The Royal "We" and the Rhetoric of Socialism
Oct 28, 2009
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Branson L. Woodard
]
One word can say it all-- English professor Dr .Branson Woodard gives his personal analysis of President Obama’s recent speech to Congress, sprinkled with some sharp wit and intriguing rhetorical insight. (Photograph: ComputerWeekly.com).
The moment came suddenly and with great fanfare. It was to be the defining moment about a White House plan for health care.
But from the opening lines of Mr. Obama’s recent address to a Joint Session of Congress, audiences there and on national TV saw something much different. It was a subtle moment of political vision—and disclosure. In sixty minutes or so, the old cliché about knowing when a politician is lying (if his lips are moving) had given way to a broader move toward a new political and national identity
The effort lies in a question:
How do you know when you’re listening to a radical Socialist? When he packs a speech with the pronoun “we” and rarely indicates whom he means.
That’s only one several offenses pointed out in this speech and in others. To be sure, the charismatic Obama treated health care listeners to a fluid procession of timely claims that Obamacare was the cure for America. After all, according to the speech, health care is at the “breaking point.”
In fairness, Mr. Obama covered important ground in the speech overall. First came a reminder about America’s financial decline, then a list of current problems in health care, Obama’s own proposal, some erroneous rebuttals by his opponents, some ways to pay for his plan, and finally an urge to act based upon the legacy of Ted Kennedy and the magnanimity of the American people. It was a wonderful, moving speech.
But wait: my words wonderful and moving may not mean what you think. By wonderful, I refer quite literally to the fullness of wonder about what the man was intending to say. Moving is not related to compassion or empathy but to subtlety in shifting back and forth between calculated implication and utter ambiguity—a deliberate obscurity of whether Obama’s use of we at any point was referring to the federal government, to his own private advisors (the czars), to the US Congress itself, to the American people, or to some combination of these. Any reasonable person is left as confused as ever about his plan due to its lack of specifics, not just about who “we” are from point to point but basic evidence of his claims. The speech made for lively campaign talk but offered little in clear specificity.
The pundits like to remind us that with proposed legislation, the devil is in the details. If so, then Mr. Obama’s detail-starved address was nothing short of heavenly, with the substance of a cloud.
Specifically, much of the ambiguity lies in one word, we. How can a simple pair of letters obscure so much? The very question smacks of paradox, especially given Mr. Obama’s need to re-energize the health care debate by calling for unity and cooperation. No wonder the speech contains approximately 70 occurrences of we. More to the point of paradox, a look at only a few instances of this little word shows how the speech both discloses and conceals at the same time.
One quick clarification: my examples are chosen randomly so as to avoid skewing the data. Let’s look briefly at the beginning of the speech and go from there.
His opening line (“Madame Speaker, Vice President Biden, Members of Congress, and the American people”) is typical, of course, for the occasion. Moments later he warns, apparently to this collective already identified, “we are by no means out of the woods.” But then comes an important shift: he pledges to seek relief for jobless Americans, credit-deprived businesses, and foreclosure-threatened homeowners because such help “is our ultimate goal [emphasis added].”
Whose ultimate goal? Hardly the fundamental objective of American society—that is, unless everyone is essentially an economic servant of the State. Were you and I truly responsible for the failure of Lehman Brothers? Mr. Obama offered no clarification, only ambiguity.
A sentence later, another we, and another shift: “Thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January, I can stand here with confidence and say that we have pulled this economy back from the brink.” Again, who are “we”? The czars and others in the federal government? A clear answer is not obvious, as it should be, given that this is primarily a speech and not the electronic text before me now.
But how have the feds actually saved the economy in the last eight months? Again, in the absence of details from Obama, a few possibilities come to mind: exploding the federal deficit; taking over GM; botching the “Cash for Clunkers” program by failing to limit purchases of new cars to American ones; ramming through a Stimulus plan (TARP), though it hasn’t stimulated much except bureaucracy; dealing with lobbyists, which contradicts campaign promises to exclude them; and hiring the secretive unaccountable czars despite earlier claims to have a transparent government. These actions are “bold and decisive”?
Given this context for the speech, the very next “we” borders on the ridiculous. Obama says, “we did not come here just to clean up crises. We came to build a future.” Again, great words to rally voters before an election, but at last glance, no crises have been cleaned up, and building a future requires clarity, not obscurity about the present. The speech leaves listeners without explanation, without details.
