By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
I haven’t worked in the realm of children’s television in more than a decade, but lessons learned in that world are lessons learned for life.
First and foremost: never condescend. When writing for kids, think of them as slightly shorter grown-ups with fewer bad habits and better credit.
Would that the Bush administration followed the non-condescension rule for adults. Instead, they’ve taken a page from the playbook of the late Uncle Don, host of a kiddy show during the glory days of radio.
It’s apocryphal, one of those hoary urban legends, but the story goes that after finishing the broadcast of his usual half-hour of moonbeams and treacle, Uncle Don turned to a colleague – not knowing the microphone was still hot – and said, “Well, that ought to hold the little bastards.”
Similarly, the White House seems to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that dispersing the same old, Uncle Don-style effluvium to the American public will continue to placate and hold us close. But more and more of us know it’s nothing more than a bad smell.
A comparison of two noteworthy speeches last week – Barack Obama on race, George Bush on Iraq – shows the difference between a candidate who talks to us like grown-ups and an incumbent who seems to think he’s still reading “My Pet Goat” to second graders in Sarasota.
Regardless of how you feel about Obama’s candidacy or the continuing issue of his past affiliation with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, last Tuesday’s speech in Philadelphia was formidable, candid, sophisticated rhetoric.
As Republican Peggy Noonan, a virtuoso of speechwriting for Ronald Reagan, observed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, “He didn’t have applause lines. He didn’t give you eight seconds of a line followed by clapping. He spoke in full and longish paragraphs that didn’t summon applause. This left TV producers having to use longer-than-usual soundbites in order to capture his meaning. And so the cuts of the speech you heard on the news were more substantial and interesting than usual, which made the coverage of the speech better. People who didn’t hear it but only saw parts on the news got a real sense of what he’d said.”
