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Gun crazy

originally published on Crosscut.com on November 30, 2009

Gun violence is a hallmark of the American West. It’s as if bloodletting by firearm is hard-wired, as natural as breathing.

Sunday’s execution-style murders of four Lakewood police officers at the Forza coffee shop in unincorporated Pierce County echoed the horror of the Oct. 31 slaying of Seattle police officer Timothy Brenton. How do we make sense of the senseless? As Elie Wiesel wrote years ago, “Words, they die on our lips.”

A tragedy this grave and unspeakable will spur recrimination. Should Washington state extend sentences for all violent offenders? The answer may be existential. Human nature is base and inscrutable. We’re as likely to mitigate violence as remedy the seven deadly sins.

For Western lawmakers, gun control is the third rail. Still. Even liberal icons such as Idaho’s late, great Frank Church knew better than to savage the National Rifle Association. A couple years ago, I referred to this as the Northwest thread in the political fabric — Big Government Libertarianism. West Coast politicians harmonize the value of New Deal-era government intervention with the Northwestern value of libertarian hands-off-ness.

These same lawmakers, however, would be horrified by the mad injustice that unfolded in a Lakewood coffee shop on Sunday.

The debate over gun violence brings out the worst in us. Years ago historian Richard Hofstadter referred to the “Paranoid Style in American Politics.” As Hofstadter understated in 1964, “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” (For years I presupposed the gun debate hinged on the West’s urban-rural divide. It doesn’t quite factor, however, in light of the scholarship of Stanford’s Richard White and others who’ve documented the West’s primarily urban character).

The latest nudge at gun control is Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels’s proposed gun ban in city parks and community centers. The mayor has a point. Could there be a compelling reason to pack heat at a neighborhood park? Roaming packs of berserking 5-year-olds? Revenge upon that Czech immigrant who tries to castle twice at chess?

The Nickels initiative triggered a response from Snohomish County Councilmember John Koster who will, according to the Everett Herald, propose an ordinance to lift the firearm ban in Shohomish County parks. “The code is in conflict with state law,” Koster is quoted as saying.

Nickels and Koster are principled public servants. They’re also strategic thinkers, and the current battle serves as a proxy war for gun rights.

Legally speaking, Councilman Koster is likely right and Mayor Nickels is likely wrong. A gun ban contravenes state law. An extended legal fight won’t benefit anyone except, perhaps, the attorneys involved.

All the while, both lawmakers owe the public a “yes, and” pledge: Yes, I’ll pursue this gun-control question AND I propose the following: For example, develop programs in restorative justice to help young offenders make personal amends; enhance neighborhood watch programs; increase access to crime data; no parole for violent convicts; hire more street cops; and invest in gang-crime prevention programs with proven outcomes. The list, of course, goes on.

The Northwest’s epidemic of gun violence demands more than grandstanding or symbolism. It can’t go unchallenged. What, then, will actually work and who, over the long term, will benefit?

November 30, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

A personal memory of Ted Kennedy

originally published on Crosscut.com on August 25, 2009

My father, like my father’s father and my father’s mother and all of my father’s Norse-American siblings (from the teenage Agnes, a victim of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, to a redoubtable elementary school teacher, Gertrude) is buried on a shoulder of land overlooking Interstate 5.

I didn’t expect it, my father’s death. I was a teenager, petulant and awkward. You see, my Dad waited a long, long time to get hitched. And he waited until he was well into his fifties to have children. He was a good soul, his nuptial-commitment-aversion notwithstanding. So, his death felt abrupt and horrifying to me. To any kid, I assume.

I spoke at my father’s funeral and afterwards I stood in a receiving line for several excruciating hours. It was 1983, an early summer afternoon in Everett. Three people touched my shoulder and were comforting: Pete Wilson, then a Republican Senator from California, Admiral H.G. Rickover, the legendary father of the nuclear Navy, and U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy. From that time onward, I rarely made a joke at Ted Kennedy’s expense (and God forgive me those few times that I did make a joke). He was a stand-up fellow, I told friends. He eulogized my Dad at Everett’s First Presbyterian Church.

