Beyond The Commons

Aaron Wherry covers all the goings-on in and around Parliament Hill. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronwherry

Categories: Beyond The Commons, Capital Read

BTC: Before we move on

by Aaron Wherry on Friday, October 3, 2008 9:52pm - 39 Comments

Just thinking this through.

So let’s say we’re deciding that the plagiarism of John Howard (and now Mike Harris) doesn’t matter because Stephen Harper didn’t write the speech. If that’s case, do any of Stephen Harper’s speeches, assuming almost all of them are at least partially written by someone else, matter?

If he takes none of the blame, can he receive any of the credit? That doesn’t seem possible. Or rational. So are we collectively making some sort of post-modern decision that political speeches no longer matter? And is that a really enlightened point of view? Or a sign of profound apathy?

Tags: Election Watch, John Howard, Mike Harris, Stephen Harper

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Jenn

Ah, but jwl, back in those days speeches really did make a difference. People, and I mean other politicians, actually listened to the ideas contained therein, and if you made a speech with enough good ideas and you spoke it passionately, people would actually change their minds on the issue.

These days no matter what your leader says or does, it is the right thing to do. Other politicians and the party faithful no longer have minds of their own. They just work to ensure that whatever crazy fool thing the leader says or does has the right ‘spin’.

Maybe because the ability to communicate around the globe has become so very easy, we’ve had to insulate our brains from idea overload. Whatever the cause, we simply no longer listen. Not just to the other guy, we don’t even listen to our own guy with any sense of rational thought.
http://myblahg.com Robert McClelland

This is ridiculous. We’re talking about 3 sentences in the middle of a speech.

Conservatives really hate being hoisted on their own petards. Listen up rubes. If you don’t want this to happen stop injecting these things into our political discourse. It wasn’t the Liberals or the NDP who made plagiarism a political issue.
Sean S.

Jenn,

You’re right in some ways. Speeches were far more complex and nuanced 100 years ago than they are today (John Rahlston Saul makes this point in one of his books – pointing out that speeches to barely literate rural populations in the late 1800s were far more intellectual and developed than those of today).

On the other hand, when I was a kid (I’m 39) growing up just north of Toronto, there was a strong pattern of habitual partisanship, where often party allegiance would maintain for generations. Or consider the influence of the church in Quebec politics prior to the Quiet Revolution, etc..

I’d be cautious of overstating the purity of political life in the past.
Jenn

How about we meet in the middle? A speech might get you to think about a specific ISSUE differently; but it would take a lot of issues over a long period of time to change your party allegiance. And that hasn’t changed, I don’t think.

And please don’t think I think politics of the past were PURE. If anything, I suspect more shenanigans went on back then, simply because they were easier to hide. I wonder if the average joe knew MacDonald had a drinking problem, for example.
http://carnewsandviews.com jwl

Sean S

There’s an interesting article by John McWhorter at the New Republic website called Speech!. It’s well worth a read if you have some free time.

It starts:

“If Abraham Lincoln were brought back to life, one thing that would throw him, other than electric power and the Internet, would be that audiences disrupted his speeches by clapping after every three or four lines. As ordinary as this seems now, this kind of applause is actually a custom of our times: Wesleyan political scientist Elvin Lim has documented that, in records of presidential addresses since Franklin D. Roosevelt, 97 percent of the applause lines appear in speeches by Richard Nixon and his successors. To speakers in Lincoln’s day, a public address was typically a lecture. In our time, it is more often a love-in, more about the speaker “connecting” with the audience than teaching it anything new; hence the constant interruptions for clapping.”
Mtl_dude

Jarrid, you talk about smears, but this passage is quite inaccurate:

Why did Canadians continue to support Pierre Trudeau even though they knew that he was riding around on a motorcycle wearing Nazi insignia and supporting the Germans. Because it was old news and Canadians decided Aaron to, guess what,…move on.

