeping into the Presidential vocabulary. What we need is a “no American left behind” administration with some raised expectations for the electorate. Anyone track dictionary sales lately?
July 27, 2009 at 1:37 pm
aschup
Ahistoricality, just curious: did any of the comments give specific examples of what was unacceptably “highbrow”? And what sorts of phrases did you end up retooling?
July 27, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Gabriel
Do these guys think that all the other Presidents gave off the cuff speeches? Charlieford makes some interesting points, but I’m still stuck on the idea that it’s somehow remarkable that a politician sometimes gives prepared remarks.
If only there were something different about this President that caused some people to search for reasons why his eloquent words must have come from somewhere else…
July 27, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Charlieford
All of these strike me as fair-ish points. The ambiguity of “ordinary Americans” is a real problem, of course–famously so. And the porous border between “ordinaries” and the actually-far-from ordinary gentlemen who claim to speak for them is another difficulty.
I don’t deny any of that, of course, but sometimes you need to just move past those questions, otherwise you’ll never get to anything else. It’s kind of like how historians deal with epistemology: we don’t deny there are real issues there, but there’s already a team assigned to work on those.
If anyone wants to write “A Prolegomena to a Critique of the Phenomenology of Pure Ordinariness,” I’d love to read it.
My own elevation of these “ordinaries” to a place of centrality in this entry makes my move more dubious, perhaps, but that’s why I put the term in quotes, and qualified it with a “self-proclaimed.” (Amazing how much you can hide under those tents.)
My father dropped out of school in 1933, and the older guys in my neighborhood were generally from similar backgrounds, but I never heard them calling themselves “ordinary” with the implication that that meant “real American.” Nowadays we have people who are paid to tell them to think exactly that.
I will reiterate though, that however bogus much of this is, it is out there, and, as Ahistoricality points out, it does have some points of purchase on what at least seem to be un-astro-turfy attitudes. I’d be surprised if anyone in higher education hadn’t encountered it at one time or another.
July 27, 2009 at 2:47 pm
bitchphd
Just to prove how fair-minded we liberal elitists are, I want to note that I’ve been having similar thoughts about the criticisms of Palin’s transcripts as having too many exclamation points, too many words in all caps, whatever. My guess is that, weird syntax and illogic aside, those are the marks of a text prepared for *reading*, and that the caps and exclamation points and wonky punctuation probably signal pacing and emphasis.
July 27, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Ben Alpers
If only there were something different about this President that caused some people to search for reasons why his eloquent words must have come from somewhere else…
FTW
July 27, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Zora
For a few months, I had a clerical job at the-law-office-from-hell. I made the mistake of using the word “eschew” in a note. The office manager scolded me, accused me of trying to intimidate the lawyers, and ordered me not to use any words that they didn’t know.
Fact.
July 27, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Li'l Abnor
Dang, you still don’t get it.
It’s kind of like how historians deal with epistomology, if you axe me. Not to mention I dropped out of school in 1964, or was it 1965? Or maybe it was 1933. WTF?
To me the interesting story is why the blog owner forworded this bullshit up into the blog.
When I was in the UC system, UC Davis was understood to be the college of the agricultural goobers, and whatever history professors had been foisted off on the ag school had to know a little bit about prune culture and a little bit about prune culturalists, starting with the fact that they weren’t illiterate. Nobody would have written a post about this class or that class knowing the words that I learned while I was not learning how to adjust my valves or doing whatever else it is that lower Americans do.
Sorry, folks, but this discussion is the worst sort of reverse-gooberism that I’ve ever seen, starting from the initial forwarded post, which should never have been forwarded. You should all give poor Charlieford the benefit of the doubt and let it die the death it deserves.
July 27, 2009 at 6:18 pm
dana
Charlieford, I think you might be overstating the elite/”real American” divide. Those are fancier words, but a mechanic surely knows how to calibrate a meter. Maybe even with his ratchet.
But seriously, I think to the extent your theory is plausible, it’s not in that the President’s default dialect is too high-falutin’ for the masses, but that his default mode is “law prof” which can be wordy and dull. Not necessarily bad, but not good for off the cuff remarks and soundbites.
July 27, 2009 at 6:20 pm
kevin
Great post.