Here’s a brief excerpt of what Ted Kennedy said about my Dad:

On that day Jack died, he was a friend who comforted me. On more days than I can count, I felt his happy clasp on my shoulder; I saw his crinkled smile; I enjoyed his counsel and his company.

I won’t expound on Ted Kennedy’s personal and political legacy. Many folks, much smarter than I, can and should debate away. Therefore, I will keep it simple: When I was a teenager, my father died unexpectedly. Edward Kennedy was kind to me. I’m grateful to him.

August 25, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Everett: God’s gift to Seattle politics

originally published on Crosscut.com on August 11, 2009

Politics and humility aren’t always mutually exclusive. Consider, for example, a recent trifold mailer from Seattle Mayoral candidate, Joe Mallahan:

Joe was born and raised in Washington, the seventh of nine children in a working-class family where he was taught the value of hard work, integrity, and service to others.

Note the inspired ambiguity of “in Washington.” In fact, Mallahan is an Everett native, but he wisely ain’t a braggart. Why trumpet roots in the Athens of Puget Sound, Mallahan figures, and risk turning off rank-and-file Seattle voters?

Now that the Everett genie is out, however, it’s easy to conjure a JFK-style exchange between Mallahan and scornful Seattleites. “Mallahan, what do you know about Seattle’s gang problem?” voters will demand. “You grew up in an All-America City enlivened by cruising low-riders, the magisterial Scott Paper Mill, and 40 parks.”

Mallahan will, I imagine, stare back and reply in cool Everett-ese, “No one ever asked me where I learned the value of hard work, integrity, and service to others when I was at T Mobile protecting families from scratchy cell reception.”

To his credit, Mallahan soft pedals the enchantment of Everett life. I’m from Everett, Hometown Joe is saying, but that doesn’t make me a better person than you, at least not in God’s eyes.

How a candidate handles the so-called Everett card is a harbinger of his or her leadership style. An unassuming Mallahan will be level-headed and congenial. Actor Patrick Duffy, Cascade High School Class of 1967, played Bobby Ewing on TV’s Dallas and gave expression to this “Everett cool.”

It’s a thread that sews together Mallahan and Duffy and extends back to, yes, Teddy Roosevelt. Americans remember TR though the lens of San Juan Hill and his leadership preserving America’s wild lands. No one cared that Roosevelt was a snooty New Yorker with a Harvard degree. It’s deja vu all over again as voters judge Joe Mallahan by his real-time achievements, not by his privileged legacy as a son of Everett.

Contrast the Mallahan style with the North Everett hauteur of Dow Constantine, a leading candidate for King County Executive. Constantine, who didn’t even grow up in Everett, effuses about his “ancestral home.” His mother, a schoolteacher, moved to West Seattle because it reminded her of Everett, he said. To magnify his elite status, Constantine noted that his great uncle, George Wilson, played halfback on Enoch Bagshaw’s mythical 1920 national high school championship team. Constantine’s grandfather, Abe Wilson, also played for Bagshaw and followed the coach to Husky football glory.

That’s right, Constantine is insufferable, an unabashed flack for the Everett Chamber.

“Everett is the undiscovered city in our region,” Constantine said. “I believe it has a great future. It’s a great town.”

As a result of his Everett heritage, Constantine should make a stellar King County Executive. But he’ll govern with sharp elbows, this one.

In a recent email interview, Joe Mallahan finally came to terms with his murky past, acknowledging that he was hiding his Everett light under a mailer. It was a cathartic experience for Everett’s next Seattle mayor.

Jackson: You’re the only Seattle mayoral candidate who was born and raised in Everett, and you’re also the only candidate rated “Outstanding” by the Municipal League. Is there causality or coincidence to these two statements?

Mallahan: Everett has long been the incubator of great leaders, and once you have been a newspaper boy for the Everett Herald, your resume is pretty much golden. Scoop Jackson liked to claim he was a Herald carrier in his youth, but I’m guessing he had a route in hoity toity North Everett. I, on the other hand, had the most coveted route in town: the Mobile Country Club on SE 85th Street — 250 mobile homes tucked nicely into less than one quarter square mile. I used to run that route after cross-country practice at Cascade High School. I could deliver 150 papers in 20 minutes.

