Dialogue: Lesson for the grunters - eloquence is on sale

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

We are surrounded in New Zealand by stunted and artless public English, and by politicians and public figures who either grunt or shout and whom eloquence eludes.

So I was struck silent in admiration by President George W. Bush's inaugural speech. I didn't see it delivered but read it and wondered why, oh why, can't we produce politicians who respect gifted speechwriters enough to entrust them with their ideas and, in return, accept their words.

The problem is that New Zealanders think that if someone has anything to say, then to mean it they must say it in their own inept way. To borrow the skills of a writer would be dishonest. Eloquence would smack of insincerity.

The same New Zealanders accept that schooled and artificial use of television technique is no impediment to credibility, and that clothes and grooming maketh the person.

Effective plain English might seem simple, but it's not, and when the occasion is big, skilled rhetoric can be a stirring and inspiring device to move and motivate people. If the speaker means what is said, then the rhetoric is valid and honest.

Peggy Noonan, a CBS News writer and producer, worked with (as she put it) Ronald Reagan and Bush's father on many of their major speeches and later wrote What I Saw At the Revolution, a vivid if adulatory memoir on her years as a White House adviser.

"Working with" meant that sometimes dozens of other aides would push her words around and she would have to rescue as many as she could. She was so influential, though, that it made her career.

But none of Reagan's or Bush Senior's speeches matched the graceful style of George W's, written by 36-year-old journalist Michael Gerson. Ignore the sentiments, if you must, but read this excerpt as it was set out for Bush to deliver, and admire the assonance, the cadences and the forward-moving simplicity of the sentences:

"We have a place, all of us, in a long story, a story we continue but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer.

"It is the American story, a story of a flawed and fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals. The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.

"Americans are called to enact this promise in our lives and in our laws. And though our nation has sometimes halted, and sometimes delayed, we must follow no other course.

"Through much of last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations."

A Democrat who wrote speeches for Jimmy Carter, Henrik Hertzberg, now on the staff of the New Yorker, called it by far the best inaugural address in 40 years. Gerson and Bush aim at what they call simple grace and that's what, so far, they have achieved.

What is extraordinary - and the convention acceptance speech was similar - is that it is so lacks flowery sophistication, is so plainly written entirely in the active voice, that it trips convincingly from the tongue even of a man as non-literate as the President.

Gerson has three or four writers to help him and insists, as I suppose he would, that Bush has a hand in the work. But there is no doubt who crafts the words.

So perhaps New Zealand politicians should start thinking about hiring speechwriters and valuing them enough to pay them as much as they pay policy advisers. It might be a smart investment in a political future.

It probably won't happen, though, because at the very core of our public administration are the education managers, and their language is appalling. I've quoted many cumbersome and unintelligible passages from the Education Review Office in this column and the Minister of Education thought them funny.

Now I have a letter from the chief executive of the Qualifications Authority, which speaks for itself, or rather fails to do so: "The Quality Assurance Services unit (QAS) of the Authority is the unit responsible for the operation of the Authority's quality assurance activities. This unit is separate from the policy setting (overarching) and development functions of the Authority. The Authority proposes to conduct an audit of QAS.

"The purpose of the audit is to provide an assessment of QAS's application of criteria to reach fair, consistent and professional course approval and accreditation decisions and to recommend actions to reduce any risks that are identified in current practice.

"The focus of the audit will be on the adequacy of the unit's quality management systems to ensure the unit has adequate and appropriate means to make approval and accreditation decisions."

No sign of simple grace there.