Roger’s Rules

January 15th, 2008 6:22 am

Hillary and Quintilian, or Sophistry on Parade

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“Some ideas which you could not actually make good should be sown in the mind with the help of rhetorical figure. The hidden dart sometimes sticks; it cannot be removed, because it cannot be seen; but if you were to say the same thing openly, the defense can justify it and it needs to be proved.”
–Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria

Quintilian would be proud of the Clinton campaign. He took 10 long books to set out “the education of the orator,” and here they are putting it all into action flawlessly, just through intuition or natural aptitude. Hillary and her minions are masters of insinuation, what the sophists (that’s Greek for “politician”) called apophasis or paralipsis, i.e., asserting something by feigning to ignore it. First we have Bill Shaheen, until last week co-chairman of the Clinton campaign. As a story in MSNBC noted, Shaheen was forced to resign after observing to a reporter that Republicans would likely use Obama’s admitted drug use against him in the campaign. “Was Shaheen’s commentary truly a blunder?” the writer asked. Well, what do you think? The Clinton position seems to be (I paraphrase):

We are not going to make Obama’s drug use an issue–no, no matter what the nasty Republicans say, we are not even going to mention the fact that, at least when young, Obama took drugs. It just isn’t fair to make such youthful indiscretions as taking illegal drugs–cocaine or whatever it was–an issue, so we definitely are not going to raise the matter of Obama’s drug use, even though he admitted taking drugs in his autobiography.

Or, as Mark Penn, a Clinton pollster, put it when asked about the Shaheen incident on Hardball: “Well, I think we’ve made clear that the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising.” And Brutus, as Mark Antony continually assured us, “is an honorable man.”

What do you suppose the Greek word for “sleaze” is?

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10 Comments

Hale Adams:

Worthy people the ancient Greeks no doubt were, and naive they weren’t. But sometimes old concepts don’t get labelled until long after they’re first thought of.

So, what IS the Greek world for “sleaze”? Or is the English word “sleaze” sort of like the German word “gestalt”, for which there’s no good translation into another language?

Jan 15, 2008 - 10:57 am Peter:

I don’t speak Greek but I live in northeast Texas, not far from Arkansas. The word for sleaze in Redneck is “Clinton”.

Jan 15, 2008 - 11:06 am Bob Reynolds:

λεπτός

Jan 15, 2008 - 11:22 am heedless:

I’m pretty sure Aristotle named this one:

“Politics”

Jan 15, 2008 - 11:38 am Max:

This isn’t Quintilian as much as it is Saul Alinsky. Obama can work the Alinsky playbook, too. This is going to be a very nasty campaign.

Jan 15, 2008 - 12:36 pm arlo:

Pappy O”Daniel could learn a thing or two from the Clintons. They are a compelling case study in the fine art of innuendo.

Jan 15, 2008 - 1:17 pm Chester White:

There’s a long tradition of this, especially among Democrats.

I’m old enough to remember Jimmy Carter speaking of Ted Kennedy (paraphrasing): “I will not bring up our great national tragedy of Chappaquiddick again”…. thereby precisely “bringing up Chappaquiddick again.”

Jan 16, 2008 - 3:46 am Anonymous:

This is a post I made on Matt Bai’s blog a few days ago.

“I think it unfortunate that race, once mostly a subtext in the campaign, has now moved from the background to the foreground. Obama had positioned himself above the ugly fray of race with his message of a unity that transcended differences. Now, thanks mostly to the Clintons, and their paraliptical rhetorical ploys (the invoking of a subject while denying it should be invoked that is usually employed for thinly disguised ad hominem attacks)race has reared its ugly head.
They know that the mere foregrounding of race will work against Obama, because it will convert a submerged subtext into a key text in the primaries, and thus work against his message of inclusiveness. It is an ominous development for Obama, since it tries to lump him together with past African-American race-centric themed candidates. Further, it will help to transmute latent racism into an issue that will be one of the pivots around which the campaigns could turn.”

However, notwithstanding this scurrilous usage of rhetoric, we should not be too quick to jettison its full exercise because, as Aristotle noted a few years back, it deals with the probable and not the certain. No human endeavor can escape its clutches since omniscience tends to escape the grasp of most humans, excepting Pat Roberson and a few others. And, in particular, because politics is the House of Rhetoric given that the facts underdetermine argumentative conclusions, we are reduced to using the persuasive conceits of rhetoric. Although we can and should avoid its darker ad hominem side.

Given the ineluctablility of rhetoric due to a paucity of apodicity, perhaps there is something to Nietzsche’s marching army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms after all?

Modernists and classicists to the parapets…! Hark! The post-modernists are weaponizing their flea-infested semantical fantasies.

Jan 16, 2008 - 5:05 pm darrell:

Hitchens’ latest piece reminds us that his book accuses Hilary’s husband of being a RAPIST (juanita broaddick) and nobody has ever refuted that. read about the death of free speech, and james madison, at http://www.darrellepp.com

Jan 18, 2008 - 4:17 pm narciso:

Well the Greeks did introduce us to wordslike’sophistry’and’demagogue’.
They did have characters like Cleon, & Alcibiades. A Clinton, an Obama, a Dean, wouldn’t be too far removed from their experience.
Although Marc Anthony’s funeral oration “I come not to bury Caesar” or the speeches of Catiline,another Roman probably have more of the flavor that one is looking for.There
has not been anything new under the sun in this regard.

Jan 20, 2008 - 7:43 pm