Jackson: You abandoned your hometown, the City of Smokestacks, soon after graduating from high school. How long have you been plagued by feelings of shame or did you simply elect to repress all memories of your formative years?

Mallahan: They’re not smoke stacks, they’re steam stacks, stupid.

Jackson: In the 1980s, Seattle made a splash with its sister-city agreements, hooking up with every radical and outre city in the world (think of it as the Hippie years). Would you be willing to make Everett a Seattle “Sister City” complete with reciprocal junkets, cultural exchanges, and general goodwill?

Mallahan: I think a sister city program with Everett would be a good way to heal some of the wounds. Relations have been rather strained since the Teddy Bears incident at the Everett Event Center in the fall of 2007. Everett Silvertips fans have never forgiven the Seattle fans since then. That was the game where every fan was given a Silvertip Teddy Bear, and was instructed to throw them on the ice after Everett scored a goal so they could be donated to the Everett Police Department. Alas, the Thunderbirds beat the Silvertips 3-0, and bears were tossed only when Seattle scored. I’m still ashamed of the multiple Teddy Bear beheadings I witnessed that night. Deep, deep wounds. As Seattle’s mayor, I will deliver a teddy bear to Mayor Stephanson as an olive branch, and a symbol of the high regard Seattle holds for its neighbor to the north.

Jackson: True or False: Scandinavian Lutherans made and enforced the laws of Everett only to have the Irish Catholics upend and violate all that was lawful, decent, and true.

Mallahan: I guess you never read the book, How the Irish Saved Everett Civilization. The Ruckers will always have their hill, and they will always supply the athletic uniforms for thousands of Everett youth every year, but it’s Pat Sullivan and the Irish Soccer Club that put Everett on the world sports map. As for pro soccer stars from Everett, a lot of people forget that Sean Henderson was actually O’Henderson before his family passed through Ellis Island.

Jackson: An Everett litmus test. Please define the following: A choker, a gypsy drum, and a rootwad.

Mallahan: Rootwads were the deadheads you had to dodge when water skiing Steamboat Slough. The real question is what’s a Peavey? If you haven’t handled a Peavey, then you’re not a real Sounder.

November predictions are ill advised, but here goes: Mallahan and Constantine win. They both have certain, well, natural advantages.

August 11, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , ,

2008: Year of Hope, Year of Fear. Essay 10

originally published on Crosscut.com on January 1, 2009

In 1984 then-state Sen. Jim McDermott ran for Washington Governor on the APPLE agenda, with each APPLE letter spelling out a political goal. It was “L” promising “life with hope, without fear” that stirred a subconscious transposing. Didn’t McDermott mean “life with fear and with hope?” Doesn’t fear, properly channeled, give us meaning?

Both currents, as the overall headline for this series of year-end thoughts implies, defined 2008 just as they will define 2009. A couple of questions arise: 1) Will the Northwest, as a far-left-coast laboratory of democracy, have any influence on the national conversation? and 2) Will the economic crisis speak to our better angels and translate into a full-scale blitz for things such as National Service?

Washington’s progressive tradition still hangs like the scaffolding of a home remodel that’s never quite finished. We have public utility districts, a populist state constitution requiring voters to pick a public lands and insurance commissioner, port districts conceived to delegate control to citizens (ha!), and an initiative process borrowed from the Swiss and designed to smash concentrated interests.

All these instruments of accountability and direct democracy have corrupted over time because people are, well, people.

Suitably chastened, what then should we do? For starters, during the 2009 legislative session we should identify one or two specific issues which reveal some core values. For me it’s establishing a sensible rate cap and finally reining in the payday-lending industry that preys on military families and the working poor. Think of it as one of those if-they-can’t-do-it-now-they’ll-never-ever-have-the-backbone-to-do-it benchmarks. But remember: the payday-lending industry has deep pockets.

