Rhetorical Magician

Sidney Blumenthal does a nice job of deconstructing Clinton's speech and I think gets to the heart of why it worked. Clinton has a natural instinct for framing an argument.

By means of rhetorical alchemy, Clinton transformed himself into no less than Bush: Like Bush, he pointed out that he was a dodger of military service in Vietnam and a rich man gaining lucrative tax benefits instead of sacrificing along with everyone else during a war. Clinton played on Clinton hatred by turning it on its head, a magic act performed with deadpan delivery. The audience was in on the joke from the beginning.

Clinton disdained the very idea of personal attack through a humorous aside: 'And you might remember that when I was in office, on occasion, the Republicans were kind of mean to me. But as soon as I got out and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. It was amazing. I never thought I'd be so well cared for by the president and the Republicans in Congress.' By making himself his own straw man, Clinton could ridicule at will. The greater the self-deprecation, the deeper the stiletto thrust in Bush.


I would be very interested in hearing Clinton's thoughts on political rhetoric. He's awfully good at it -- and reading the moment in which it's delivered -- and yet I've never heard him speak at any length about it. Maybe it's not something he can actually explain. But, nonetheless, aspiring politicians should definitely study what he does. He's the best in my lifetime.

And speaking of Clinton, No More Mr Nice Blog helpfully spares me the necessity of writing this post (which I had put off and am now glad I did.) When I read Gary Wills' generally good review of My Life, I too was astounded by his assertion that had Gore taken office following Clinton's impeachment and conviction that he would have had a honeymoon and transformed the debate in the liberal direction because that's what happened to Lyndon Johnson.

Hah! Maybe on the moon, but here on planet earth, Republicans don't give honeymoons anymore --- they go for the jugular. Where does this wide eyed credulity come from?

NMMNB correctly asks:

Is Wills nuts?

Look, you don't have to believe that the Republicans would have tried to impeach Gore if they'd succeeded in driving Clinton from office -- although Wills's NYRB colleague Elizabeth Drew, unlike Wills a full-time Washington reporter, insisted at the time that that was the case. You just have to look at the GOP's behavior throughout the Clinton presidency, starting long before the Republicans attained a majority in both Houses of Congress. Alan Ehrenhalt nailed it in a 1998 op-ed:

It was on Election Night 1992, not very far into the evening, that the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, hinted at the way his party planned to conduct itself in the months ahead: it would filibuster any significant legislation the new Democratic President proposed, forcing him to obtain 60 votes for Senate passage.

...it worked. Little that the President proposed became law in the two years that he operated with Democratic majorities. There was no health care reform, no economic stimulus package.... the procedural consequences turned out to be grave: Congressional Republicans were tempted by success into even more dangerous constitutional mischief.

In the fall of 1995, emboldened by new majorities in both the House and the Senate, they forced the closure of the Federal Government. For all the millions of words that have been written about this event then and since, the reality of it has rarely been portrayed in succinct terms. This was not a political showdown -- it was an attempted constitutional coup....


And on and on into the serial fishing expeditions that led to Clinton's impeachment.


I don't know what is wrong with Gary Wills that he still hasn't figured it out, but I certainly hope that most Democrats have. The Republican party does not play by any rules. It is foolish to ever think otherwise.