I’m always stunned by the snickering over the teleprompter, as if there haven’t been countless examples — in debates, in Q&A, in town hall meetings — of the felicity that Obama has with facts and figures, as well as figures of speech.
I think part of it is the pent-up anger conservatives have over the mockery that liberals made of Bush and Palin’s multitude of issues with the English language. They’re desperately looking to find the same fault with Obama.
Which is odd, because Joe Biden is just sitting there.
July 27, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Ahistoricality
Ahistoricality, just curious: did any of the comments give specific examples of what was unacceptably “highbrow”? And what sorts of phrases did you end up retooling?
It’s funny, aschup, because I do it on the fly and I don’t really have a list. There weren’t any specific examples in the feedback (the cynical side of me notes that if they’d been able to spell the words, they probably would have known them and not been botherd by them, but that’s mean. Probably true, but mean.) but my general rule starts with any word I didn’t use regularly before I went to grad school — historiography, early modern, axial, syncretic, periphery, etc. — and foreign language terms which I use because they don’t translate neatly — shoen, daimyo, kampaku.
After that, it’s a bit haphazard, a combination of self-consciousness, instinct and trying to keep an eye on the faces in the room. But I haven’t had a complaint about my language use in years, so I must be doing something right.
July 27, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Charlieford
Great anecdote Zora. That story fits what I’m talking about perfectly.
The emotion that accompanies these exchanges can take you a little aback the first time.
I once had someone go a little nuts on me for using the word “allay” (she was the unemployed wife of an undertaker, for those of you keeping score). She insisted it wasn’t a word. I said of course it is. She got the dictionary.
Blamed the dictionary.
I was also surprised one day in class, Ahist., to find that 100% of the students had no idea what the word “affluent” meant.
dana, I hear you. But, as I thought I made clear by saying “above all, Obama the reader,” it’s reading, not degrees earned, wealth accumulated or occupations held, that draws the line I’m interested in.
July 27, 2009 at 7:56 pm
aschup
Zora, my dictionary says “eschew” is of Germanic origin. Your office manager probably threw a shit fit because it is not an arcane, oft-mispronounced legal phrase of dubious Latinate origins.
July 27, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Ahistoricality
I was also surprised one day in class, Ahist., to find that 100% of the students had no idea what the word “affluent” meant.
It happens, yeah.
It gets even worse when you start tossing historical documents at them, even (especially!) ones originally in English. I was working through a bit of JS Mill with them last year and it was like I’d given them a text in Esperanto. That really threw me: I know he’s a bit hard to read, but I never really thought that the vocabulary was the issue.
Speaking of which, I gotta get to my syllabi…..
July 27, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Charlieford
“Speaking of which, I gotta get to my syllabi…..”
You said the s-word? In July?
July 27, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Carl
At least it’s just one – I believe according to current consensus usage “syllabi” is singular. Like “alumni.”
July 27, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Ahistoricality
“syllabi” is singular. Like “alumni.”
Quis concubitus?
July 28, 2009 at 1:38 am
ajay
Charlie, do you really believe that a significant number of ordinary Americans don’t know the meaning of the word “ratchet”? Or “resolve”?
July 28, 2009 at 4:26 am
dana
I gotcha, Charlie, but I think I still disagree. It’s not that ordinary Americans don’t understand twenty-five cent words, or that they’ve never encountered (most of) them, but that it’s not the word that would instantly come to mind were they expressing the same sentiment themselves.
My guess is that, weird syntax and illogic aside, those are the marks of a text prepared for *reading*, and that the caps and exclamation points and wonky punctuation probably signal pacing and emphasis.
This, too.
July 28, 2009 at 7:54 am
Charlieford
ajay, I guess one could assume that “some or all of these terms are on the periphery of, perhaps even entirely outside, the familiar universe of discourse,” is merely a wordy way of saying “don’t know the meaning of.” Or, we could assume it’s a way of saying something slightly more nuanced.
July 28, 2009 at 10:37 am
Davis X. Machina
That really threw me: I know he’s [J.S. Mill] a bit hard to read, but I never really thought that the vocabulary was the issue.