I also like Ted Van Dyk’s suggestion of dropping industry-specific giveaways as a way to address the budget deficit — an inspired idea that runs counter to the tyranny of interest-group politics. Alas, it probably won’t happen. So maybe before lawmakers monkey too much with budget sweeteners and other revenues, they should re-noodle the armature that carries the load, Washington’s regressive tax structure. Someone in Olympia needs to dust off Bill Gates Sr.’s 2002 “Tax Structure Study Report” and move on it.

True, that won’t happen either.

On the federal level, 2009 can be crystallized in one issue driven by the economic storm: National Service. In addition to military service, there will be a massive ramping up of AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps along with innovative initiatives such as a Green Service Corps, a Hospital Corps, and a National Park Service Corps. These programs will conflate the idealism of the Peace Corps with the hands-on, back-to-basics ethic of the WPA and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Here, finally, is where the Northwest can press the conversation. We’re leaders in National Service with a major contingent of AmeriCorps members working in classrooms, in community centers, and in our parks and national forests. We are, as folks are wont to say in this era of stimulus moola, “shovel ready.”

January 1, 2009 phjackson Leave a response , , ,

Inauguration: the fine print

originally published on Crosscut.com on December 23, 2008

For a Northwesterner to enter and win the inaugural-ticket lottery is to become Rod Blagojevich. You’ve got this thing, see, and it’s [expletive deleted] golden.

The congratulatory notice from your Congressman begins innocuously enough, like the first line on a prescription-drug label:

Congratulations on being selected to receive two tickets for the 56th Presidential Inaugural Ceremonies in Washington, DC on Tuesday, January 20, 2009. I look forward to seeing you when you come to pick-up your tickets.

True, you’re poor and it will cost at least 600 smackers to fly to DC. Why not give your tickets to a friend instead? Your inner-Blago awakens and says to you, “It’s a [expletive deleted] valuable thing. You just don’t give it away for nothing.”

Your Congressman anticipates miscreants like you. He writes:

Inauguration tickets will be available for pick-up in my Washington DC office on Monday, January 19th from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM. This is the only day that tickets will be available.

Each person will need to show photo ID in order to receive their ticket. Tickets are non-transferable. Ticket holders will be required to provide the names of each individual in their party in advance.

Drats, you think, no windfall. At least you’ll be a part of history. You can sit back with your umbrella and thermos of Scotch and watch “Change We Can Believe In” finally come to pass.

This is the part of the message qua prescription-drug label that kindles second thoughts. It’s that mid-section on the back listing possible side effects such as dry mouth, trouble breathing, and mild-to-severe psychosis rarely lasting more than four hours.

The Inaugural Ceremony is held outside the West Front Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Historically, Inauguration Day is cold and sometimes wet with an average temperature of 37 degrees. Attendees should be prepared to stand for several hours. If there is rain on Inauguration Day, umbrellas will not be permitted within the security perimeter.

No umbrella? What of your thermos? What of your Cutty Sark?

Once inside the event, movement will be limited and attendees will be asked to stay within their ticketed area. [read: weak-of-bladder best not attend] Please review the list of prohibited items carefully as there will be no place to leave prohibited items.

Prohibited items include, but are not limited to: Firearms and ammunition (either real or simulated), Explosives of any kind (including fireworks), Knives, blades, or sharp objects (of any length), Mace and/or pepper spray, Sticks or poles, Pockets or hand tools, such as ‘ꀜLeatherman,’ꀝ Packages, Backpacks, Large bags, Duffel bags, Suitcases, Thermoses, Coolers, Strollers, Umbrellas, Laser pointers, Signs, Posters, Animals (other than service animals), Alcoholic beverages, Other items that may pose a threat to the security of the event as determined by and at the discretion of the security screeners.

A TSA-style gauntlet followed by a freezing, thermos-umbrella-backpack-free inauguration?

Make no mistake, it will still be [expletive deleted] golden.

December 23, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Sic Semper Tyrannis!

originally published on Crosscut.com on November 28, 2008

It’s a sweetly alarming image: Washington State Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders shouting “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!” at the Attorney General of the United States during a Federalist Society dinner in Washington, DC last week.

It was a Colonial-style insult followed by a public injury when, a few minutes later, Attorney General Mukasey fainted mid-speech (there was no connect-the-collapse causality, mind you).

