More Oratory, Please
Mark Bauerlein
Maybe Peggy Noonan was right last week to say:
“We are grown-ups, we know our country needs greatness, but we do not expect it and will settle at the moment for good. We just want a reasonable person. We would like a candidate who does not appear to be obviously insane. We’d like knowledge, judgment, a prudent understanding of the world and of the ways and histories of the men and women in it.”
Candidates today seem to live by that expectation, and the presence of cameras at all times, friendly and hostile, turns every unguarded moment into a threat. And with the press sometimes pushing the most harmless or inconsequential statements into notable self-exposures, no wonder bromides abound.
Every once in a while, in a perverse mood, an attentive voter longs for something like this:
“The great question for all of us this fall is becoming clearer and clearer. Will America be led by a President elected by a majority of the American people, or will we be intimidated and blackmailed into following the path dictated by a disruptive and militant minority—the pampered prodigies of the radical liberals of the United States Senate.”
That was Spiro Agnew back in September 1970. He also complained that day, “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism,” leaders pessimistic about the United States who have “formed their own 4-H Club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”
William Safire wrote those lines, and later left the Nixon Administration disgusted with the abuse of presidential power. (Pat Buchanan was another of Agnew’s writers.) Agnew resigned in disgrace a few years afterwards. It was a low point of national politics, and it coincided with the rise of what might be called surveillance journalism.
Question: Is it now impossible for pointed, dramatic, original, bellicose declamation to survive on the national stage?
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