Reprinted from last week’s The Wanderer, the nation’s longest published national Catholic weekly.
By Thomas F. Roeser
CHICAGO—Strangely for a party that is trouncing the Republicans on almost every presidential campaign issue extant, the Democrats seem to be content with a presidential candidate who veers away from serious issue delineation, disses town hall forums with voters and avoids (whenever he can) debates.
That is Sen. Barack Obama, of course. He disdains town meetings where he is forced to answer questions from the crowds. He doesn’t cotton to debates. The very first one he engaged in, in a run for the Senate in 2004 where he was an enormous favorite, he lost decisively to Alan Keyes and has never, ever come looking for more opportunities like that one. He has steadfastly declined to debate Hillary Rodham Clinton, even when she was ahead in the polls. He has not done particularly well in contrast to other contenders at candidate cattle shows. Once he hedged so long about the issue of drivers’ licenses for illegals that he seemingly alienated both sides.
But it is as a rock star that Obama has triumphed. As tens of thousands of mesmerized fans gasp, swoon and recite parrot-like his suggested responses, the 6-foot-5-inch handsome candidate, strides tie-less on a stage with a hand mike, reciting rhetorical banalities that defy parsing—or and some cases, understanding. Don’t knock it. Hillary Clinton wishes she could be as loose-limbed and casual on the stage instead of a wind-up doll rooted on statistics. John Edwards was pretty good but was more trial lawyer-turned humorless propagandist than rock-star. As for Bill Richardson—well, forget it. On the Republican side, John McCain gets attention because of his long (and I mean v-e-r-y long pedigree befitting a white-haired patriarch of 71 who can’t comb his hair because he can’t raise his arms up due to five years of torture by the North Vietnamese). Mike Huckabee with his guitar and droll humor might collect a passel of gawkers at Grand Old Opry but that’s it. There’s utterly nothing, or no one, like Obama the rock-star in U. S. politics nor was there ever.
John Kennedy with whom Obama is eternally and wrongly compared and whom I covered as a wire-service reporter in Minnesota was nothing like Obama. To be like Obama he’d have to stride onto a stage with an informality that would require at least unbuttoning his button-down collar and ditching his Brooks Brothers tie. Kennedy’s aura: pencil-thin, auburn-haired, Cambridge trim, cool-cool-cool with a lectern against which he could lean to ease the pain in his back no one could appreciate that he was suffering. His understated cool commanded the crowds. He spoke literately with only a jabbed forefinger for passion after which it returned to rest on the podium. And Reagan, a debonair somewhat JFK’ish type never operated without a net—meaning script, either on TelepromTer or 3 x 5 cards. And as for content? Those who compare Kennedy to Barack don’t have the Kennedy 1960 stump speeches that I do—compiled by antique tape recording in those days, word-for-word by direction of the U. S. Congress (the same thing for Richard Nixon’s off-the-cuff stump speeches).
Here is vintage JFK taken from a tape of a speech delivered at 2 p.m. Sept. 27, 1960 in Hellriegel’s Inn parking lot, Painesville, Ohio. Tell me how rock-starish this sounds:
“How can we identify more successfully the United States with the cause of freedom around the world? We are going to face in the 1960s problems as difficult as faced us in the 1930s. We are going to have to find in the 1960s 25,000 new jobs a week if we are going to maintain full employment and we are going to do that at a time when new machines arecoming in and taking the jobs of men [sic]. We are going to have to build more schools than were ever built before. In the next 10 years in the United States we are going to have to build for your children as many college dormitories and buildings as were built in the whole history of the United States all in a period of 10 years….I run for the presidency believing that this great country can meet its responsibilities, can assume its functions, that a free society does have more vitality and strength…” well you get the drift. If this sounds like rock-star stuff, you really ought to try to get out more.
What do I mean by rock-star speech? Here are excerpts from a Barack Obama classic of the art. Delivered February 6, 2008 in Chicago at a screamingly loud victory rally where his Super-Dooper Super Tuesday victories were announced. His actual words are in italics—my comments are attached.
Excerpts from the Hope Pope.
