President Obama's victory speech & the return of rhetoric

It's four years since I posted 'Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech' (HERE), based on a line-by-line analysis of a piece that was originally commissioned by the Independent on Sunday. It is still by far the most frequently read post of the 961 that have appeared on this blog since it first started.

Now we have another victory speech to analyse, which will obviously take time to complete. In the meantime, this fascinating article from The Washington Post is well worth reading:

Obama’s victory speech: Behind the return of the president’s rhetoric
Posted by Ezra Klein on November 7, 2012 at 2:31 am

Judging from Twitter, President Obama’s rousing victory speech left most everyone with the same question: Where’s that guy been during the 2012 campaign?

There’s an answer to that question. The Obama campaign pored through the focus groups and the polls and came to believe that though voters were disappointed with Obama, they didn’t really hold the disappointments of the last few years against him. They figured no one could have delivered the kind of hope and change Obama had promised against an economy this bad, a Republican Party this intransigent, a world this dangerous.

But if they were willing to cut Obama some slack, they weren’t willing to let him make the same promises a second time. It was understandable that Obama couldn’t change Washington, but it was only forgivable so long as he stopped promising to change Washington. Fool me once, and all that.

The Obama campaign found that their key voters were turned off by soaring rhetoric and big plans. They’d lowered their expectations, and they responded better when Obama appeared to have lowered his expectations, too. And so he did. The candidate of hope and change became the candidate of modest plans and achievable goals. Rather than stopping the rise of the oceans — which sounded rather more fantastical before Sandy — Obama promised to train more teachers and boost manufacturing jobs.

What you saw tonight, however, was that Obama didn’t much like being that guy. He still wants to be the guy he was in 2008. He still wants to inspire and to unite. He still wants Americans to feel that the arc of history is bending under their pressure.  He still wants to talk about climate change and election reform and other problems that the Senate is not especially eager to solve.

This has been the tension at the center of the Obama White House for four years now. Hope and change don’t go together. The legislative process doesn’t leave people feeling very hopeful. But it’s the only mechanism the president really has to make change.

Tonight, however, President Obama wasn’t trying to get 60 votes in the Senate or to swing a few undecideds in Ohio. Tonight, he had finished the long grind of his last campaign, but he hadn’t begun the hard work of his second term. Tonight, he could be the candidate of both hope and change, if only for a little while.

Clegg's reply to the Tory rebels weakened by lack of rehearsal

As a former MEP who has worked for an EU commissioner, Nick Clegg is obviously better informed about Europe than most of our MPs.

Given yesterday's anti-EU vote in the House of Commons, it was therefore quite fortunate that he was booked to speak this morning at the Chatham House think-tank on international affairs - even if there wasn't much time to write much of a critique in time for today.

What a pity, then, that the Deputy Prime Minister didn't allow more time to rehearse what he wanted to say a few times before he said it. Had he done so, he wouldn't have had to spend so much time looking down at his script and might have even have managed a rather livelier and less 'wooden' delivery...

"I couldn't wash his smell away" - Jimmy Savile's great niece

This interview is not pleasant listening, but it does give a sense of what it must have been like to have been been one of Jimmy Savile's victims - and how remarkably easy it was for him to get away with such flagrant abuse.

Blacking the names of Adam Boulton, Jeremy Paxman & the American judicial system

From time to time this blog features interviews in which the conduct of the interviewer or the interviewee (or both) are of special or unusual interest.

This week, Conrad Black sparred with Adam Boulton of Sky News and Jeremy Paxman of BBC Newsnight, both on the pretext of plugging his new book.

If you missed these two gems, here they both are:



In both cases, 'sparred' was the operative word. Few of those interviewed by Boulton have to ask him what his name is and Paxman doesn't often get accused of 'bourgeois priggishness'.



American readers may be specially impressed Lord Black's views on the US judicial system, which starts about 42 seconds in and features some interesting statistics:

"...99.5 % of prosecutions in the US are convicted. The whole system's a fraudulent fascistic conveyer belt to the corrupt prison system, that's what. Let me tell you something. 5% of the population of the world are Americans, 25% of the incarcerated people are and 50% of the lawyers are... six to twelve times as many incarcerated people as Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan. How do YOU explain that?"

10 OTHER UNUSUAL INTERVIEWS FROM MY ARCHIVES

• Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule
• A Labour leader with no interest in spin!
• A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question
• The day Mrs Thatcher apologised (twice) for what she'd said in an interview
• A prime minister who openly refused to answer Robin Day's questions
• 'Here today, gone tomorrow' politician walks out of interview with Robin Day
• The day Mandelson walked out of an interview rather than answer a question about Gordon Brown
• Mandelson gives two straight answers to tow of Paxman's questions
• Two more straight answers from Mandelson - about failed coups and the PM's rages
• Rare video clip of a politician giving 5 straight answers to 5 consecutive questions

Why did the BBC's Director General keep nodding in agreement with himself?

Watching George Entwistle giving evidence to the House of Commons select committee on culture media and sport reminded me of something my late sister-in-law used to do, the meaning of which we never managed to work out.

Sometimes, she would mark the end of what she'd just said with a rather emphatic "Hmmm!". The nearest we got was that it meant something like "that's it and I don't want to be asked anything else about it" - because we all took it as indicating something final about her comment on which she'd rather not have any more discussion thank you very much.

My followers on Twitter may have noticed that I became rather preoccupied (and seriously distracted) this morning with Mr Entwistle's obsession with nodding in agreement with what he'd just said (e.g. 28 and 1:06 seconds in the above). It wasn't just that he did it occasionally, but did it after almost every 'answer' to every question.

It may have been his way of telling the committee that he'd no more to say on that particular matter, but suggestions and/or enlightenment from readers would be very welcome.

This sequence also includes the only question of the morning that prompted raucous laughter from those in the room (about 1:10 seconds in). It prompted an embarrassed-looking grin from the Director General, and was enough to prompt one contributor to Twitter to describe it as 'humiliating'.