When rhetoric wanders in wacky ways.

AuthorVatz, Richard E.
PositionPolitical Landscape - United States 2016 presidential elections

THE 2016 presidential election pitted former Secretary of State and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.) against world-renowned entrepreneur Donald Trump, constituting the highest negatively-rated Democratic and Republican candidates in any election in the modern era.

It is important when analyzing the rhetoric of such a fractious national election that the writer says what his biases are, as well as what he means by rhetoric and is clear about why it is so important. My biases, well known where I teach, Towson University, and my national organization, the National Communication Association, for better or worse, are conservative--not the nasty alt-Right or fake conservatism, as in Steve Bannon of Breitbart News (now part of Pres. Trump's inner White House circle), but Howard Baker, George F. Will, Paul Ryan, and Mitt Romney anti-big government, pro-individual responsibility, pro-internationalism in foreign policy conservatism.

Rhetoric, meanwhile, is the struggle for agenda, or the subjects we talk about, and the struggle for spin, or the meaning and significance of what we talk about. In presidential campaigns, the agenda and spin always are critical. In the 1960 race--the first of the modern presidential era--between Republican Vice Pres. Richard Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy (D.-Mass.), the rhetorical conventions all were broken.

Why would an eight-year vice president debate a lesser-known second-term senator? The debates put Kennedy on an equal stage with Nixon. People could see how polished, cool, and attractive Kennedy was, and how sweaty and unattractive Nixon was. It is a consensually validated truth, but actually true nonetheless, that people who listened to the debates on radio thought Nixon had won them, but people who saw them on television thought that Kennedy had won them going away.

Nixon serially made an incredible rhetorical mistake that no one reported as such, but which Americans noticed, if only subconsciously. Frequently, Nixon--he was nicknamed "Tricky Dick," a less devastating title than "Crooked Hillary" as it turns out--when asked to respond to a Kennedy position, sometimes would reply, "I have no comment."

What this did was communicate that Nixon's opponent, Sen. Kennedy, had said it all on a particular point, that Nixon had nothing to add, and that there often were no major differences between the two nominees. That raised people's comfort level with the upstart Kennedy, who, parenthetically, was only four years...

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