“The polls are just closing in California. And the votes are still being counted in cities and towns across America. But there is one thing—you know I love you back—but there is one thing on this February night that we do not need the final results to know. OUR TIME HAS COME! OUR TIME HAS COME! Our movement is real! And change is coming to America!
“Only a few hundred miles from here, almost one year ago to the day, we stood on the steps of the old State Capitol to reaffirm a truth that was spoken there so many generations ago, that a house divided cannot stand; that we are more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and always will be the United States of America!”
Lincoln’s phrase is adroitly misused here by one who wishes to compare himself to the Emancipator. But Obama is on the Stephen A. Douglas side of the controversy. Douglas, the pro-choice Democrat, believed slavery and freedom could exist side by side, you make up your own mind. Lincoln said emphatically that it could not i.e. a house divided cannot stand. The meaningless talk of red states and blue states being less important than the United States of America is a given: cotton candy for the ears rather than tongue—of no intellectual content.
“What began as a whisper in Springfield, soon carried across the cornfields of Iowa where farmers and factory workers, students and seniors stood up in numbers we have never seen before. They stood up to say that maybe this year we don’t have to settle for politics where scoring points is more important than solving problems. Maybe this year we can finally start doing something about health care we can’t afford. Maybe this year we can do something about mortgages we can’t pay. Maybe this year, this time, can be different.
“The voices echoed from the hills of New Hampshire to the deserts of Nevada where teachers and cooks and kitchen workers stood up to say that maybe Washington doesn’t have to be run by lobbyists anymore. Maybe the voices of the American people can finally be heard again. They reached the coast of South Carolina when people said that maybe we don’t have to be divided by race and region and gender. That crumbling schools are stealing the future of black children and white children. That we can come together and build an America that gives every child everywhere the opportunity to live out their dreams [sic]. This time can be different!”
Depend on it: Crumbling schools are not stealing the future of black children—or white children. Crumbling families have and are. This is an unique version of nonsense talk--actually political scat talk, a variant of scat singing. Scat singing which came of age in Chicago gave singers black and white the ability to sing improvised melodies and rhythms influencing the pitch articulation, coloration and resonance of the performance. In political scat talk meaning is secondary to the passion. Take the phrase “maybe Washington doesn’t have to be run by lobbyists anymore.” Absurd since it ignores the constitutional guarantee that legislation is passed with “the consent of the governed.” The USSR had no lobbyists: guaranteed.
Is Obama saying advocacy is to be banned? No, of course not. It’s imprecise scat talk i.e. crowd demagoguery or, to be explicit, relatively harmless oratorical pornography i.e. enticement of the auditory senses to the state of passionate climax with no goal other than pure self-manipulated pleasure of the self. See Ella Fitzgerald’s scat performances of “How High the Moon”—sounds of no cognitive worth. Sarah Vaughan would prefer “shoo-doo-shoo-bee-oo-bee!” stop consonants and open vowels while Betty Carter used sounds like “louie-ooie-la-la-la” which Jazz expert Leonard Feather identified as soft-tongued sounds. In Illinois, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is a master of Irish scat talk. When criticized for non-transparency in his administration, he shouted at the press: “Do you want me to take down my pants!” When confronted by his son’s secret investment in a sewer inspection company and with no answer, he convulsed with sobs until the press moved away embarrassedly. Scat political talk.
“This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different! It’s different not because of me. It’s different because of YOU! Because you are tired of being disappointed and you’re tired of being let down. You’re tired of hearing promises made and plans proposed in the heat of a campaign only to have nothing changed when everyone goes back to Washington.”
This is the cresting of Obama scat talk to a crowd and marvelously non-cognitive stuff. David Brooks of The New York Times caught it—and Brooks is not an arbitrary critic of Obama or liberal thought He calls Obama “The Chosen One.” He has perceived a falling off of Obama-mania: “fainting at rallies, weeping over their touch screens while watching Obama videos, spending hours making folk crafts featuring Michelle Obama’s face…But they found that as the weeks went on they needed more and purer hope-injections than even the Hope Pope could provide and they began experiencing brooding moments of suboprimal hopefulness.”
