Opinion and Stupidity so often Equate These Days — an Example from the Democratic National Convention and Its Pundits

© 2012 Peter Free

 

07 September 2012

 

 

Today’s media news analysis is filled with opinions about the quality of President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention last night

 

These opinions are tiresomely all over the place.  Apparently as a result of people’s inability to bring rationally chosen reference points into their critiques.

 

As a friend reminded me yesterday, he and I are deathly tired of hyperbole, bombast, deliberately crafted deceits, and brain-dead lip flappers.

 

I am not just talking about politicians.

 

Pundit analysts, too, seem to have left their minds so far outside the door that even someone wielding a telescope couldn’t see them.

 

 

Was Obama’s speech good, bad, mediocre, or beside the point?

 

In a rational world, the answer should depend on what it was intended to do and whether it used intellectually respectable means to get there.

 

But even that relatively obvious standard got pitched by most of the people I read.

 

Democrats, for the most part, unqualifiedly saw motivational excellence.  Republicans, almost unanimously, saw complete lack of worth.

 

Obviously, these two outcomes cannot both qualify as rational evaluations of someone’s performance.  Did they, school kids would be randomly receiving As and Fs for the same school product.

 

 

“Pete, we know everybody is partisan — why does this matter?”

 

When we abandon rationality, we have pitched the only way of accurately measuring standards of performance (even in the arts), as well as the ability to assess progress toward achieving goals.

 

 

How the President’s speech should (rationally) have been evaluated

 

There are broad three steps in thinking about the quality of political speeches:

 

(1) What is the speaker trying to accomplish?

 

(2) Was his message capably crafted with that goal in mind?

 

(3) Did the message connect with preponderantly more numbers of critically important people than it missed?

 

 

Point One — what was the President trying to accomplish?

 

At the very least, last night, the President wanted to motivate Democrats to vote for him.

 

Were he as smart as he thinks he is, he arguably should also have been trying to motivate the tiny handful of TV-watching, true independents to come to the poles for him, as well.

 

Of course, the President may have recognized that his first term’s performance was not inspiringly good enough to persuade any but true believers to come to his defense this time around.  If so, his speech could rationally have been designed to appeal only to them.

 

 

Point Two — was President Obama’s speech competently crafted with the vote-getting goal in mind?

 

The President’s pedestrian, some called it “workmanlike,” recitation of accomplishments and goals obviously appealed to hard-core Democrats and ideologically attuned pundit fellow travelers.

 

Whether that speech was actually required to get these people to the polls is another question.  My guess is that they would have gotten off their bottoms to vote for him anyway.

 

More critically, those who were dispirited by the Administration’s record would most probably have gone to sleep one-quarter way through the President’s often stentorian recitation.  We have heard what he said before, presented in the same emphatic, but divorced way.  Many have reluctantly come to connect the President’s stylized rhetoric with a weak record of implementation and an even slighter one of plan-based forward-thinking.

 

 

Point Three — did the message connect with preponderantly more numbers of critically important people than it missed?

 

The President’s qualitatively pedestrian speech exhibited obvious strays from Truth and lacked even the minutest substantive details for achieving a more successful future.

 

As such, the speech seemed unlikely to appeal to people who actually care about the specifics of America’s soon-arriving destiny.

 

In this regard, I do not think that the President’s talk did “squat.”  Which means that, rationally speaking, he missed the speech’s presumed mark.

 

Maybe not an F, but certainly no A.  And that tosses out the numerous opinions of pundit evaluators at both extremes.

 

 

Driving my points home — compare President Obama’s mediocre speech last night with Bill Clinton’s genius the night before

 

Two days ago, Bill Clinton walked on political water at the Democratic Convention.

 

He exhibited honed genius in the related arts of analysis, insight, synopsis, persuasion, and human connection.

 

His speech was an extraordinary display of skills that litigating lawyers spend their lives trying to achieve — the art of persuading judges, juries, and folks generally, without straying too obviously far from truth.

 

Note

 

At law’s higher (meaning more expensive) levels, there are always adversaries and disinterested parties who will catch you (and stomp on your head), when you lie about the facts, the law, or the situation at hand.

 

Now, compare President Obama’s performance last night:

 

No gift for mind-grabbing analysis.

 

None for penetrating insight.

 

Lacking memorable synopses that are the core of persuasive analytical thinking.

 

And emotionally connecting only to those who already like him — therefore failing at building the person-to-person empathy that Bill Clinton can do with virtually anyone, anywhere, at any time.

 

(Leaving out, of course, rabid Republicans who despise former President Clinton just for existing and who spitefully cannot acknowledge even his obvious political gifts.)

 

 

“So, Pete, what is a fair-minded, rational assessment of the worth of President Obama’s speech last night?”

 

Republican Joe Scarborough nailed it, as he so often does:

 

The President said nothing in his speech tonight. But he said it so much better than Mitt Romney when he said nothing in Tampa.

 

© 2012 Katherine Fung, Barack Obama Media Reactions: Pundits Have Mixed Feelings About DNC Address, Huffington Post (07 September 2012)

 

President Obama is a conventional politician running a conventional administration.

 

Note

 

I recall that an irritated Bill Clinton, alone and insightfully, highlighted Obama’s political conventionality, during the then Senator’s presidential nomination campaign against then Senator Hillary Clinton.

 

 

The moral? — Opinions are worthless, when we refuse to apply (even broadly) applicable intellectual standards by which to measure performance

 

Rationality standards have existed for centuries.  We’re just too narcissistic to think that they apply to us.

 

As a result, we blather and gesticulate, like hormonal Australopithecines, across the space between hostile camps.

 

The only thing that I am going to remember from either 2012 convention is former President Bill Clinton demonstrating his towering political and communication gifts.

 

Genius lifts the heart, no matter where it rises.

 

It is a pity that no one in today’s political leadership has even a fractional mastery of consciously sharpened talent for “persuasion with passable integrity.”  This absence is a consequence of our inability, as a public, to rationally seek and elevate society-enhancing genius in the political arena.

 

For American modernity’s gesticulating pseudo-Australopithecines, irrationally opinionated and irrelevant battles are more important than making community progress toward solving crushingly real problems.