September 23, 2006
Politicians and Eloquence and Wit Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST On Tuesday, Fred Schwarz deprecated the importance of wit and eloquence in American politics. As for eloquence: “Has anyone who made a memorable speech at a convention ever been on the winning side?” As for wit: “It seems to me that wisecracks are rarely an effective way of winning votes from the American public. Adlai Stevenson, a two-time loser, was a famous wit, and in 1988 millions of people repeated or rang changes on Lloyd Bentsen’s putdown of Dan Quayle . . . and then voted for his opponents. Could this be another case of the Regular Guy Theory of Presidential Elections, under which quipsters are seen as too clever by half?” I think this overstates the case. To start at the top, Lincoln’s eloquence was beyond compare. For that matter, when I was a boy Americans still seemed to treasure Lincoln’s wit, and remembered it with advantages: Herndon’s Lincoln was long mistaken for the real one, but a great historian (David Donald) once observed that what Americans choose to believe about Lincoln itself says something interesting about our political culture. If Lincoln represents the triumph of the common man in American democracy—the rise of the rail splitter—the common man must be popularly imagined to have an almost unrivalled command of language (in eloquence Lincoln yields only to Churchill if to anyone at all). And while Lincoln was brilliant by our rhetorical standards as well as those of his own day, nineteenth-century American taste ran to what contemporaries took to be spellbinding oratory, some but not all of which is forgettable today. To again recall my boyhood, we used to memorize bits of Daniel Webster in school, and we thought he was pretty good. FDR was both eloquent and, on occasion, something of a wit (his once-famous defense of his dog Fala springs to mind). His eloquence was of inestimable political importance. Reagan retained enough regard for FDR’s fireside chats to revive them, and Reagan’s occasional flashes of humor served him in very good stead. FDR was not a regular guy, indeed about as far from being a regular guy as you could be. Other evidence? Huey Long really did run as something of a regular guy, but Huey Long was eloquent, in his own idiom, also witty, and that eloquence and wit was part of his strength, a strength so great that it briefly alarmed FDR. JFK was reputed a wit and reputed eloquent. He may not have been either as witty or as eloquent as we believed—political historians can name his speechwriters and some of his joke writers—but that does not belie importance of eloquence and wit in American politics. And JFK was not a regular guy. TV, that notoriously visual medium, plus changes in taste, are widely believed to have reduced the importance of oratory in American politics, but I am not sure that will be true forever. I am not even sure how true it has been in my lifetime. My memory of hearing Clinton, who went in for stemwinders, is that I was always surprised by how impressive he was when speaking to crowds. He reminded me of my recurring reaction to the actor Richard Dreyfus: He was always a lot better than I had remembered. And Clinton won elections.
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