The motorcycle thing, he wore a WW1 Helmet, you know, the goofy looking one with a spike on top . . . not Nazi insignia. Like most francophones at the time, he was anti conscription, but in fact while attending university undertook reserve officer training.

Check your facts next time please
DR

I think speeches stopped relevant once it became possible to reach people through mass media.

It’s like the uselessness of lectures at University Brad Delong talked about on his blog.
Jarrid

“The motorcycle thing, he wore a WW1 Helmet, you know, the goofy looking one with a spike on top . . . not Nazi insignia.”

Fine, but this was not Trudeau’s finest moment, neither was it Quebec’s. The Fascists in Europe had to be stopped and Quebec took a powder.

I would add that I see Quebec’s self-indulgence today and think things haven’t improved all that much.

I realize Duceppe is not necessarily representative, but that is one inward-looking, myopic-thinking and politically dépassé a leader as I’ve seen in some time.
Sean S.

Thanks jwl, I found the article and read it. The distinction between logos and pathos is a good way to look at it.
Jack Mitchell

Sean S: “On the other hand, when I was a kid (I’m 39) growing up just north of Toronto, there was a strong pattern of habitual partisanship, where often party allegiance would maintain for generations. Or consider the influence of the church in Quebec politics prior to the Quiet Revolution, etc..”

Yeah, those were the days, eh? My grandfather’s clan (Eastern Ontario Scots) would literally have voted Liberal if a dog had been the candidate. And there are still some ridings where party affiliation is written in stone – man, I grew up in Ottawa Vanier, the very safest Liberal seat in the country – nothing on God’s green earth would make the good franco-ontarians of Vanier & Overbrook not vote Liberal.

Howbeit, while one shouldn’t wrongly glorify the past, I do think oratory was far more important before radio and television. For one thing, the speaking candidate, whether addressing supporters or an “undecided” crowd, was the main source of information and propaganda about where the party stood. For another, even in dyed-in-the-wool partisan ridings there would often have been a stage of the process at which one speaker’s ability outshone another’s – say, the nomination meeting, if the election itself were fixed.

Besides, when you look at how incredibly low we’ve stooped – auto-applause, speechwriters, teleprompters, winking at the camera, and now plagiarism – you don’t have to glorify the past at all to see it as an idyllic time of positively Arcadian political speechmaking. It’s all relative, right?
Sean S.

I agree, Jack – television in particular has not enriched our political and oratory life, it’s fair to say.

I’m getting all nostalgic now. It wasn’t just voting patterns that were often entrenched. How about beer? You had your Molsons families and your Labatt families. A lot of folks would have probably started voting Communist and converted religions before they switched brews. And spaghtetti was viewed as a fairly adventurous foray into foreign food. (Okay, maybe life was too boring – pity we couldn’t have kept the substance to speeches while enjoying a micro-brew with some Thai food…)
Andrew

I think with Harper’s Iraq speech, the goal was not so much to convince anyone we should get involved so much as to establish Harper’s ethos as a statesman or whatever. It is a fairly eloquent speech. Unfortunately, looking back, that ethos was built on lies.
seaandthemountains

Jack Mitchell – well put… this is nihilism and to the degree and we, as a whole, seem intent on sleep walking through the consequences. Sad.
sf

Hey Aaron, before we move on, I’d like your take on Dion ripping off speeches that he delivers to the United Nations.

If Dion takes none of the blame, can he receive any of the credit? That doesn’t seem possible. Or rational. So are we collectively making some sort of post-modern decision that political speeches no longer matter? And is that a really enlightened point of view? Or a sign of profound apathy?

Just wondering.

It would appear as though over a quarter of Stephane Dion’s speech at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2005 was plagiarized directly from a 2004 speech given to the U.S. Senate committee chaired by none other than…..John McCain. That’s right, folks, Dion has ripped off Dr. Robert Corell, a a Senior Policy Fellow with the Atmospheric Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society, in order to look like a competent Minister of the Environment.