...but there are some interesting observations to be made about how political operatives influence public perception of the leaders for whom they operate by comparing a November 2002 speech by Karl Rove at the University of Utah, later transcripted online, entitled "What Makes a President Great" with Joseph Goebbels's April 1945 speech, widely circulated in German newspapers, commemorating Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday. No, I'm not saying that Rove is Goebbels.
Rove's speech outlines several "changeless characteristics" of great presidents: 1) "clarity of vision . . . clarity about the goal, if not always clarity about the method," 2) "consistency of purpose, but a willingness to change strategy in moments of crisis," 3) "for good or ill, the legacies that have been left to them by the previous presidents," 4) "an internal self-confidence," 5) "a healthy respect for public opinion, but not to be dictated by opinion polls," 6) be a "successful coalition builder," 7) "surround himself with a strong team," and, finally, "there must be a readiness to act and a comfort in deciding." Goebbels is more succinct: "Times like those we experience today," he says, "demand more of a leader than insight, wisdom, and drive. . . . Here stands a man, sure of himself, having a clear and firm will, against the unnatural coalition of enemy statesmen who are only the lackeys and tools of this world conspiracy."
I am not an expert in German history, but I suspect there wasn't much joy in the Fatherland in April 1945, despite the Fuhrer's birthday; Goebbels himself begins his speech by admitting that "never before did things stand on such a knife's edge," acknowledging the looming "death blow to the Reich." But instead of understandable despondency, Goebbels's tone is, unsurprisingly, defiant. For him, Hitler embodies this defiance. "He is the core of resistance to the collapse of the world," Goebbels proclaims, continuing, "He is Germany's bravest heart and our people's most passionate will." Indeed, "If the nation still breaths, if it still has the chance of victory, if there is still an escape from the deadly dangers it faces," Goebbels crescendos, "it is thanks to him," concluding, "He is steadfastness itself." More accurately, then, defiance is embodied in Hitler by Goebbels, a rhetorical act with a clearly transitive goal. If Hitler is "manly" and "sure of himself," steeled, "despite terrible pain and suffering," against "our hate-filled enemies," Goebbels contends, how can the German citizenry respond any differently? He is, after all, "Fuhrer of a great and brave people." And if it is "manly and German...to depend wholly on oneself in this struggle," then "it is just as manly and German for a people to follow such a Fuhrer, unconditionally and loyally, without excuse or reservation." It is necessary, Goebbels concludes "to trust in the good star that is above him and us all." Goebbels's encomium is not simply a descriptive acclamation of Hitler's character; it directs the audience's perceptions and reactions via that description of tenacity. It models for them the behaviors they should exhibit. Moreover, it fuses the leader with his people, diffusing the leader's characteristics into the larger political community: "We feel him in us and around us."
Thirteen months after the 9/11 attacks, and four months before the start of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," Rove's speech sits on its own knife edge, with America sandwiched between its own "deadly dangers." In retrospect of course, it is easy to draw straight lines between the eight characteristics Rove defines as essential to presidential greatness and the well-documented rationales employed by the Bush administration to engage, promote, and defend the March 2003 invasion. For Rove, most of these eight characteristics come down to leader as ultimate "decider," the term Bush was humorously derided for employing in April 2006. But the term appears in the middle of Rove's 2002 speech. * "One of the great easy deciders was Theodore Roosevelt," he explains, following with a story of Roosevelt's decision to build the West Wing "where the garden conservatories were," a decision lamented by Roosevelt's wife: "In 1857, Buchanan began building these ornate glass conservatories. Over the years, they had grown and grown and grown. It was a great social highlight of Washington to be able to go, particularly in wintertime, to see the orange trees with the First Lady. Mrs. Roosevelt did not want the conservatories to be removed. She lobbied the architect to find another location for the West Wing. He reported this to Roosevelt, who in characteristic style said, 'Smash the glass houses.'"
Snarkier aspects of me want to suggest that "smash the glass houses" sounds an awful lot like current administrative attitudes towards foreign policy, but that isn't the point. What I am saying is that Rove, like Goebbels, is not merely describing an inevitable kind of leadership, or even a particular sui generis leader, he is constructing a public sphere where such descriptions are accepted as inevitable and sui generis, and, thus, logical and necessary. This acceptance occurs even though the exactitude of what we accept is evidently questionable because of the snugness with which those requisite characteristics --what we should call the leader's ethos-- fit the situations in which they were described. In other words, we accept it even though we sense there is a rhetorical manipulation afoot.
The manipulation occurs when the ethos described by the operative is manifested by the leader as if it were intrinsic to the leader and not a construction of the operative, et al. This is exactly what happened when Bush, four years after this speech by Rove, dubbed himself "the decider." Despite the ribbing Bush took for his lexical misuse, most Americans seemed to understand what it meant, in part because of Rove's preexisting and persistent cadence, elsewhere as in this speech, that 'decider-ness' is an inherent Bush characteristic. This formulation of the reciprocal Bush-Rove (leader-operative) relationship, not shockingly, calls into question the viability of adjectives like 'misuse' and 'his,' just as Hitler's suicide undermines Goebbels's claim that the Fuhrer is "the core of Resistance." Both instances suggest that the operative-constructed ethos of the leader qua leader is not necessarily synonymous with the character of the leader qua individual, though they may wish us to believe it so.