“Tyrant” is a pregnant old-schoolism that triggers thoughts of King George III or Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. John Wilkes Booth purportedly yelled “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” (“thus always to tyrants”) after shooting Abraham Lincoln and bounding from the Presidential box at Ford’s Theatre. (Sic Semper Tyrannis is also the official state motto of Virginia which puts Washington’s gentle “Al-ki” to shame).

Justice Sanders may be a libertarian eccentric, prone to ill-considered outbursts. But give the magistrate his due: In the context of Mukasey’s November 20 prepared remarks, the tyrant broadside appears to be deserved.

The spiel-in-question was part Federalist Society suck-up (“The Federalist Society should be proud of the role it played in supporting these judges”), part lament of the liberal media, and part defense of the indefensible. One choice passage:

And when people denounce a purported assault on the Geneva Conventions, you might expect some level of specificity in the charges. One cannot assault a treaty as an abstract concept; one can only violate the treaty by acting contrary to its words. The Geneva Conventions contain 319 articles, of which 315 are plainly addressed to armed conflicts among the nations that signed the Conventions. It is hardly surprising that the United States concluded that those provisions would not apply to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda, an international terrorist group and not, the last time I checked, a signatory to the Conventions.

Ick. Mukasey embraces the dubious inheritance of Alberto Gonzales without apology. Does that make him a tyrant? As Yeats wrote a long, long time ago, “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”

November 28, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

John Anderson’s Pennsylvania postmortem

originally published on Crosscut.com on April 24, 2008

Consecrate a Scandinavian-American in the spirit of Obama-mania and footlight a contradiction: the Audacity of Pessimism.

Consider John Anderson, the octogenarian former Illinois Republican congressman and 1980 Independent presidential candidate (Anderson agreed that his age, 86, was irrelevant). Anderson’s recent Barack endorsement complements another Obama-celebrity booster, former EPA administrator and elder-fish-head statesman, Bill Ruckelshaus.

“I’m nursing my wounds,” Anderson said over scotch, the day after the Pennsylvania primary.

“It’s a little debilitating, but not enough to lose your resolve,” he said.

I was visiting Anderson in Washington, D.C., the day after I moderated a panel noodling a proposed U.S. Public Service Academy.

Only once during our conversation did Anderson exhibit attenuated judgment.

“I’m very proud of my Swedish heritage,” he said.

In the Northwest, Anderson’s 1980 presidential bid ignited passionate support. There was a refreshing courage to his message, from promoting a national gasoline tax to bolster conservation to delivering a speech to the National Rifle Association knocking the organization’s strategy of quashing gun control.

The latter drew hoots from Westerners, Democrats included, but it was arguably more brave than foolish (members of the audience were packing heat after all). That year Anderson managed a politician’s dream, albeit a doomed one, of advocating a vision for America unencumbered by pollsters and special interests.

Over the past quarter century, he’s remained civically active and continues to teach electoral and constitutional law. In 2006, he flew to Tacoma to push Amendment Three to the Pierce County Charter. The amendment established instant runoff elections, a political tool that boosts the viability of independent candidates.

All the while, Anderson was dogged by a former Republican colleague,Burt Talcott, who had “minimum high regard” for Anderson’s advocacy.

In the end, Anderson won.

What of Tuesday’s disappointing returns? “I have not not become hopeless,” he said, despite the Democratic party’s “self-wounding.”

In particular, the recent endorsements of former Senators Sam Nunn and David Boren should resonate with more conservative voters, he said.

Obama-mania notwithstanding, what about the odds of ever electing a “squarehead” President? (slang for a Scandinavian).

“That won’t happen for a long, long time,” Anderson said.

Editor’s note: William Ruckelshaus, mentioned in this article, is one of 18 owners of Crosscut.

April 24, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

This just in: Boomers ruined America

originally published on Crosscut.com on March 26, 2008

On Monday night I went to see Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, an animated/snatches-of-newsreel documentary on the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and subsequent Chicago Seven conspiracy trial (the filmmaker rounded the seven up to ten to include attorneys Bill Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass as well as Black Panther leader Bobby Seale).

