Former White House speechwriter Matthew Scully's article in The Atlantic, accusing his boss Michael Gerson of claiming too much credit for President Bush's speeches, has elicited the predictable defenses of Gerson from die-hard Bushies.
But it also has the distinction of being one of those pieces that unites right-wingers with moderates and liberals trying to prove their own fair-mindedness.
See, for example, Carolyn Curiel's rather silly defense of Gerson in The New York Times and, nearly as silly, the Michael Kinsley's defense of Scully in Slate.
The great Kinsley hasn't been on top of his game lately. His review of Christopher Hitchens' entirely mediocre book, God Is Not Great, was the worst thing I have ever read by Kinsley -- not terribly informed, quite meandering, asleep at the wheel (Kinsley did not even catch Hitchens' most glaring error, his ridiculous assertion that Orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in a sheet). This new Slate piece in defense of Gerson is not nearly as bad, but I have to think the better, smarter version of Kinsley wouldn't have been so eager to deride Scully's very important article.
In fact, most of the commentators on the Scully piece, pro and con, are such Beltway group-think-dweebs that they have missed two fairly elementary points.
1. Yes, it's true, as many, like Kinsley, have noted, that Washington insiders know that speeches are collectively written -- so Scully's "revelations" that Gerson had a lot of help aren't so astonishing.
2. Even Bennet, however, and all the Washington types, including Scully, his target Gerson, Michael Kinsley, The New York Times, and about a thousand other tone-deaf yahoos, are still colluding in the gigantic lie that Gerson was a brilliant speechwriter. That Bush has given even one great speech is one of those lies whose persistence I simply can't explain.
Well, I can try. But first, let's establish the facts, shall we? No American can name more than two or three phrases from any speech Bush has ever given. I can think of "axis of evil" and "fuzzy math," but the latter came during a debate. I can think of no others. But I figure that in a big country they come in all shapes and kinds, which means somebody out there is a big fan of Bush oratory. But even that sorry soul can't quote more than three other Bush phrases -- unless one includes slips of the tongue and other solecisms, which Jacob Weisberg dubs "Bushisms." The man is just not a good speaker. No speech can be truly great if delivered by someone who sounds bumbling and whose voice lacks authority, and what's more, Bush's speechwriters never gave him lines as quotable or eloquent as those Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan got from their hired pens. I'm sure many people sympathetic to Bush's politics have been moved by a speech of his, here and there, but nobody not sympathetic to Bush's politics has, and that's the better test.
But to admit that Bush gives bad speeches would be to short-circuit much commentary and pseudo-journalism that the pundits and D.C. journalists adore: no glowing profiles of Gerson, no inside-the-West-Wing feature pieces, no post-State of the Union commentary about which were the good sections, which the bad (they're all bad).
Not that the grade inflation is all intentional or deceitful. Much of it can be chalked up to simple falling standards. We have so few orators of any real caliber today, our expectations have fallen so low. In 1963, an American interested in current events could hear speeches by JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, William Sloane Coffin, Barry Goldwater, and not a few other eloquent speakers. Nobody alive today matches those men. Barack Obama was very good in his Democratic National Convention speech, and one imagines he'll speak that well again. The only other terrific speech I have heard in the past 10 years was Tony Blair's defense of the Iraq War invasion before Congress in 2003. But Blair's English, of course. American oratory is at an all-time low.
One might add, on a closing note of desperation, how selectively interested in ethics Scully's piece is. While attacking Gerson for being a credit-hogger and a bad friend, Scully never questions whether in fact one wants credit for writing words whose very purpose is to be used under false pretexts by another. Because that's what speechwriters do: they write words that another claims credit for. I realize that speechwriting is an old profession -- the Attic orator Isocrates was ghosting speeches in the fourth century B.C. -- but we should never entirely lose our discomfort about it. In an ideal world, politicians would use their own words. Keeping that ideal in mind is, to me, is more important than figuring out which of the hired hacks claims the credit.
The most reputable way to make a living putting words in someone else's mouth is not speechwriting but ventriloquism, which makes this podcast exceptionally important to hear.