The first thing Critical Voter listeners and readers might notice when they look over the acceptance speeches of President Obama and Mitt Romney at the recent party conventions is how frequently both candidates peppered their talks with linguistic rhetorical devices, such as alliteration (which, if you recall, is the repetition of an initial consonant sound), anaphora (the repetition of a word or phrase within a sentence for affect) and the “rule of three” (three items in any list or examples to used illustrate a point).
The moment the President was allowed a word in edgewise between cheers of “Four More Years!” he had already talked about a “dogged faith in the future…” (alliteration), “…which has pushed this nation forward, even when the odds are great, even when the road is long.” (anaphora).
Similarly, Mitt Romney had barely said yes to his party’s nomination before listing all kinds of triplets, talking about: “When a hard fought election was over, when the yard signs came down and the television commercials finally came off the air…” (three verbs), Americans who have always been “optimistic and positive and confident in the future.” (three nouns, with an extra “and” thrown in for anaphoric impact).
The use of such devices over and over again in both candidate’s speeches (along with other linguistic devices such as a modest attempt at chiasmus on the President’s part who announced to veterans, that once they took off their uniforms “we will serve you as well as you’ve served us”) should highlight the fact that, for persuasive speakers, such devices are as common as the use of pronouns by those engaging in normal conversation.
It’s commonly assumed that the President is the more skilled public speaker of the two, but in looking over both speeches, this seems to boil down to the fact that he has a greater comfort level utilizing the linguistic devices I’ve just highlighted far more frequently than his rival (alliteration, anaphora or a triplet can be discerned in almost every paragraph of his speech).
Romney, in contrast, seems to have spent more time responding to anticipated criticisms of his candidacy (that he is a rapacious businessman who has destroyed more than he has created, or that his party is hostile to women) by including content in his Statement of Facts and Refutation that confound such judgments.
A paean to women, starting with his mother and wife and continuing through Republican office holders (including those he ran with and worked with when Governor of Massachusetts) was meant to stave off criticism on the “War on Women” accusation. But his attempt to defend his role at Bain Capital was cleverer (and, thus, more effective), including as it did a list of companies that his rival’s campaign shops at (Staples) and the President’s own wife has praised (Sports Authority) which helped defuse the notion that Bain (and Romney) has done nothing but destroy businesses and export jobs.
Obama speech (which, as I mentioned earlier, was light on logos-based Arrangement elements, including Refutation) did not seem to include similar attempts at procatalepsis (the blunting of an objection by answering it in advance), although his overall message (that the work he has started will take another term to complete) could be seen as an attempt to provide an uber-response to any accusation that he has not delivered on his 2008 promises (with an answer that boils down to: “not yet, but I soon will”).
As much as I was expecting the best rhetorical moment to come from the Obama speech (given that, as noted above, he is the more skilled speaker of the two), I’ve got to say that my favorite point came during Romney’s defense of his role at Bain when he talked about his decision to not ask for investment from his Mormon church’s pension fund.
The punchline of that story was that his partner (who did get the pension fund of the Episcopal Church he was a member of to invest) did that institution a big favor since Bain brought in such good returns. But rather than leaving it at a self-effacing remark that effectively says “even I, a brilliant businessman, can make mistakes,” he instead continued saying that “…it was bad enough that I might lose my investors’ money, but I didn’t want to go to hell too.”
The reason this joke worked so well is that one of the candidate’s unstated negatives is his membership in a church (the Mormons or Latter Day Saints/LDS) with which many Americans are still uncomfortable. And by making this small gag, he was highlighting that members of the church – starting, importantly, with Romney himself – have a sense of humor about themselves (one of the most important elements of being considered “normal”).
And while I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the religion issue this election, we have seen an important turning point in how we deal with that subject, a turning point delivered not via a press conference dedicated to the subject (something both Presidents Kennedy and Obama had to do when dealing with contraversies regarding the churches they belonged to) by via a simple joke that wonderfully encapsulates the power of rhetoric.
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