Gettysburg regress; the lofty promises and lowly debate of Campaign '92.

The lofty promises and lowly debate of Campaign '92

In the 1962 movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the working-class toff played by Tom Courtney sits with a friend in front of his mother's new TV and watches a British politician deliver a speech. At first they watch blankly, then they giggle. Soon they lower the sound and provide their own audio. "Buh buh buh buh buh buh buh. . . ." They shake their fingers for emphasis, looks of bland concern on their faces. The scene is deeply anti-establishment, and funny.

That, I think, is where the American public is this year as they watch their candidates for high office speak. Buh buh buh. . . .

Rarely has what politicians say been held in such low regard; rarely have books on rhetoric been so prevalent and popular. Why would this be? Perhaps the success of books such as Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg reflects an unmet national yearning for words that are elevated, pertinent, and true, that attempt to persuade and not only assert. No one expects this from the candidates this year, which may have something to do with the air of disappointment that already enclouds the process.

The problem is usually put this way: Isn't it sad that people no longer have faith in politicians? But I think the problem is that the politicians no longer have faith in the people. That's why they patronize voters. It's also why none of our current leaders will be remembered as great. Great leaders trust the people. The people can tell, and eventually trust back. This makes both leadership and followership possible, which makes progress possible.

V

The family values debate--actually, debate is too complimentary a word for the repetition of the words "family" and "values" in recent speeches--has further soured this campaign, and only partly because it has brought out the worst in each party (in the Republicans, prissiness; in the Democrats, lack of seriousness).

What is most obviously missing is a clear definition of terms and meaning. Those who speak of family values tend to do it with soft, muzzy phrases that both lull and confuse. "We believe in the family," and "As far as I'm concerned the family is the number-one building block!" All true, but so what? Democrats believe in the family; they don't have a plank in their platform called Destroy the Waltons. Republicans playing offense are somehow too shy to be explicit; one assumes this is in hopes that the voters will make their own associations, the more unpleasant the better.

When we use words not to clear up but to cloud, we show disrespect for the audience and the issues. I have a friend, a highly sophisticated former government official, who believes that the family values debate is really about this: The Democrats, obligated to various gay rights groups for money and support, will, upon taking the White House, include homosexuals as a minority covered by the nation's civil rights laws, a decision that will inevitably allow the legalization of homosexual marriage.

If my friend is right that this is what we're talking about--by the way, is he? are we?--wouldn't it be helpful to treat this issue, in the manner of the grownups we are, as an area of frank discussion? Mr. Clinton, would you take actions as president that allowed or encouraged legalization of marriage between same-sex homosexuals? If you would, or would not, why? And what would you envision as the implications of such action? Mr. Bush, we put the same questions to you.

To be direct and honest is to show respect; to be indirect and only suggestive is not just subtle but--nasty, creepy, low.

The issue has been undermined by its proponents. It has been reduced to the almost comically pinched, or at least so it seemed when Marilyn Quayle, in an otherwise interesting speech at the Republican convention, boasted that not everyone in her generation took drugs or got sexually obstreperous.

As she said that, I had two thoughts. One--the first, I'm embarrassed to say--was, What dumb politics. Why make every boomer who in the seventies smoked dope, streaked, and approached the barricades of the sexual revolution feel unwelcome? I assume the majority of boomer Republicans did one, maybe two of those. So what? That's what college is for. It's precisely where your ought to

do those things because you would look silly doing them at 40, when you're the president of the Parent Teacher Association.

Also, I may add, since I appear to be on a tear here, that for all our talk as a nation of our marvelous openness and tolerance, we've gotten awfully priggish lately. I don't remember that in the repressed, judgmental fifties anyone thought it fair or pertinent to criticize the Trumans, Luces, and Stevensons for going to speakeasies in 1928. (Most of us would like Harry Truman a little less, not a little more, if we found that, back in prohibition days, he had sniffed and if whiskey was against the law, it would never cross his lips, nor should it those of others.)

The other thought on seeing Marilyn Quayle, and later Newt Gingrich when he suggested Woody Allen would be Clinton's top domestic affairs adviser, was: Isn't it sad that all this delegitimizes a real issue that people are hungry to see confronted and debated (the beginning, one always hopes, of improvement)--the issue of our country's cultural values. Our culture is increasingly violent, vulgar, cynical, and anti-child (or at least anti-childhood), and there is not a parent in America who does not see this and worry about it.

A small example. I grew up in a house where the TV in the living room was always on. At night when the news came on (note to the young: the news used to come on; it didn't always prattle away all day like an unwanted neighbor), we'd pay a little attention to Walter Cronkite, who would tell us CBS's version of what happened that day. We did not know at the time that we were taking part in a wholesome family ritual, but we were. We were understanding our country together and following its history through the news.

