Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (7 page)

Mention John Kennedy and most people will quickly recall the famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” I am not sure why this is so.

To begin with, the line was not his own. It is commonly ascribed to his courtly speechwriter, Ted Sorensen. But even were it really Mr. Kennedy’s, it is still difficult to see why it clots the pages of every modern quotation book and is so often invoked as a touchstone of public eloquence.

It is clumsy, for one thing. “Ask not what your country can do for you” is a very odd sequence in modern English. You don’t run into a lot of “ask nots” these days. “Ask not” is an idiom of a time long gone; it has the feel of the overtly poetic about it, the fake suede of greeting-card prose.

The best we can say of Kennedy/Sorensen is that at least they were trying. Mr. Kennedy was still alert to the
rapidly thinning air of a quite ancient tradition: one that understood that public utterance, especially on ceremonial occasions, should strive for elevation, elegance and dignity. Mr. Kennedy may have been the last major leader in the West to carry that ambition. In his case, it probably survived because he was a leader who grew up under the long shadow of Winston Churchill, one of history’s great word-smiths, a man to whom leadership was inseparable from the ability to fashion speech, to draw from words something of their elemental power to bind and inspire.

The energy with which Mr. Churchill composed his illustrious speeches is common knowledge. So, also, is the care he gave to his studiously offhand or “spontaneous” remarks, jibes and witticisms. One of those same witticisms tells us so: “I’m just preparing my impromptu remarks.” Mr. Churchill represents the end of that great tradition, which is at least as old as the great Latin and Greek orators.

Abraham Lincoln is perhaps his only superior, for his oratory had a lyric and affecting quality that Mr. Churchill’s did not. Mr. Churchill could stir: he was a master of the sonorous and martial mode. Mr. Lincoln could move: much of his language had the subtlety and strange power we associate more with poetry than the platform. Mr. Lincoln was quiet and deep. Mr. Churchill reached for the accents of defiance and glory—as he said himself, to “give the lion’s roar.”

The volumes of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien are
now competing in our nation’s bookstores, but we shall not be going to them to savour or resavour favoured passages from some of their most memorable speeches. That’s because there aren’t any, which is not as dismissive as it sounds. It may still be possible for leaders to write and give great speeches—Vaclav Havel certainly tried during his tenure—but it is getting more difficult with each advancing year. There was no evidence, for instance, of any exertion toward eloquence in this week’s Throne Speech, whose entire elegance was contained in the person who read it.

We are in the culture of the sound bite. We remember of Mr. Mulroney his onslaught against John Turner (“You had a choice, sir …”), just as of Mr. Chrétien we recall a telling and petty riposte (“For me, pepper, I put it on my plate.”) Considering the great number of debates in which these two participated, the number of state occasions during which they spoke, this is a pathetic harvest.

The premiers fare no better. Dalton McGuinty, Jacques Parizeau or Ralph Klein, to take but three large names, may all be remembered in time, but they will not cheat oblivion because they crowded the public mind with imperishable speech.

It is not, by any means, all their fault. Mr. Churchill spoke in an age, despite its horrors, more confident of its public men, and during a time when politics itself still retained some association with noble practice. He could speak the largest of words—such as “honour” and “country”—and
make appeals to the glory of his people, and neither those words nor appeals sounded hollow in his mouth.

Today, the large words have shrunk, and even in their shrunken stature do not fall obligingly from lips that have had them “poll-tested” and “focus-grouped” beforehand. Even in the many debates we have had on Afghanistan, I cannot recall any sentiment expressed touched with the fineness and depth of that most honourable undertaking.

From Lincoln’s day to ours, soapbox to satellite, the means of communication have proliferated. Yet, not even Google will search up a more affecting and noble tribute than a few words spoken at Gettysburg nearly a century and a half ago.

Modern words can blanket the whole world in an instant, and that is as long as most of them will endure. They steal from light nothing but its speed.

The marathon battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination is already one of the great political dramas of our time.

More than any other element, more than money, organization or endorsements, what has carried Mr. Obama from relative obscurity and being a hundred-to-one shot at surviving even a month in the primaries to celebrity and frontrunner status is his ability to speak on a platform. He is the front-runner over … Hillary Clinton!

He has overtaken a household-name candidate who began with every advantage: heaps of money; a set of professionals second to none; a husband regarded as the best
natural politician of his generation; and the expectation of most seasoned observers in the press and elsewhere that the nomination was hers.

This was a lot to displace on the strength of one’s vocal cords.

The phrase we hear most often describing Mr. Obama’s performance is that he connects. And he does. He has reduced the frenetic Chris Matthews of MSNBC, a veteran of the rough game of politics, to exclaim, live on air during an Obama speech, “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

I note, only incidentally, how glad we are that he doesn’t.