He writes concerning this passage of scat talk: “Up until now The Chosen One’s speeches had seemed…less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space. But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense. For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for. But if we are the change we have been waiting for, then why have we been waiting, since we’ve been here all along?” [Italics mine]. The downfall of scat political oratory comes when you begin to parse the oracular nonsense—as Brooks has just done.
“I’ll be the president who finally brings Democrats and Republicans together to make health care affordable and available for every single American. We will put a college education within the reach of anyone who wants to go. And instead of just talking about how great our teachers are, we will reward them for their greatness with more pay and better support. And we will harness the ingenuity of farmers and scientists and entrepreneurs to free this nation from the tyranny of oil once and for all. And we will invest in solar and wind and bio-diesel: clean energy, green energy that can fuel economic development for generations to come.
“That’s what we’re going to do when I’m president of the United States. When I’m president, we will put an end to the politics of fear, a politics that uses 9/11 as a way to scare up votes. We’re going to start seeing 9/11 as a challenge that should unite America and the world against the common threats of the 21st century; terrorism and nuclear weapons, climate change and poverty, genocide and disease.”
Well, I’ll quit parsing this now. You got the drift and can do it for yourselves. I leave you with this relic from the past.
The Music Man.
Do you remember “The Music Man,” the stage play of 1957 and award-winning film of 1962 starring Robert Preston as the con man “Professor” Harold Hill, the charlatan who alights from a train in the small midwestern city? It is River City, Iowa which represents Mason City, Iowa, home town of Meredith Willson, the brilliant musician and lyricist who wrote the play and film. Hill has come to convince the citizens…as he had so many other gulled innocents in small towns all over America…that they should have a Boys Band. He will collect funds for instruments and uniforms, will take the funds in his satchel to faraway Chicago and come back with the instruments, uniforms and teachers like himself to begin the River City Boys’ Band.
Why should they have a Boys Band? Because, he says in a brilliant oration (a 1912 version of scat political hustling), there’s a great danger in River City as in other cities where youth is likely to be corrupted. Corrupted by what? He sings in a memorable address: “Oh there’s trouble in River City! Trouble is a word that starts with `T’ that rhymes with ‘P’ that stands for Pool!” Hill scares the entire town that its male youth will be corrupted by pool halls! To guard against it, River City must have a Boys Band.
The town falls under his sway. All but the comely librarian. Marian the librarian. She is strangely attracted by this hustler from faraway Gary, Indiana and a professor from the Gary, Indiana Institute of Music. But she’s wary. Hill is drawn to her as well but frightened that she will find him out. He tells the entire town and Marian that he sees the future of River City as the host community of a convention of boys’ bands from all over the universe. They will all converge and bring prosperity, jobs, new business, world-wide fame. To rev up the enthusiasm he sings the song “Seventy Six Trombones.”
Marian is unconvinced. But the town is sold. The money comes in to Professor Hill like a gusher. He collects it, stuffs it into his satchel and is preparing to catch the midnight train out of River City which will never see him again. But this means he will never see Marian again and will give up any chance of a decent life. Before he is to leave and without telling her his plans, he sees her and they sing the duet based on a slow version of “Seventy Six Trombones”—“Goodnight My Someone.” That duet does it. Hill cannot leave. He tells his confederate to scat. He will take the money, use it to buy the instruments and uniforms. He will confess he’s not a musician at all. But he will become an honest man at last.
He calls the town together to give them the horrid truth about his life, that he is a fraud but he’ll make it up to them—but seeing that they’re so happy with their dream, he says…needlessly to their mind…that he’ll see the dream come true. Then in the distance there comes the sound of a band. Hill thinks he’s losing it. But the townspeople hear it as well. In the Palace theatre in New York where the show opened, as the audience sat transfixed the music got louder and louder and a trapdoor in the aisle opened and a huge army of band men marched in, surrounded Hill and Hill, Marian the Librarian and the cast march through the theatre, down the aisle…Hill—Preston of course—leading the band twirling his walking stick like a baton: a marvelous finale.
America is too prone to Music Men of the current age, scat pols of both parties. But none is worse than Obama. Mixed up Americans are now in the grip of what has come to be a creepy messiah-ism. Just pray as so often in the past, the good sense of the American people and a latter day Marian the Librarian will force them to come to terms with the truth.
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