When I had a child I looked forward to these TV times. I would say helpful-mommy things like, That's the wind of a hurricane, which is a big storm, and that woman is the Queen of England. Later, I dreamed, I would get to say things like, That's a tax, which is a very wicked thing.

But I cannot watch the TV news with my son. No parent in America can watch local news with a child. The news gives children nightmares. They think the news is real; they think it depicts reality. They begin to think they live in a place where violent child abuse is prevalent ("Mommy, what does beheaded mean?"), where every day policemen are killed, where mothers are frequently shot as they walk to the grocery store, where sexual matters ("Mommy, what's a condom?") are endlessly debated. For at least a decade, though I did not notice until I had a child, watching the local news has been one more thing American families cannot do together.

A television producer would answer, We just bring you the news, we don't make it. This is partly true. What is also true is that the producer's decisions about what is said and shown on the air are determined also by his desire for money and success, which in his line of work come from ratings, in the pursuit of which the hotter and sicker the better. It has been years since the producer thought about the fact that he has a certain responsibility to the culture, but he does. We all do.

A debate on our culture, on its values, on what we can do to improve the human ecology, to clean up the muddy, airless river in which we all swim, ought to be discussed this year. It is, along with the economy, the thing that makes people think the future will be bleaker, no better. Our political leaders should be talking about it. They should, in fact, feel some anguish: They have children too.

Instead, we get tinny braying about who inhaled, who has the better character. Why? Why don't our political leaders look at things seriously? Is it because they think we do not think seriously? Is it because they fear the press will make them look stupid if they express concern about what is being carried on the airwaves around us? ("Quayle to Hollywood: |Clean up or we'll censor.'" "Tipper zaps Zappa/Zappa zaps back.") It is also that they are so in the habit of stooping low they cannot stand straight, or think straight, anymore?

Who told them to stoop? Who told them that when you talk to the people you talk down?

In one of the most important speeches he would give in the 10 weeks before the election, Bill Clinton on August 25 gripped the podium at the national convention of the American Legion, cleared his throat, looked the Legionnaires straight in the eyes, and said, "I will work to ensure the VA gets the funding it needs to provide the excellent and timely care our veterans deserve." He promised the Legion virtual veto power on his choice of secretary of veterans affairs. He did not, surprisingly, wear a funny hat.

The same week, President Bush was in New Jersey, where he eschewed a normally reliable applause line--"This government is just too big and spends too much"--to unveil a new federal jobs program, the cost of which has been put variously at $2 billion and $10 billion. A week later, on September 2, the president went to South Dakota to promise wheat farmers a new $1 billion in export subsidies, and later that day, in Texas, threw in almost a billion in aid for farmers hurt in Hurricane Andrew.

It reminded me of the old Reagan joke that the difference between the federal government and a drunken sailor on a spree is that the sailor spends his own money. And, he might have added, doesn't, while on the toot, offer homilies on fiscal restraint.

Speech impediments

In different ways, the president and the governor have taken to the most egregious kinds of pandering, although the governor's performance seemed the more obnoxious, perhaps because it seemed so stupid. The Legion would never vote for him anyway, so why not use the forum to show strength? It was also insulting. When a politician panders to an audience like this, what he's really saying is: "I understand, my fellow porkers, that even though you wave the flag and make much of your love of country, what really motivates you is seeing to it that your interests are served. Don't worry. When I'm in charge of the federal trough, I will vigorously ladle to all the piglets."

As for the president, I have real doubts that it is going to resonate, as they say, with the public if he continues in his speeches to press two themes: 1) We must stop the Democrats from spending more money, and 2) Let's spend more money. Something tells me--and maybe I'm wrong, but hear me out--that the people may actually see through this.

What a year: The more you promise, the more contempt the voters have. People are more hungry for truth and less fed it than ever. And it is not the people's fault. Their leaders have lost a sense of them. They are so busy running the government and dealing with interest groups that they have forgotten that the people, as Sam Ervin liked to say, are not mocked. Or, if they are, at least mocked at the politician's peril.

To tell the truth

What happens when public disgust reaches critical mass? What would convince politicians that honesty wins, weasel words don't; candor wins, evasive language doesn't; belief wins, pragmatism doesn't? Or to put it another way: Pragmatism is not pragmatic. Belief is the only true pragmatism.

These three books(*) approach rhetoric from

V different angles. Among them, Safire's is most important, in part because it is the most comprehensive, in part because Safire is Safire.

The Pulitzer-winning columnist and known Bigfoot--at the Houston convention a college journalist approached him and asked, "Excuse me, are you a media biggy?" Safire lowered his voice and said, "You bet you life I am"-- was also the foister, as a Nixon speechwriter, of the phrase, "nattering nabobs of negativism" on an unsuspecting world. Safire is unofficial godfather of all speechwriters. He loves the dodge, and honors it in this book.

