TPCS 25: The rhetorical world of George W. Bush

By Jan Blommaert

Introduction

An important part of political science rests on the analysis of the public and institutional discourse of politicians. Their speeches, memoirs, archives, interviews provide the historian of past politics or the analyst of current politics with a window on the ideas, dogma’s and ideological preoccupations of politicians, and they thus provide some degree of ‘insiders’ view’ on political developments or events. Most prominent politicians have left abundant data; in fact, many politicians made sure they left abundant data to the scholars. And scholarship in conjunction with collective political memory has lifted some of their speeches or statements to the status of emblems of an epoch, icons of a type of (heroic) person, or near-proverbial sayings articulating universal wisdom. Examples abound: Martin Luther King’s ‘I had a dream’, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, De Gaulle’s ‘Français, Françaises, aidez-moi!’ and so on.

Command of rhetorical skills has been, and to some degree still is, a prerequisite for high office. The leader of a country or of an important fraction of the polity was, and still is, a great communicator, someone whose words are required to incorporate the thoughts and worries of the people, and someone whose words are required to emanate the ‘spirit’ – one might also call it ideology – of the people. Just as we do in everyday life with people around us, we judge politicians very much by the ways in which they communicate, categorizing them as ‘serious’ or ‘a joke’, as ‘commanding respect’ or ‘uninspiring’, as heroes or wimps, as people who could rise to the moment and take a courageous decision or people who faltered, doubted themselves and hesitated to do what was right. We combine such features of communication style with other features of personality – the looks, the recognizable features of ethnic, regional, educational or class background - and blend them into ‘image’.

There are no standard criteria for such judgments about communication style. Such criteria tend to be contingent, they depend on who, what and how, on concrete circumstances, and most of all on how they fit with other features. Thus Bill Clinton could afford a certain degree of machismo in his style because of associative links between such a style of speaking with an overall image of the ‘Southern US male’, a species apparently renowned for sexism and machismo. Ronald Reagan’s toughness was made larger than life and more convincing because it blended so well with his grandfatherly, friendly appearance – when a friendly old man gets angry, it’s genuine. Mitterand’s carefully constructed proletarian background was the perfect vehicle for a very De Gaullian (even ancient regime) style of public address. And Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher was tough as a rock, yet the queen of friendly, conversationalized public interaction – a style which invoked images of middle-class everyday rationality.

Not everyone, however, was a fabulous orator. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush Sr., John Major: none of them was impressive or memorable as a speaker. But all of them spoke and wrote, all of them left a record that can now be explored and compared by scholars. They can be judged as mediocre orators because we can compare them to great communicators, because they have left something that can be compared.

A traditional analysis of the rhetoric of George W. Bush is nearly impossible. The reason is straightforward: there is nothing to be analyzed traditionally. The president of the US appears to be a non-rhetorical politician, a non-communicator. This, I believe, is politically significant and begs all kinds of comparative questions. Fortunately, evidence of absence is not absence of evidence. Even if George W. Bush does not communicate publicly in the way all of his predecessors did, this absence is not a negative thing, not a void, but a positive thing, the production of public silence. Seen from this angle, we may start analyzing such silence as rhetoric, or at least, as an ingredient of a rhetorical world in which George W. Bush himself only plays a marginal direct role. Yet he is omnipresent, indirectly and through the communicative acts of others. This, I believe, leads us right into the heart of contemporary power politics and how we should appraise it.

How to quote: Blommaert, J. (2012). The rhetorical world of George W. Bush. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 25).

Read the full working paper here: The rhetorical world of George W. Bush.