Speaking of Politics...

I'll admit it...I'm addicted to election news. While I haven't blogged much myself of late, I have followed political blogs (especially Talking Points Memo, Andrew Sullivan, Five Thirty Eight, and David Frum almost rabidly. The poll fluctuations, the latest gaffes, the rollouts of new commercials and the commentariate's take on it all...I'm up on them, maybe to the detriment of other obligations.

Being a student of language, I naturally pay close attention to the candidates' rhetoric, and not only to its strategy or structure (or factuality) but to its delivery. And it's that last which often moves me to some empathy for candidates or politicians already elected, even ones I don't support or even like.

Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin has been the subject of incredulity and ridicule since her awkward interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. It's fair to say she's out of her depth, but beyond that I don't feel compelled to pile on. After last Friday's debate Barack Obama was criticized for his halting responses. I'm voting for him anyway, but as I watched him occasionally stumbling over his words, I felt, more than I usually do, that I could identify with him. Mulling over his and Palin's performances last week, a paraphrase of Eliot came mind.

And I Tiresias foresuffered all enacted on this dais or set...

I think I'm a reasonably intelligent person. And I'm a very good public speaker--IF I have a text prepared. But off the cuff, I have trouble coherently discussing so much as the plot of a sitcom. I have to talk around books, complex ideas for quite a while before I can say what I mean to. It's a rare conversation in which I don't need to attempt one or two or three clarifications of a statement or I don't leave groaning about some utterance.

So I feel for the politicians who, on camera day in and day out, find themselves asea in their native tongue. That goes even for our current president, for whom I have sufficient disgust to burn up most of Blogger's bandwith were I to vent it here.

Unsurprisingly, then, I don't put much stock in fluency. I would like to say this benefits me as a voter since I am inclined to discount a candidate's manner of speaking and focus on what he or she actually says. That advantage could only hold, though, if candidates' actions after being elected tended to conform to promises made on the stump. I can more confidently say that it constrains the sanctimony with which I might inveigh against candidates I don't like. Which at least makes me a more rational participant in civic discourse. So, hard as it is to say it, for the one and only time I will ever say it, Thank you Sarah Palin.