Friday, December 05, 2008

Hardly ...

... The new Cicero. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

All of these discussions of Barack Obama's rhetorical skills focus almost exclusively on matters of form and style. Well, I actually had a course in rhetoric, and the substance of what is said is supposed to figure as well. As for the simplification of presidential rhetoric, that has coincided with the overall simplification of American prose, which has been going on since the 1920s at least. Compare the prose in 20th-century American fiction to that of Hawthorne or Melville.

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