It’s the syntax, and the sentence structure, and the style of the argument, and not the vocab per se. Sven Burkhardt tells the same story about teaching Henry James’ fiction in the Gutenburg Elegies, with a plausible explanation why the words themselves aren’t the issue.
July 28, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Davis X. Machina
Sven Birkets. No one over fifty should ever quote from memory…
July 28, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Vance
Birkerts. And I can believe it about James: the vocabulary is actually quite deliberately casual, long stretches of short common words dotted with archly highlighted slang and only the occasional ten-dollar word — while the syntax is idiosyncratic in the extreme. (Particularly once he started dictating.)
July 28, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Ahistoricality
It’s the syntax, and the sentence structure, and the style of the argument, and not the vocab per se.
I expected them to have trouble with Mills’ syntax and style: that’s why I gave them a short excerpt and was going over it with them in class. But they were having trouble with a lot more of the vocabulary than I expected, as well.
July 29, 2009 at 2:34 am
ajay
ajay, I guess one could assume that “some or all of these terms are on the periphery of, perhaps even entirely outside, the familiar universe of discourse,” is merely a wordy way of saying “don’t know the meaning of.” Or, we could assume it’s a way of saying something slightly more nuanced.
I see that clear answers to simple questions are completely outside the periphery of your familiar universe of discourse.
July 29, 2009 at 9:48 am
Charlieford
Alright, ajay, since you’ve insisted, I’ll bite. Leaving aside doubts about how simple the question was, whether the answer wasn’t clear, indeed whether the entire performance is in good faith or not, let’s recall I wasn’t talking about “ordinary” Americans, but “self-proclaimed ‘ordinary'” Americans. These sets are not entirely identical. Who the “ordinary” are, whether that’s an analytically useful category, as I’ve said several times, isn’t my topic (I understand this is inconvenient for some commenters, who insist on making it the topic, but what can I say? My hands are tied.) I used the phrase “self-proclaimed ‘ordinary'” to denote those who object to fancy words and criticize those that use them for being “not one of us” or “elitist” or whatever. Their reactions to a speech from a public figure are, in part, tactical. (See, eg, the original observation the post was jumping off from.) Words that are on the periphery of or entirely outside a “familiar universe of discourse” wouldn’t necessarily be words one is completely clueless as to the meaning of. Rather, they would be words one doesn’t regularly hear or use oneself, or words pulled from one realm and used metaphorically–anything that pushes that certain button. The cumulative effect of words unknown (“extrapolate,” “malign,” perhaps?) and those used metaphorically (“ratchet” perhaps?) with those that merely sound fancy (“resolve,” “calibrate,” perhaps?) in one speech might have the effect of making the entire performance objectionable to these folk. An effective public speaker, I submit, will be aware of this potential effect and take steps to avoid giving that particular offense.
July 29, 2009 at 11:39 am
Ahistoricality
Their reactions to a speech from a public figure are, in part, tactical.
As, I think, was ajay’s response: I thought your reply was perfectly clear.
July 29, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Hal
Since the comparison to Bush has come up…
I haven’t seen the footage myself, but I remember Jim Fallows looking at Bush’s performance in debates…
Ah, here it is. Here’s the quote, talking about Bush’s 1994 debate with Ann Richards:
Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two (“million” when he clearly meant “billion”; “stole” when he meant “sold”), but fewer than most people would in an hour’s debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. “To lay out my juvenile-justice plan in a minute and a half is a hard task, but I will try to do so,” he said fluidly and with a smile midway through the debate, before beginning to list his principles.
The “aw shucks,” “Turdblossom” Bush we saw while he was president may well have been just a man playing a character.
July 29, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Ben Alpers
The “aw shucks,” “Turdblossom” Bush we saw while he was president may well have been just a man playing a character.
I remember that article, too, Hal. I keep meaning to see if I can find a video of that performance to see if Fallows is right (I have no reason to suppose that he isn’t).
If aw shucks Dubya was just a character, I can’t decide if I’m more troubled by Bush’s (and Rove’s) contempt for the American people in concocting such a persona or by the fact that its (at least short-term) success suggests they might have been right about us.
July 29, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Vance
Here’s a video with clips.
July 29, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Vance
Better link to the same video.