Facing what seem to be Mr. Obama’s near-invincible platform skills, Hillary and her camp have adopted a peculiar line of attack. Mr. Obama, she says, is just using words really well, or he’s just making really eloquent speeches, or he has great rhetorical gifts. This is extremely strange, for what is a political campaign except an exercise in verbal persuasion? How is it a vice to be good at the essential task?

In a bathetic pronouncement on this theme, she offered this anecdote: People come up to her and say, “You’re so specific … Why don’t you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up?” This is so tone-deaf it should be in its own one-quotation anthology.

She implies, of course, that she could be a cross between Elmer Gantry and Winston Churchill any time she chooses,
and that only her virtuous addiction to “being specific” holds her back from getting everyone “whooped up.”

She observes that Mr. Obama offers “only words,” while she offers “real solutions.” This is perplexing. How does she, or any politician, retail solutions, real or otherwise, to an audience except through the medium of those despised words? Her criticism of Mr. Obama, a politician, for his acknowledged skill as a speaker is akin to criticizing Wayne Gretzky for his skill in scoring goals. Good hockey players score goals; politicians, the good ones, talk and make speeches very well.

The other bizarre aspect of Ms. Clinton’s protestation is the attempt to imply that her (relative) inarticulateness is actually a screen concealing greater competence. It’s offered, in fact, almost as proof. This is parallel to some hapless goalie trying to persuade a coach that letting all those pucks pass through the net is, actually, an emblem of greater hockey skill than his opposite number who, you know, actually stops them.

Finally, and this point is very true for the United States in particular, to suggest that skill and finesse with language, some sympathy with the evocative and poetical nature of public utterance, is a flaw, is hostile to the legendary example of some of America’s greatest political heroes, is to ignore or deflate what Abraham Lincoln achieved through words, bypass dozens of others from Patrick Henry to William Jennings Bryan to Roosevelt with his fireside chats and Ronald Reagan’s inspired ease with anecdote and humour.

Ms. Clinton, whether she knows it or not, is repudiating the very medium of her trade. A care in the choice of words signals a corresponding respect for the ideas those words embody. A politician that cannot handle language is intrinsically handicapped in his or her capacity. It is George Bush’s one undeniable, and central, weakness as president.

Remember the great mess of Florida in 2000? Al Gore wins popular vote, Bush wins electoral college, and then the recounts and lawsuits, the dimpled ballots and hanging chads, the furiously bespectacled scrutineers peering though
Sherlock Holmes-like magnifying glasses at mutilated ballots, trying to determine the “intent” of the ghostly voter.

Some people said American politics would never get over it.

And here we are today, with a new star ascendant in the American primaries, a wave of young and new voters trooping off to their state contests, all for a black man, a novice senator, whose middle name is “Hussein” and then, for good measure, whose last name is a perfect rhyme for America’s arch-terrorist arch-enemy.

Everything was against the Obama explosion. He was virtually unknown a year ago, and was staring down the long, steel barrel of the most formidable munition in U.S. politics: the great howitzer known as the Clinton machine. He wasn’t so much a candidate as an ornamental distraction. And here we are today, with the first serious black candidate for president ringing up victory after victory, and the Clintons, Hillary and her Exocet husband, are now outfitting their only Alamo for a very last stand in Texas and Ohio.

The American electorate is “turned on” to politics in a way that even the most dewy-eyed optimist in Florida 2000 would not have dared to dream.

Why? In one sense, the answer’s simple. Obama, or the Obama candidacy, is out of the mould. He’s not tiredly or nakedly partisan. He’s not looking over at his opponents, whether Democrats or even Republicans, as if they’re running a branch office of Satan or are “enemies of the state.”
He suggests that politics is not a game played between teams who “own” the game.

All that tedious, empty and inane Bush-hatred, which followed years of visceral contempt for “slick” Willie; the mutual, almost clinical, rages members of one party have for the members of the other—that’s what most of U.S. politics has been: a psychodrama of the hyperpartisans.

Obama, so far, I say again, suggests that something less corrosive, something larger than animosity for the other guy, and something other than the incestuous righteousness of pure partisanship, is the vehicle of politics. His “hope” is just another word for taking politics away from the viciousness of raw ambition and egotistical scrambling as its fundamental drives.

We could learn a bit in Canadian politics from his campaign.

Our politicians should look south, look at the phenomenon of Obama, and, if they are determined to inflict another essentially repetitive election on us this spring, throw away their rote scripts, talking points, wedge issues and prefabricated attacks, all the tired tactics and tired practices of the tired old game, and try something new. Speak their minds, abandon the trumped-up warfare, and—heresy of heresies—think a little less of winning, and a little more of making their politics as large as the country they profess to serve.