James Button, one-time speech-writer to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, wrote this in his recent book:<\/p>\n
When Rudd spoke at the Department’s Christmas party, he had sketched a triangle in the air that distilled the work of producing a policy or speech into a three-point plan:\u00a0 where are we now; where do we want to go and why; how are we going to get there?\u00a0 The second point – where do we want to go and why – expressed our values, Rudd said. It was a simple way to structure a speech and I often used it when writing speeches in the year to come.” (Button 2012, page 55, large print edition).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Reading this I was reminded\u00a0how inadequate I had found the analysis of political speech propounded by anthropologist Michael Silverstein in his short book on political talk (Silverstein 2003).\u00a0\u00a0 He seems to view political speech as mere information transfer, and the utterances made therefore\u00a0as essentially being propositions\u00a0– statements about the world that are either true or false.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps these propositions may be covered in rhetorical glitter, or presented incrementally, or subtly, or cleverly, but propositions they remain.\u00a0\u00a0 I know of no politician, and I can think of none, who speaks that way.\u00a0\u00a0 All political speeches (at least in the languages known to me) are calls to action of one form or another.\u00a0\u00a0 These actions may be undertaken by the speaker or their political party – \u201cIf elected, I will do XYZ\u201d<\/em> – or they may be actions which the current elected officials should be doing\u00a0 – \u201cOur Government\u00a0should be doing\u00a0XYZ.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em> Implicit in such calls is always another call, to an action by the listener:\u00a0 “Vote for me”<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Even lists of past achievements, which Button mentions Rudd was fond of giving, are implicit or explicit entreaties for votes.
\nOf course, such calls to action may,\u00a0of necessity, be supported by elaborate\u00a0propositional statements\u00a0about the world as it is, or as it could be or should be, as Rudd’s structure shows.\u00a0\u00a0 And such propositions may be believed or not, by listeners.\u00a0 But people called to action do not evaluate the calls they hear the way they would propositions.\u00a0 It makes no sense, for instance, to talk about the “truth” or “falsity” of an action, or even of a call to action.\u00a0\u00a0 Instead, we assess such calls on the basis of the sincerity or commitment of the speaker, on the appropriateness or feasibility or ease or legality of the action, on the consequences of the proposed action, on its costs and benefits, its likelihood of success, its potential side effects, on how it compares to any alternative actions, on the extent to which others will support it also<\/a>, etc.
\nWhat has always struck me about Barack Obama\u2019s speeches, particularly those during his first run for President in 2007-2008,\u00a0\u00a0is how often he makes calls-to-action for actions to be undertaken by his listeners:\u00a0 He would say \u201cWe should do X\u201d<\/em>, but actually mean, \u201cYou-all should do X\u201d<\/em>, since the action is often not something he can do alone, or even at all.\u00a0 “Yes we can!”<\/em> was of this form, since he is saying, “Yes, we can take back the government from the Republicans, by us all voting.”\u00a0<\/em> \u00a0 From past political speeches I have read or seen, it seems to me that only JFK, MLK and RFK regularly spoke in this way, although I am sure there must have been other politicians\u00a0who did.\u00a0 This approach and the associated language comes directly from Obama\u2019s work as a community organizer: success in that role consists in persuading people to work together on their own joint behalf.\u00a0 Having spent lots of time in the company of foreign aid workers in Africa, this voice and these idioms were very familiar to me when I first heard Obama speak.
\nRudd’s three-part structure matches closely to the formalism\u00a0proposed by Atkinson\u00a0et al.<\/em> [2005] for making proposals for action in\u00a0multi-party dialogs over action, a structure that supports rational critique and assessment of the proposed action, along the dimensions mentioned above.
\nReferences:<\/em><\/strong>
\nK. Atkinson, T. Bench-Capon and P. McBurney [2005]: A dialogue-game protocol for multi-agent argument over proposals for action.\u00a0\u00a0 Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems<\/em>, 11 (2): 153-171.
\nJames Button [2012]: Speechless:\u00a0 A Year in my Father\u2019s Business.<\/em>\u00a0 Melbourne, Australia:\u00a0 Melbourne University Press.
\nMichael Silverstein [2003]:\u00a0\u00a0 Talking Politics:\u00a0 The Substance of Style from Abe to \u201cW\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 Chicago, IL, USA:\u00a0 Prickly Paradigm Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Button, one-time speech-writer to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, wrote this in his recent book: When Rudd spoke at the Department’s Christmas party, he had sketched a triangle in the air that distilled the work of producing a policy or speech into a three-point plan:\u00a0 where are we now; where do we want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,59,60,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obama-speeches","category-oratory","category-philosophy-of-language","category-politics","p1","y2013","m03","d29","h18"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}