Rhetorical Questions by James Fallows

Once again, I look for information that will help ME decide for whom to vote. I still haven't decided, but the more informed I am, the better to make an educated decision. I found this interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly online. Here is an exerpt.

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Who will win the presidential debates? What does each candidate’s use of words say about how he would govern as president? Can Obama’s rhetorical skills lift him to the heights of Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan—or will his speechmaking do him in? After watching all 47 (!) of the primary season’s debates, our correspondent has the answers—and some harsh criticism for the moderators.

Rhetorical Questions

by James Fallows

(Final paragraph to this article.....)
The argument that Obama would be another Pétain-like Carter, offering his noble qualities only to be overwhelmed by ignoble reality, is the deepest fear about him, or at least the one that most resonates with me. The greatest hope is that before his brief time in the U.S. Senate, he absorbed more practical skills and sensibilities than Carter did in Georgia. Michael Janeway, who as dean of the Medill Journalism School at Northwestern knew the Chicago establishment figures who nurtured Obama’s rise in the 1990s, speaks of “the Chicago way”—“getting all the parties together and taking responsibility for finding a solution.” Under the Chicago way, the fact that Obama’s most important speeches are short on eight-point action plans is a strength rather than a weakness: it’s a sign that serious business will be done.

Peggy Noonan compared this approach to that of the Kennedy administration. “JFK and his people came into the White House,” she said in an e-mail, “with a faith they could be practical, pragmatic, worldly, that with these attributes they could manage what came over history’s transom. I see Obama as like this: things will come over the transom and he’ll approach them as a thoughtful sophisticate. He’ll think.”

For better and worse, if Obama wins, a thinking president is what we’ll have.