At the risk of talking ancient history, I want to return to Tuesday’s inaugural address and dispute a criticism of it, or more accurately, dispute the criticism’s relevance in assessing the speech’s quality —the criticism that it included no memorable phrases.
Can you think of any memorable phrase coming from President Obama in his two years of campaigning? Not, “Yes, we can,” which is memorable thanks only to mind-numbing repetition. But don’t limit the question to the new president. Other than “Axis of Evil” and “Compassionate Conservatism”, what memorable phrases came from George W. Bush during his presidency. And other than “Mend it, don’t end it,” which, like “Yes, we can”, is remembered because he said it so often, and setting aside defensive dissembling during self-induced dramas (I am trying to be delicate here), how about from President Clinton?
My point is that contemporary presidents — politicians generally — no longer speak in memorable phrases. Certainly nothing comparable to “Evil Empire”, “Go ahead, make my day”, or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” — only few of President Reagan’s many arresting formulations, formulations that themselves changed the course of events and that his speechwriters served up almost weekly… or that he extemporized when the staff failed to deliver.
Why? Yes, yes, I know, we Reagan writers possessed, collectively and individually, a rare genius, and we worked for a rare genius. Yes, yes, I hear you saying that, and, with all due modest, I must acknowledge its truth. But, no, that’s not why the sound bites flowed then and not now.
Instead, think of the change in the media environment. Except for Inaugurals, national convention acceptance speeches, the occasion nationally televised address from the Oval Office and State of the Union addresses, we had to cram our messages through three tiny TV portals (the half-hour evening news programs of ABC, NBC, CBS), brief national radio reports and, effectively, two newspapers (The New York Times and The Washington Post, though arguably a few other major papers mattered, too). And we would get, maybe, 20 seconds of our own words in broadcasts and two sentences in newspaper reports. No one carried our speeches in full. Entire texts were available only to the media. CNN didn’t become a force until our last year in office (even then, comparatively few watched it) and the web arrive almost a decade later. We lived and died by soundbites.
No one does today. For a major national candidate today, it is a fair bet that most of those he or she wishes to reach will see entire speeches on cable TV or the Internet or read the texts online. Formulating bright phrases has become less urgent, and so writers give it less attention.
My point: Criticizing the inaugural for its lack of such lines is, in effect, holding it to the standard of another era. That may have been a good standard. It may have been a superior standard. But it is not today’s standard. And those who demand it are showing themselves relics of the past.
