Vincent J.
Curtis
27 Aug 2016
“Hillary Clinton is a bigot, who sees
people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,”
"What does she do when she can't defend her
record?" "She lies, she
smears, she paints decent Americans as racists. She bullies voters, who only
want a better future, and tries to intimidate them out of change."
"To Hillary Clinton, and
to her donors and advisors, pushing her to spread her smears and her lies about
decent people, I have three words: Shame on you."
The attacks were "the oldest play in the Democratic
playbook" -- the "one tired argument" left for Democrats when
their policies fail. "They keep
going back to this same well but the well has run dry."
Hillary Clinton said this of Trump:
"From the start,
Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia." "He is taking hate groups mainstream and
helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party. His disregard for the
values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous."
Karl Rove doesn’t like Donald Trump accusing Hillary Clinton
of being a bigot - explicitly. On the O’Reilly
Factor earlier this week he said he preferred Trump not being so blunt, but
rather painting a picture and letting people draw their own conclusions. Rove said nothing about Clinton’s remarks
about Trump.
Rove doesn’t seem to get the difference between a TV
commercial and a speech. TV commercials
are all about painting pictures, and letting you draw your own
conclusions. (Actually draw the
conclusion the commercial leads you to, unless you are repelled by the lying
premises.) TV commercials are repeated
endlessly, so that the message it carries is eventually driven home.
A speech on the other hand is given once. There are no replays. The audience either gets the message the
first time it is delivered, or they don’t get it. The whole art of rhetoric is about making
speeches memorable and effective.
Rove doesn’t seem to get this.
As a piece of rhetoric, Trump’s line that “Hillary Clinton
is a bigot.” is terrific. It is short,
simple, the word ‘bigot’ is punchy and powerful, and the whole expression is
memorable. Hell, we’re still talking
about it.
The rest of the passages are also very strong
rhetorically. “She lies, she smears, she
bullies.” “She paints decent Americans
as racists.” “Shame on you.” Members of
the audience grasped Trump’s meaning immediately. There was emotional power both in the words
and in the delivery of them.
Compare this with what Hillary said of Trump. The sentences are long, wordy, full of
polysyllabic words, and not one of them is memorable enough to be
repeatable. She said them in a voice as
if she were reading the phone book, in order.
The words and delivery meet Rove’s requirements perfectly, and as
rhetoric they are terrible.
If being a professional means being paid for work that does
not involve manual labor, then Karl Rove is a professional political
advisor. That doesn’t mean he is any
good, any more than being a professional financial advisor means that his financial
advice is any good. He may know how to implement,
but that doesn’t mean that where he is taking you is the right place.
What proves that a professional is any good is repeated
success, in a statistical sense. A short
string of successes is statistically meaningless. Prolonged success, or a theoretical
understanding of how success is routinely achieved, are signs of real
professionalism in a complete sense.
With Rove, we have only his success with George W.
Bush. We have no other successes as a professional
political advisor to demonstrate a real professionalism in a complete
sense. His error in respect of speaking
in public and making a TV commercial is a sign to me that he is not a complete
professional, but a guy who got lucky, once, and has been living off that one
success ever since. Just like some
financial gurus.
I don’t know who is writing Trump’s speeches for him, but he
is an excellent rhetorician. Trump’s
speeches are like artillery raining down on Hillary’s campaign.
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