So. Your Humble Blogger finally got around to watching ‘The Gore Speech’, Al Gore’s May 26 NYU/MoveOn PAC speech. For those who want to watch the whole thing, C-SPAN has it in their video library under Defense/Security, and it’s currently the Most Watched Video on their home page. Save your bandwidth.
It’s a terrible speech. I mean, he’s right and all, and that’s got some value, but as a speech, it’s dreadful. It’s got no shape at all, it has no interesting rhetorical tricks, it goes from outrage to solemn recitation of facts, to mockery, to sober religiously inflected analysis, to hard-core pragmatic realpolitik, all without plan, without transition, and without the sort of rhetorical sweep that carries the audience from mood to mood with the speaker. My initial reaction, when I first looked at the transcript on Wednesday night, was that it was mediocre; having finally sat down and watched the whole darned thing, I conclude that mediocre is too high a grade. His awkward face-mopping is hella distracting, he has a portentous habit of saying “quote ... unquote” when introducing the twenty or so quotes that litter his speech, and his sense of timing is awful. It’s just brutal.
But ... but ... everybody on the left loves this speech! It’s got to be great, right? It’s been linked to by everybody from, well, everybody! Heck, MoveOn is selling a DVD of the speech for five bucks. As I noted before, it’s the Most Watched video on C-SPAN’s website. How come YHB thinks it stinks?
Well, since you ask, Gentle Reader, I think people just like it because he’s right. It’s more than that, of course, but mostly I suspect that a lot of people on the left were getting very frustrated, feeling that nobody in the political mainstream was saying the thing they were thinking: Our Only President and his cronies are incompetent, lying, arrogant bozos, and their contempt for truth, justice and the American Way, coupled with their incompetence, brought us to the position where it was entirely foreseeable that some group of ‘bad apples’ would become ‘the morons who lost the war’. He didn’t say it well, but he said it, and the audience went crazy.
In fact, if you listen to the audience reaction, they get excited when he says the most obvious things in the most obvious ways. His attempts to be clever, where he connects the term ‘dominance’ to both the administration’s alleged policy and to the chains-and-sex torture of prisoners, or where he discusses differences of degree and of kind in the ill-treatment of prisoners, or when he riffs on how “a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit” fall into the auditorium like the proverbial lead zeppelins. His attempt at mocking the State of the Union bluster was painful, just painful. Nobody seemed to get what he was trying to do; he ad-libbed a comment afterwards that seemed to me to acknowledge that the bit totally failed. But when he said “Our nation's best interest lies in having a new president,” they went nuts. When he said “How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison,” the audience went nuts. And, of course, when he demanded Secretary Rumsfeld’s resignation, they went nuts in spades.
Not, I think, because they were being stirred up to it. You can see Mr. Gore picking up the energy of the audience at those times, rather than the other way around. He didn’t put anything over to them, but they took what they wanted anyway. I think that was pent-up nutsosity, waiting for somebody to tap into it. John Kerry doesn’t want to tap into it, or not yet, and I think that’s probably good electoral politics, but it leaves it untapped. Still, lots of people do try to tap into it; from Speaker Pelosi (oops, heh heh) to Senator Kennedy, and they don’t get the buzz that this speech does. Al Gore does, however, bring to the podium a more-or-less unspoken reminder that George W. Bush was not elected by the popular vote, and beyond much doubt ought not to have been elected by the Electoral College. In other words, he can be beaten. He was beaten before. He can be beaten again. That’s why the speech is making the rounds, and why it’s so successful.
Well, that and MoveOn’s skill at Tipping a phrase or two into the minds of the American Left; let’s give credit where it’s due. Which, if I haven’t made it clear, is not to Al Gore this time.
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-Vardibidian.