On Monday night I went to see Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10, an animated/snatches-of-newsreel documentary on the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots and subsequent Chicago Seven conspiracy trial (the filmmaker rounded the seven up to ten to include attorneys Bill Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass as well as Black Panther leader Bobby Seale).

It’s an ode to the glory days of dope-addled bomb throwing that filled my non-Boomer, truth-in-history heart with dread: Somewhere in the Midwest, I imagine, a textbook editor is pasting a photo of a stoned and hirsute Abbie Hoffman beneath a caption that reads, “Ending the War, Fighting for Civil Rights.”

Nooooo, please, sister, stop!

Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, et al. delighted in radical chic (and its attendant windfall of easy sex) LSD, and comic relief. They’re a part of the 1960s narrative, but not a substantive part. If anything, they kindled a backlash that gave us Richard Nixon and six more years of bloodshed in Vietnam.

Make no mistake: If I weren’t preoccupied with learning to crawl in 1968, I likely would have been rioting and getting my noggin’ cracked by Chicago’s finest. And like most privileged, male protesters, I would have monkeyed an excuse to sidestep the draft while my less-connected compatriots in Everett, WA went off to serve and die.

It’s all those Midwestern textbook editors who should take note that counterculture jesting not eclipse Hoffman and Rubin’s predecessors who made up in courage what they lacked in glitz.

I’m thinking of the Greensboro lunch-counter protestors, and MLK, and the self-immolating Buddhist Monks in SE Asia, even Oregon Senator Wayne Morse who was one of just two U.S. Senators to oppose the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution. These were passionate, risk-taking folks: Sober, intense, unyielding.

Pretentious movies, of course, call for pretentious Northwest asides: When it comes to radicals, the Seattle Seven were infinitely more compelling than their Chicago counterparts. For heaven’s sake, we had Michael Lerner, he of Tikkun and Bill and Hillary-braintrust fame.

Maybe it’s the baby-boomer schmaltz that triggered my inner-hardhat. Halfway through Chicago 10, I struggled to erase flashbacks of a 2006 Simpsons episode, written by Tim Long, in which Abe “Grampa” Simpson decides to be euthanized. To enhance his final minutes on earth, Abe asks to hear the music of the Glenn Miller Orchestra while watching footage of cops beating up hippies.

So wrong, Grampa, but somehow resonant, given the times.

The truth-in-history narrative even extends to Barack Obama’s speech on race. On March 18, Obama was introduced by a graying statesman named Harris Wofford, a former university president and (briefly) a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. It was Wofford who introduced Martin Luther King to the non-violent resistance tactics of Mahatma Gandhi and who shepherded the Peace Corps during its formative, early years.

Still, Harris Wofford won’t get stopped on the sidewalk and asked for his autograph. Wish I could say the same for Tom Hayden and Bobby Seale.

March 26, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

The Lazy B’s blue funk descends

originally published on Crosscut.com

It’s as if the serotonin god turned down the rheostat: Neighbors shuffle. Playgrounds have emptied.

For the denizens of Snohomish County, Wash., Boeing’s loss of a $35 billion aerial-refueling tanker contract a week ago, to a consortium of Northrop Grumman and EADS, the European parent of Airbus, marked the beginning of an official Period of Mourning.

The reason for people to mourn in this the urban-suburban-rural area just north of Seattle, where most of Boeing planes are made, is not solely because the Lazy B got a rude awakening. More on that in a moment.

First, though, it should be pointed out that the Pentagon will get its comeuppance. Wait until the Air Force takes possession of its first KC-45A, only to discover baguette crumbs gumming the navigation system.

Short-circuited altimeters? Well, maybe the Defense Department should have thought of that before enlisting the French with their on-the-job carafes of Bordeaux.

Everett-ites reach for gallows humor while the emasculating voice of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Jean Girard, from the movie Talledega Nights, echoes like a bully. What’s dat, Ricky Booby? You no like ta be beataan by dar Franch?

Lawmakers wasted little time heaving red meat to the vanquished.

Continue reading →

March 8, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,

Ask not who wrote the words, ask whose words are rote

originally published on Crosscut.com on February 26, 2008

Photographs, like language, draw strength from subtext.