With this reciprocity in mind, the most fascinating part of Rove's 2002 speech isn't even in the body proper, but during the subsequent Q&A session when an audience member tosses Rove a big, fat slider of a question:
Audience Member: Mr. Rove, it is a real privilege to have you here. One of George W. Bush’s greatest assets seems to be that his opponents always underestimate him. Perhaps you could maybe shed some light on why people seem to do that, and as one who truly knows the president, maybe you could just shed a little light on what makes the president such a great leader and such a good man.
Rove's response is worth reading in its entirety; search intext for "I can't explain why they underestimate him, but they do" that begins Rove's response. What follows is approximately eight hundred cogent words, suggesting that, though this response was extemporaneously delivered, its content was not spontaneously generated in Utah, November 2002.
The way Rove embodies Bush as simultaneously Everyman and Ubermensch is also well-documented, though perhaps never as densely as in this response. "I think [they underestimate him] because he is from Midland, Texas," Rove begins, "and his idea of a vacation spot is Crawford, Texas, rather than Hyannisport." Bush as the Everyman. But, he immediately continues, "He is one of the best-read people I have ever met. He was a Yale undergraduate, a history major. He has a great sense of history and its forces. He is the first president to be an MBA, a Harvard MBA" Bush as the Ubermensch. Rove announces that "I think a great deal of it is his personal characteristics." The antecedent to that "it" is left unclear, but we can bridge the gap easily enough: Rove closes the circuit between the general, historical "changeless characteristics" that make presidents great and the "personal characteristics" of this particular president: "He is a person who is centered . . . I think he is also someone who is driven by a vision." Here another instance of reciprocity is generated. "Clarity of vision," a gregarious and inchoate concept, can easily apply to any declaration Bush makes, Rove knows, and such self-conscious and expansive labeling reinforces, reflexively, the notion that the label indicates an essential characteristic of Bush. Even in the face of massive public disapproval --indeed especially in the face of it-- Bush's declarations, stemming from his clarity of vision, cannot be criticized as tone deaf and stubborn because, to restate Rove's changeless characteristics, Bush's persistent adherence to his "vision" exhibits an "internal self-confidence." Or, as Rove explains more fully in answer to the student's question about Bush as "such a great leader and such a good man:"
He knows what he believes. He knows he is not always right. He has an ease in making decisions. He has a vision of where he wants to go, a comfort that he is going to do the best he can do, and if people don't like if, he is going back to Crawford, Texas and mosey around his sixteen hundred acres, get a new pair of boots, watch baseball games, and read some good books.
This statement concludes Rove's response to the student, and it is here that we see Rove emphatically conflating the conceptual "great president" with the current president, a man who likes both to "mosey" and "read some good books." A great president maintains "a healthy respect for public opinion, but not to be dictated by opinion polls," while Bush "is going to do the best he can do;" a great president must be maintain "a readiness to act and a comfort in deciding," while Bush "has an ease in making decisions." Etc. "[H]e is successful because he is a person who is entirely comfortable in his own skin," Rove summarizes. One suddenly suspects that blithely and assertively demanding the smashing of glass houses is not beyond the purview of a leader so deeply comfortable with his own ethos.
If Rove and Goebbels's speeches are more than descriptive declamations celebratory in focus --which we might call an epideictic mode-- what, then, are their functions? The answer may be that perhaps they are a sort of trojan horse epideictic from whence the rudiments of political bulwarks are raised, defensive in 1945 Germany, preemptively offensive in America, late 2002. Both speak of "rare times" and "rare individuals." Goebbels's claim that "Times such as these are rare in history," is easily paralleled by Rove's hypothesis that most presidents are not "called upon to deal with the greatness of the times." It is obvious that both operatives want audiences to believe that their man, their leader is such a rare individual in such a rare time, and so the purpose of their speeches, beyond approbation, is to prepare the earth for the building of those bulwarks. That the audience asks to be told how great a leader and good a man Bush is suggests how easily that preparation is accomplished: if the digging is done by the audience, the shovel is forged by the operative.
In their New Rhetoric (page 52), Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca suggest that "the speaker engaged in epidictic discourse is very close to being an educator." Since the function of the epideictic mode is conventionally celebratory, they explain, "what he is going to say does not arouse controversy" because the speaker is "simply promoting values that are shared in the community." In this sense, Rove and Goebbels are educators, if by that term we understand the act of education as the establishment of a reiterable framework by which the world is made intellible for audiences. Less kindly, it's an education where the educator both defines the word and quizzes its meaning. The problem with their explanation, though, is that their assumption that "no immediate practical interest is ever involved" fails to acknowledge the dual-purpose epideictic mode highlighted here by Rove and Goebbels. I'd argue that both operative's speech had definite "practical interests" beyond panegyric: for Goebbels it was a rallying cry of 'once more to the breach,' while for Rove it was the introduction of Bush's character, and more significantly, the casting of that character as authentically Bush's, so both can act as pre-established (seemingly intrinsic) keys waiting for audiences to unlock the justifications behind the administration's posture towards the 'global war on terror' and post-9/11 foreign policy. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are absolutely right, then, that speakers's "own authority" over audiences helps them "increase the intensity of adherence to values held in common by the audience and the speaker." Certainly Goebbels and Rove understood this fact.
A more extensive analysis, however, could take into account the proportion of authority between speakers and audiences in negotiating which values are held, and the extent to which they are held "in common."
-------
* In Rove and Bush's defense, there are a handful of instances in the OED of the use of "decider," starting in the mid-sixteenth century, with none newer than the late nineteenth century, most dealing with either biblical scripture as ultimate arbiter, or the championship of a series of horseraces.
[Thanks to Trish for the lead on Goebbels.]
Recent Comments