23 de fevereiro de 2008

Retórica e política (I)

Ricardo Costa, no Diário Económico, sobre a capacidade de retórica de Obama e a importância da retórica como instrumento da política: O som e a fúria. Tenho de admitir o que diz, embora, com qualificações - e, uma muito óbvia: nem toda a boa capacidade retórica foi respaldada com todo aquele conjunto de qualidades que torna um político, num grande político.


Jack Shafer disseca, na Slate, How Obama Does That Thing He Does. Porque Obama consegue, mesmo, fazê-lo: "No less an intellect than The New Yorker's George Packer confesses that moments after a 25-minute campaign speech by Obama in New Hampshire concluded, he couldn't remember exactly what the candidate said. Yet "the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days," he writes."

Adiante: "Given that many of his speeches are criminally short on specifics, as Leon Wieseltier writes this week, how does Obama do that thing he does? A 2005 paper (abstract) by University of Oregon professor of rhetoric David A. Frank unpeels Obama's momentous 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address (video and text here) for clues to his method" e mais: "Obama relies, Frank writes, on a "rhetorical strategy of consilience, where understanding results through translation, mediation, and an embrace of different languages, values, and traditions" e :"In a response to Frank's paper (published in tandem with it), Mark Lawrence McPhail of Miami University warns of the downside of the Obama vision, which he regards as, in the 1994 words of Stephen L. Carter, one that "almost nobody really believes in but almost everybody desperately wants to." Têm de ler o artigo.


Na mesma linha, Sasha Abramsky, no Coment is free (Guardian), escreve In defense of oratory e conclui a sua coluna com: "Great speechifying has always been, and will always be, important in democratic politics, not just in America but globally. Of course there has to be substance behind the words, but to attack Obama simply because he's a fine speaker, well that's below the belt."

PS: Acabei de ver e ouvir o discurso de Obama na convenção democrata de 2004 (ligação indicada acima). Indiscutível: "powerful stuff".

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