Bush's Speech
James Fallows' new article (link may disappear soon) in the Atlantic brings out one of the more interesting puzzles in the Bush phenomenon. (Originally brought to my attention in Slate, "In Other Magazines").
"This spring I watched dozens of hours' worth of old videos of John Kerry and George W. Bush in action. But it was the hour in which Bush faced Ann Richards that I had to watch several times. The Bush on this tape was almost unrecognizable--and not just because he looked different from the figure we are accustomed to in the White House. He was younger, thinner, with much darker hair and a more eager yet less swaggering carriage than he has now. But the real difference was the way he sounded.
"This Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two ('million' when he clearly meant 'billion'; 'stole' when he meant 'sold'), but fewer than most people would in an hour's debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. 'To lay out my juvenile-justice plan in a minute and a half is a hard task, but I will try to do so,' he said fluidly and with a smile midway through the debate, before beginning to list his principles."
[snip] "For years I had been told by people who knew Bush from business school or from Texas politics that he was keenly smart--though perhaps in a way that didn't come across in his public statements. Perhaps! The man on the debate platform looked and sounded smart and in control. If you had to guess which of the two candidates had won the debate scholarship to college and was about to win the governorship, you would choose Bush.
"I bored my friends by forcing them to watch the tape--but I could tell that I had not bored George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California at Berkeley, who has written often of the importance of metaphor and emotional message in political communications. When I invited him to watch the Bush-Richards tape, Lakoff confirmed that everything about Bush's surface style was different. His choice of words, the pace of his speech, the length and completeness of his sentences, all made him sound like another person. Even his body language was surprising. When he was younger, Bush leaned toward the camera and did not fidget or shift his weight. He arched his eyebrows and positioned his mouth in a way that, according to Lakoff, signifies in all languages an intense, engaged form of speech.
"Lakoff also emphasized that what had changed in Bush's style was less important than what had remained the same. Bush's ways of appealing to his electoral base, of demonstrating resolve and strength, of deflecting rather than rebutting criticism, had all worked against Ann Richards. These have been constants in his rhetorical presentation of himself over the years, despite the striking decline in his sentence-by-sentence speaking skills, and they have been consistently and devastatingly effective."
[snip] "...in those days [as Governor of Texas] Bush was noted for his poise and ease in public appearances--including the informal Q&As he has tried to avoid as President. 'You never saw him in an awkward situation as governor,' she told me. 'You expected he'd know the right thing to say.'
"Obviously, Bush doesn't sound this way as President, and there is no one conclusive explanation for the change. I have read and listened to speculations that there must be some organic basis for the President's peculiar mode of speech--a learning disability, a reading problem, dyslexia or some other disorder that makes him so uncomfortable when speaking off the cuff. The main problem with these theories is that through his forties Bush was perfectly articulate. George Lakoff tried to convince me that the change was intentional. As a way of showing deep-down NASCAR-type manliness, according to Lakoff, Bush has deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne. Moreover, in Lakoff's view, the authenticity of this stance depends on Bush's consistency in presenting it. So even if he is still capable of speaking with easy eloquence, he can't afford to let the mask slip.
"I say: Maybe. Clearly Bush has been content to let his opponents, including the press, think him a numbskull. Even his unfortunate puzzled-chimp expression when trying to answer questions may be useful: his friends don't mind, and his enemies continue to underestimate him. But to me the more plausible overall explanation is the sheer change in scale from being governor of Texas to being President of the United States."
So one possibility is that there is a deliberate "Gomer Pyle" strategy being pursued by Bush and his staff: The bold, decisive leader is basically dumb but honest and patriotic; those sophisticated smart-alecks who are always jeering at him while sucking up to Teacher (or at least the teachers' unions) are morally dubious, and can't be counted on to help when the chips are down.
Fallows' preferred possibility is that there are more issues to master at the federal level; Bush knows he can't and won't master them in the way Clinton did; so he is better off sticking with clipped, high-level, simple messages, even if they sound stupid or gauche.
As I read over all this, I can't help thinking again of "organic" possibilities, i.e. diseases. Could it be that Bush has a neurological condition which is advancing as he ages? I hasten to add: this may have nothing to do with intelligence per se, or competence to hold high office. Bush, for all I know, understands very well exactly what he needs to understand, and makes decisions accordingly. I am interested in the problems he has expressing himself.
Of course, since I have no neurological training, that is about as far as I can go. I am a bit of an amateur who reads about neurological conditions--but to be honest, I am pretty much out of that habit. Like a lot of people, I have read some of Oliver Sacks' books.
Here are some standard definitions (from Jeeves):
anomia (syn: dysnomia) - General term for the inability to name objects. This can be limited to inability to name objects in semantic categories such as living things, inanimate things, fruits and vegetables, colors, animals, body parts, furniture, etc. Many of these limited conditions are given special names. (A related condition is a failure to comprehend syntactical structures, but this has no specific name.)
aphasia (syn: dysphasis) - This is the general term that literally means "no speech." It refers to any impairment of the ability to use and/or understand words and can be used to describe loss of one or more of the following abilities: ability to speak; ability to write; understand speech; understand written words. Major subcategories include: Broca's aphasia, in which one can comprehend speech, but not produce it; and, Wernicke's aphasia in which one can produce speech but not comprehend speech.
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