Besides, the audience cannot even be sure who “we” are.
Any speech can have weak moments, so let’s try a different section. Maybe the stunning ambiguity in the opening segment is just a fluke.
Not so, unfortunately. Later, as Mr. Obama cites the problem of increasing costs of health care, he uses another shifting “we”: “We spend one-and-a-half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t any healthier for it.” Again, who spends this money? If the subject is Medicare, maybe the pronoun refers to the federal government, but if the second statement does also, what evidence does Obama offer that we are not healthier for it? With a life expectancy of 78 years? It would seem that just one stat about rates of cure would be helpful. There is none, however, just an unproven generalization; and this speech contains many.
At this point in the address (delivering some 800 of 5500 words), he already has made nine claims with no evidence—nine empty generalizations. That is inexcusable for a major speech to a joint session of Congress about health care reform.
His pronoun we, however, remains the central issue. Providing comprehensive health reform is, Obama laments, “Our collective failure,” so he offers his own plan. His proposal supposedly will make existing health insurance work more efficiently, but another shifting pronoun lurks nearby: “We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses” because “there’s no reason we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.” If the first “we” means the White House, the Congress, the czars, or some combination (who knows?), the second “we” would seem to refer to doctors and medical staff. Clear enough?
Perhaps, but shortly Mr. Obama offers this jewel of a shift in his comments about the cost of reform: “there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize [emphasis added].” Here is a really tricky pronoun switch. The second one refers apparently to backers of Obamacare, whoever they are.
The first pronoun is the artful dodger, concealing more than it reveals. On the surface, the proposers of Obamacare must offset deficits from reform by reducing expenditures on health care. But who are the people that will live, die, or stand in rationing lines due to these “spending cuts”? (Never mind that “spending cuts” becomes verbal cover for yet more government control affecting private health care providers, doctors, and hospitals.) Mr. Obama does not say and leaves the details in a fog. In the very least, his ambiguity exposes individual citizens to less health care than needed, perhaps none at all. The trick, though, is that someone will have to decide. Now, who do you think the decision-makers will be? Not we public citizens.
Did listeners to the speech recognize the switch here in the nanosecond they were given to hear and understand the claim? Frankly, I caught it only after several moments looking at the sentences in a written text. In fact, reading the written text helps to explain why the audience cannot be sure, here and elsewhere, who “we” are.
On that Wednesday evening in DC, the question should have arisen: how much did the audience, doing its very best to understand, really capture?
An electronic version of Obama’s remarks raises a sobering and reasonable corollary: How much were they supposed to understand?
Rather little, given the many other examples of the ambiguous “we.” The point is that the speech obscures more than it explains. Time after time, listeners are left with inclusive pronouns but no clear sense of who is being included.
Such vagueness becomes useful to promote a highly centralized model of government preferred by Obama. Granted, in the speech he appears to distance himself from such a model, noting that “our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not solve every problem” and that sometimes “government action” may diminish personal freedoms in order to bring about added security. But then, he adds, these forbearers knew also that “the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little.” How little is too little? There is the loophole: the alluring ambiguity in this speech provides rhetorical cover for the advocacy of socialism.
Time and again, the phantom “we” echoes to a shadow nation the mindset of a shadow government. Suddenly the royal “we,” with its pompous disregard for clarity and detail, begins to add up. The king has spoken. Under cover of an army of ambiguous pronouns, Obama ideology does its work—slowing the pulse, dulling the patient’s vision, numbing the sensibilities. Very soon, who will question that Obamacare is the Magna Carta. Washington is America.
But wait: there is, in fact, another we, and it means anything but the White House. In fact, this pronoun has no ambiguity and embodies a far greater, truly sovereign, referent: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Here stand seven noble commitments, which together constitute true “bold and decisive action.”
It’s asking a lot of Washington bureaucrats, who pass legislation without reading it, to stop and read and obey everything that follows this statement, and in its proper context. (By the way, each pol took an oath to do so.) This prescription may just be the greatest political health care plan available today. It requires no taxes, no Potomac promenade, no ambiguous pronouns or obscure public speeches.
And best of all, the 2010 elections are just months away.
Photograph: ComputerWeekly.com
philipluca
03.04.10 4:45 PM
yes
