(Thanks to Collecting my Thoughts: Senator Foghorn Leghorn).
SOUNDBITES have no greater enemy than John Kerry.While all politicians pledge to remove spin from politics, the Democratic presidential candidate has gone one further: he is murdering one-liners on sight.
To the dismay of his speechwriters, Mr Kerry's attempts to "make it real" at rallies has led him to ramble so much that any snappy phrases composed for him are drowned in a sea of verbosity.
The result has presented journalists with a problem when covering his remarks - should they stick to the intended script or report the mess of platitudes Mr Kerry utters?
During one speech, Mr Kerry's script writers had crafted the concise pledge: "I will work with Republicans and Democrats on this healthcare plan, and we will pass it."
In the candidate's hands it became:
I will work with Republicans and Democrats across the aisle, openly, not with an ideological, driven, fixed, rigid concept, but much like Franklin Roosevelt said, I don't care whether a good idea is a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. I just care whether or not it's gonna' work for Americans and help make our country stronger.And we will pass this bill. I'll tell you a little bit about it in a minute, and I'll tell you why we'll pass it, because it's different from anything we've ever done before, despite what the Republicans want to try to tell you.
The Massachusetts senator, who has spent his life with an eye for political office, is showing daily refusal to read simple declarations, preferring to ad-lib.
As Mark Twain said of the dialogues in James Fenimore Cooper's work:
To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say; when it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten; when a man's mouth was a rolling- mill, and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation; when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere; when conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look, as not being able to explain how it got there. [Mark Twain - Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences Page 06]
(I love Twain's comment, and have long sought a venue to repeat it.)
Posted by ronlusk at November 3, 2004 12:17 PM