September 10th 2008
From Whence The Urban O?
H
ave you noticed the degrading elocution of Barack Obama?
Raised in Hawaii, educated in Harvard, he came onto the scene with a nice English, definitely not starched and ironed but certainly not lazy; perfectly articulated but casual. He still talks that way in formal interviews, as you can tell in this interview with Bill O’Reilly. Just listen to a minute or two of it:
But in his less formal engagements with his supporters, he has slipped into a different locution, as with yesterday’s nefarious “lipstick on a pig” statement. Listen to how he says “foreign policy” and “callin’ somethin’ … the same thing [almost 'thang'] somthin’ diff’rent.”
Yo, who da f**k this sick dude? Where did he come from, and why? In a brilliant piece that both infuriates (as with its title, Fresh Blood for the Vampire)and astonishes with its clarity of thinking (even if it’s often wrong-thinking), Camille Paglia also notes BHO’s new diction:
As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama’s efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin’ his g’s like there’s no tomorrow. It’s analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes — be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.
Not only do his new speech patterns disconnect Obama from rural working-class whites, but urban black locution hardly exudes robustness, positiveness and “can-do”-ness. Coolness is not a big qualifier for president, and I can think of no candidate for president who has ever won a coolness vs. toughness contest – although Bill Clinton played the cool card pretty successfully. Indeed, that may explain Obama’s motivation.
Whatever the motivation, it’s a big mistake, another in a flooding stream of tactical errors from the Dem HQ: not preparing for the Saddleback Church confrontation, picking Joe Biden, dropping his “new politician” persona for cheap and piggish campaign attacks, over-aggrandizing the setting in Colorado.
In the end, it all boils down to what has been the essential issue of the campaign: experience. A more experienced politician … no, scratch that … a more experienced man would be making better decisions on all these matters. His speech style would be his speech style, his opinions would be clear to him and he would be able to communicate them directly, and when his words cut, they would do so decently, with honesty and careful targeting, so it’s the person’s policy that’s attacked, not the person.
Obama has been missing on all these points lately and it plays up his immaturity and the increasingly inescapable fact that 2012 or 2016 would have been better years for him. This is especially true when he stands in comparison next to John McCain, who talks the way he talks, says what he believes, and needs no Greek pillars to frame him.
Note: I’m sorry there’s no link hat-tipping the great art that accompanies this post. I found it early this morning but forgot to link it. Our internet was down all day and when I went back to find it, I can’t.
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September 10th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Paglia made two other points of interest in that article.One, she noted that the MSM was on Labor Day holiday when the Palin story broke. After a long weekend of left-wing bloggers sensationalizing Palin’s shortcomings, the MSM had some catching up to do. Too bad they didn’t do more fact-checking before running with some of the zanier stories from the blogosphere.Two, she unabashedly equates abortion with murder, and chastises other feminists for failing to address that issue.To me, the abotion issue comes down to right-to-life vs. the right-to-privacy. I disagree with Paglia about abortion rights, but at least she confronts that contrast while nearly every other pro-choice advocate aviods it.
September 10th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Greetings:I grew up back in the Bronx in the ’50s and 60s. Our neighborhood’s two large demographic groups were Jews and “Irish Catholics.” Guys like Senator Obama were commonly referred to as a “Negro with a dictionary.” It wasn’t a complement.Those were the days; those were the ways.