The Internet pic of Barack Obama dressed in African garb sets a trip wire that a turban (even one presented as a goodwill gift from another country, mind you) is synonymous with terrorism. Hillary Clinton’s “ready from day one” mantra is code for the other guy ain’t got the goods when the enemy comes a-knocking.

The cruelest subtext of all, however, at least for America’s hermetic community of speechwriters, is Sen. Clinton’s suggestion that words are cosmetic. Beware the silver-tongued lawmaker, all sound and fury.

How sweet to witness a politician’s anti-rhetorician rhetoric fizzle.

During her Feb. 21 Texas debate with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton revealed her finesse, or lack of finesse, as a lobber of the acid broadside.

“Lifting whole passages from someone else’s speeches is not change you can believe in,” Clinton said, referring to Obama’s ballyhooed use of lines from his pal, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. “It’s change you can Xerox.”s

Ouch. Clinton’s rapier-ish zinger drew boos, and for good reason: It rang too cold, too scolding, too rehearsed. It also begged the question: Did Clinton’s Xerox nugget spring, whole and unblemished, from the depths of her wordsmith soul?

Oh, if only. Chances are that in some murky, speechifying cubbyhole, a hungover twentysomething conceived this ditty. She handed it to her boss, who handed it to his boss, who handed it to a campaign pasha, who handed it to Sen. Clinton with a triumphant, “Here’s our ‘Where’s the beef’!”

As David Greenberg wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, “Audiences don’t kid themselves that politicians invent the words they speak.”

For speechwriters, this new conventional wisdom is shattering. Not because audiences realize someone else is writing the script – speechwriters figured everyone knew that, at least intuitively. The shattering flows from the Clinton thesis that leadership and persuasive rhetoric are disconnected. Think of Willie Stark from Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men: Before you know it, we’ll have a demagogue in the Oval Office.

Piffle. During my brief and undistinguished career as a speechifier, I picked up the essentials: Don’t try to make someone they’re not; don’t quote from writers your speaker has never heard of (Wallace Stegner excepted); keep it short with sentences no longer than a full breath; aim for a joke or two or three; and, when appropriate, steal from others.

I don’t mean steal verbatim exactly. I mean identify cadences and patterns. Look for the music and write down the notes. Mimic others when their message resonates and cite passages with attribution.

True, if politicians understood the formula, scribblers everywhere would be out on the streets tin-cupping it. It’s the speechwriter equivalent of broadcasting ICBM telemetry codes to the Russians, but here’s our secret, as summarized by former Nixon scribe William Safire: “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; then tell ’em; then tell ’em what you told ’em.” Simple enough.

Regrettably, over time, political language has lost its kick because of focus groups and professional polling. The “tell ’em” rhetoric inevitably knits together words like “moving forward” “new” “leadership” and “our families” with various slogans du jour.

That’s what makes Obama so appealing: His language crystallizes the country’s appetite for change in a manner that sounds imaginative, original, and unvetted. He thinks and writes clearly, a pensive rhetorician from the land of Lincoln.

The Northwest has never produced anything close to an Obama-style orator, alas. Idaho Sen. William Borah was a persuasive stump speaker. He also may have been the political exception.

The best gabbers, arguably, have come from the ranks of organized labor and radical offshoots like the Industrial Workers of the World: Big Bill Haywood, Harry Bridges, and Dave Beck.

Could it be that they benefited from not having speechwriters?

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom explores the challenge of poets grasping for the original while standing on the shoulders of past greats. I’m pretty sure most speechwriters don’t feel inhibited by an anxiety of influence. Hell, influence is our lifeblood.

One of my favorite patterns is the “reversible raincoat” line, a technique of JFK’s Ted Sorensen, who likely stole it from someone else. It’s the “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” line. Substitute a word or two, say “Department of Transportation” or “taxpayer,” and voila! you have yourself a hook line.

The hope is that listeners will absorb the rhythm like a subliminal message. Any chance that they’ll equate the speaker with a JFK or a Lincoln or a Churchill?

Like I said, it’s subtext.

February 26, 2008 phjackson Leave a response , ,