Oratory is back

What links Obama and Huckabee? They are both excellent public speakers. Obama's speech tonight was excellent, as many have noted. Edwards gave what I thought was a competent closing argument; his rhetoric is almost always that of the legal profession and is limited by being such. Hillary gave us the stump speech, which seemed especially hollow given the situation. But to return the main point: Obama and Huckabee are both gifted and practiced orators. Oratory of course used to be quite central not only to public life but to civic life; politics were unthinkable without oratory. The last eight years have been remarkable for numerous reasons, but certainly among them would be the fact that we have a president who is not only anti-intellectual but strangely and openly hostile toward language itself.

Granted, one does not really want to listen to all that Jesus business, but Huckabee's oratorical skill has to be acknowledged. I knew the instant I saw him perform in the last debate that he would win Iowa and I actually think it is fantastic that he can compel an audience through speech. I know we should be thinking in terms of the fascist mob but we have drifted so far from the seductions of public oratory -- and his support is still so contained to the ranks of the evangelicals -- that I don't mind the fact that he can quickly and easily captivate an audience of believers and non-believers alike. Without a doubt, he mopped up the floor with Romney and Giuliani. More to the point, Huckabee highlights Romney's plasticity in much the same way that Obama highlights Hillary's falsity. It's not for nothing that Romney and Hillary are both regarded as false, inauthentic, fake, suave, superficial, all surface -- as in fact, "politicians." They have their own inherent qualities that produce these impressions but they are also produced as fake by the contrast with Huckabee and Obama, respectively. [Also, note that both Romney and Hillary are botoxed and injected to the nines. This would of course also cause one to regard them in terms of surface.]

But I think the resurgence of oratory is more interesting: I want to think of it as part of the strong turn away from Bush. It would be fantastic if the recoil were about both form and content, performance and ideology. It would be even more fantastic if it were not just about performance but intellectuality; that is, if the country has realized at last that one does not in fact want a stupid president. How wonderful to think that we might banish all aspects of this idiocracy in just a few months. One dares to dream.