Saturday, June 17, 2023

SOME ELOQUENCE MIGHT HELP

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore wonders why so many Americans continue to believe that President Biden is doing a bad job:
... you could argue that life has been getting better in the USA overall, as Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher did recently....

Actually, notes Scher, the “inflation rate for May is down to 4 percent, less than half of the June 2022 peak.” Illegal border crossings “have dropped by 70 percent in the last few weeks, according to the Department of Homeland Security, after Biden implemented a new border-management policy.”
And as for crime, Scher writes:
"Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022,” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher, writing in The Atlantic.... That follows a 4 percent drop in homicides in 2022 from the prior year, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis of data from 35 cities. ...

Another set of promising data comes from the Violent Crime Survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which looked at data from 70 cities. During the first quarter of 2023, homicides, rapes, and robberies dropped about 8 percent from the first quarter of 2022.
Kilgore makes an obvious point:
Most Americans do not follow monthly inflation, crime, or border-crossing statistics. They experience inflation through more expensive bills, less abundant grocery purchases, and delayed big-ticket investments; crime through if-it-bleeds-it-leads local news broadcasts and major events like mass shootings; immigration through vivid images of people in migrant camps or the frequency with which they hear foreign languages spoken in their own communities.
Eventually, they might feel the improvement. But in the meantime:
Clearly Team Biden needs to do a better job of getting the recent good news out to members of his own party and persuadable independents.

... pushing back when Biden haters pretend the country is going straight to hell is probably a good idea for Democrats. A swing voter might hear them.
Under these circumstances, I wish we had a president who was a good public speaker. Or a vice president.

In their first terms, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton struggled in the polls, but at this point in their terms, their numbers were ahead of Biden's now. I think their ability to speak well reassured at least some wary voters that they were strong and trustworthy, and that put a floor under their poll numbers.

Smart people reject the notion that speeches or statements by a president can make a difference. I accept the idea that, in a specific political battle, even a great speech won't make a difference. But over the course of an administration, I think many voters respond to eloquence and connect it with competence. You can win a second term if you're not eloquent -- George W. Bush did -- but it's harder. And when Bush poll numbers fell in his second term, they never recovered.

Eloquence is probably too much to ask of Joe Biden, who was never a great speaker and has become more likely to stumble verbally as he ages. But he did a good job on this year's State of the Union address. He must have regarded that as an important moment and put more effort into it. I wish he'd do that more often. I wish someone he trusted could persuade him that his not-very-serious approach to public speaking is hurting him now.

And with all due respect to Vice President Harris, I wish she could be persuaded to take seriously some of the criticism that's directed at her -- not because she's doing a bad job, but because the perception that she's doing a bad job spreads to people who aren't even paying attention, just because it's conventional wisdom. People think she's a bad VP because they hear that other people think she's a bad VP. Or maybe they hear that her every utterance is "word salad," and maybe someone directs their attention to a cherry-picked video clip or two with hard-to-follow sentences full of corporate-speak, and they believe she must be incompetent if she sounds like that when she talks.

Is it sexist or racist to suggest that Harris could use some help in this area? I don't think so. Roger Ailes taught communication skills to two white males, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, who went on to win presidential elections. Bush also got help on his convention speech from -- don't laugh -- the most effective political speechwriter of the era, Peggy Noonan. She wrote lines for Bush that are wince-inducing now, but were plain, direct, and widely quoted at the time: "a thousand points of light," "a kinder, gentler nation," "I'm a quiet man, but I hear the quiet people others don't." Surely there's a Democratic speechwriter who can earn Harris's trust and bring directness and vividness to her speeches.

On the subject of extemporaneous remarks, I think about this anecdote from a 2004 New York Times Magazine story about Al Franken:
... when [Howard] Dean seemed the inevitable [Democratic presidential] nominee before a single primary vote had been cast, Franken was troubled that John Kerry was being written off. "I liked Dean, but I also think Kerry is just a really smart, capable man," he told me. "I'd noticed that he was very good in a small gathering, so I thought, What if I invite some opinion makers over to hear him?" On Dec. 4, an impressive collection of the media elite and assorted other notables -- Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, Frank Rich of The New York Times, Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, Jim Kelly of Time, Jeff Greenfield of CNN, Eric Alterman of The Nation, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, Jacob Weisberg of Slate and others, including, as éminence grise, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. -- responded to his call and had a little powwow with Kerry at the Upper West Side apartment of Franken and his wife, Franni.

"The whole thing was odd, I would say, because people didn't know why they were there," Kelly said. "But I think the idea was to put John Kerry into the belly of the beast. It may have been the actual beginning of the new approach he took -- 'I'm going to stay in this room and take every question you throw at me.'" Alterman grilled Kerry on his vote on Iraq, and he gave a long, tortured answer. Then he was asked about it a second time. "By the third go-round, the answer was getting shorter and more relevant," Kelly said....

The next time Franken saw Kerry was at the rally in Nashua, seven weeks later. Things had changed significantly; Kerry was considered a new and improved candidate and now looked almost unbeatable.
(Emphasis added.)

Here's a white male politician who learned to hone his answers. No one would say that Kerry became a great speaker, but he recognized that there was room for improvement, and he made himself better. He almost went on to win that election.

I think if Harris could accept that there's no shame in improving your skills even at this level of politics, she could change the way she's perceived, which might give swing voters more confidence in Harris herself, and the Biden-Harris ticket. That would be a good thing.

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