The preface takes the form of a breezy speech that begins with the information that the speaker doesn't really want your ears, your attention will do, and builds to a declaration of what is to come, and ends with a peroration of such power that its author could not refrain from including crowd calls ranging from "Let us march!" to "You tell 'em, buster!"

This is a big book. It is almost three inches thick. It has almost 900 pages. It should come with a tube of Ben Gay for rubbing on the book-holding deltoids should the tome be perused at bedtime. (Repetition--in this case of the words "it is"--is a device, Safire reminds us, called ahaphora; the Ben Gay reference I stole from something S. J. Perelman inscribed in a big book he sent to Safire. Theft, too, is a reliable and traditional rhetorical aid.) This book would have to be big to range, as it does, from great speeches of ancient Greece ("Pericles Extols the Glory That Is Greece At the Funeral of its Fallen Sons") to memorable speeches by modern union leaders ("Lane Kirkland Rejects the Labels |Liberal' and |Conservative'"). Along the way you'll meet up with Harry Truman's stump speech ("What it lacks in depth and shape it makes up for in zest"), Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," Mark Twain's speech on speechmaking, Woodrow Wilson (who said, "Passion is the pith of eloquence"), Saint Francis, Sojourner Truth, and Salmon Rushdie.

Safire likes to be helpful, so he tells those who want to make good speeches that eloquence can, in a way, be acquired by osmosis: "Close the door, or go out into the woods with only a dog as an audience, and read these speeches aloud." To make it easier, he includes a sonorous tribute to the dog from a gentleman named Senator Vest, whom I think Safire made up.

There are informative and what look to me like well-research short histories before each speech, putting them in context, telling us how they were written, where given, how received.

This is, simply, a great book that will, I suspect, become a standard reference text on oratory, providing generations hence joy and inspiration for you, your children, and your children's children.

James C. Humes' net is more narrowly cast. An adjunct professor of the University of Pennsylvania, he offers excerpts of presidential addresses that changed history, explaining how and why they came about and why he thinks they're great. There are behind-the-scenes anecdotes, some recounted with real charm, about the making and delivering of each speech. As always with such books, one can quarrel with some of the choices and praise others. Humes includes a chapter on Polk's inaugural address, calling it "Action as Eloquence," and introducing (to this reader at least) the important yet Carter-like figure of Polk. I'd never seen or heard of his inaugural; I'd been missing something. On the other hand, books like this tend to achieve balance at the cost of justice--there should be more Reagan. And I personally miss Jefferson's second inaugural (Humes includes the first), which was great because it was memorable and memorable because it was one long rant against the press.

Can we talk?

William Ker Muir Jr., I realized as I read The Bully Pulpit, is Sandy Muir, a professor of political science at Berkeley who use to work in Vice President George Bush's speechwriting shop upstairs in the Executive Office Building. He used to come by now and then and talk speechwriting with Reagan's speechwriters, of whom I was one. He was always a welcome presence; he seemed to think we were doing something important. Around 1985 he started coming by to interview us, and I remember being struck by the idea that, though he was asking me, he seemed to know more than I about the history of speechwriting and exactly what we were doing there at the EOB in our too big, badly furnished offices with the big, gracefully arched, dirty windows. I have relearned much about the Reagan years from this book, and discovered some things I didn't know.

Muir focuses on exactly how Reagan led, which leads the author to exactly how Reagan used words, and why he made the choices he did. But his intention, he tells us, is not only to examine Reagan's leadership style: "My objective was to find general lessons about leadership, ones that people everywhere could apply to their daily lives." There are stories of internal struggles over speeches, of clarity sacrificed to diplomacy, and of presidential decisions aimed less at speaking to history than at keeping the peace between warring agencies and aides.

For those who want to learn how a modern speechwriting shop is run, who are curious about how speeches are hammered out and how each decision carries at least a handful of repercussions, this will prove a valuable book. As to the reporting, I can attest that Muir's history of the failed speech Reagan gave to the European Parliament in Strasbourg is correct in all of its particulars, though too kind to everyone involved, including its chief drafter, me.

Perhaps young men and women in high school and college, reading these books and dreaming big things, will become immersed in the sound and sense of great rhetoric; and perhaps they will go into politics and elevate the debate by their presence. Maybe 21st-century rhetoric will sound not like people talking, but like people thinking.

(*)Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. William Safire, ed. Norton. $35. My Fellow Americans: Presidential Addresses That Shaped History. James C. Humes, ed. Praeger, $49.95. The Bully Pulpit: the Presidential Leadership of Ronald Reagan. William Ker Muir. ICS, $22.95.

(*)Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. William Safire, ed. Norton, $35. My Fellow Americans: Presidential Addresses That Shaped History. James C. Humes, ed. Praeger, $49.95. The Bully Pulpit: The Presidential Leadership of Ronald Reagan. William Ker Muir. ICS, $22.95.

Peggy Noonan is the author of What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era.