A Very Loud Carcass

the decline of basic political ability

In 1993, Bill Clinton spoke to both houses of Congress with a proposal for healthcare reform. His staff screwed it up: they put the wrong speech on the teleprompter. Clinton looked at the teleprompter, leaned over to say “wrong speech” to his staff, and then…gave the speech, until the teleprompter was fixed and he could get back to it. He remembered it. He knew his own policy measure, understood the major points of both the policy and his explanation of it, and calmly went on to speak from memory when his prepared remarks didn’t appear in front of him.

I thought very little of President Bill Clinton, but he had talent and a long-practiced skill at the basic task of political persuasion. Ditto Tony Blair, a horrible little toad of a man who was shockingly quick on his feet in the face of a political attack.

Look at the way they spoke. The deftness, the humor, the interplay between statement and response, the pauses for comic effect. Look at the faces, as they live in the moment and get the joke. Politicians could do this twenty years ago. Now watch Jamie Raskin at the Democratic National Convention, freezing into awkward silence the instant his teleprompter glitched out:

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Or watch this indescribably repulsive and dimwitted display from a lifelong sack of shit, if you can stomach it:

Disgusting worthless pig of a man, dumber than dirt.

Choose any video of Joe Biden’s speech last night, from any network, and look for the crowd reaction shots.

The social media age, the three-minutes-is-too-long-to-hold-the-whole-audience age, has crippled the political class, which now has almost no ability to pull thoughts out of their heads and send them out through their mouths. There’s a card with some words on it, or a teleprompter screen, and they put their lungs behind the prepared thought. It says on this notecard that I am very angry at Donald Trump, (pound lectern angrily). Or take this absolutely bizarre moment, which was somehow supposed to be a devastating personal attack on JD Vance:

Imagine the shame of growing up poor in Ohio but then going to a highly ranked law school and becoming a successful adult. Nailed him! (I recorded that straight off the screen, and apparently I was suffering some sort of unnoticed seizure while I held the camera. Sorry!)

The joylessness, the stiffness, the fakeness of political speech hung over almost every second of the corpse-dance in Chicago last night. The single exception was from the minister who went to the Senate — again, a person I don’t admire at all, but he can speak:

Completely aside from content, ignoring ideology and substance, the striking thing about the performance of politics now is how much it feels like touring the waxworks. Less than ten percent of the professional political class can speak well. It’s a dead thing that makes a lot of noise, and it pours out of a television screen like a form of low-grade torture. It’s formalized misery from empty people. Endorsed: