If you have not watched the 60 Minutes interview of the Obamas from this past Sunday, you should. Entertaining and informative.

YouTube links:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

I have not watched a single one of Bush’s State of the Union addresses, or any other of his speeches since the inaugural War on Terra speech from Sept 13, 2001. I stopped listening because I could not stand to listen to the man talk, in that pseudo-everyman drawl with the horrible grammar and the one-clause sentences that don’t even follow from each other. Every sentence depends on so many unspoken assumptions that you can’t disagree with a single claim without spending several paragraphs debunking the assumptions behind it. It was just too painful. I’m not complaining about the way the man talks; I’m lamenting that the way he talks betrays the way he operates and makes decisions.

It’s really refreshing to that we’ll soon have a president again who can speak candidly and intelligently in enumerated lists that weigh several sides of the issue. The way an opinion is expressed usually demonstrates that he’s thought thoroughly about the subtleties of many sides of the issue and tried to find an optimal approach given the constraints. Not in that boring, pedantic put-you-to-sleep way that Kerry speaks, and so much better than “my way or the highway” and “with us or against us.” So much better.

I know Bush has claimed to consult his heart rather than his mind, and perhaps the heart does tend to speak in all-or-nothing, irrational terms. But the heart is inscrutable, Bush’s even more so, and I strongly prefer someone who can articulate rational reasons for holding certain opinions rather than simply dismissing the question by explaining that his heart, or God, or inspiration told him so. It’s difficult to hold a constructive argument against such non-logic, and on occasions when it’s later proved wrong, it’s impossible to revisit the logic to determine which part was faulty.

I particularly like the bit where Obama talks about implenting good ideas, wherever they come from, whether it be FDR or Reagan, because the effective idea should be the focus, not who thought of it. Stringfellow Barr, one of the founders of the discussion-based program at my alma mater, St. John’s College, expressed the notion thusly (in 1968):

There is a pathos in television dialogue: the rapid exchange of monologues that fail to find the issue, like ships passing in the night; the reiterated preface, “I think that . . . ,” as if it mattered who held which opinion rather than which opinion is worth holding; the impressive personal vanity that prevents each “discussant” from really listening to another speaker and that compels him to use this God-given pause to compose his own next monologue; the further vanity, or instinctive caution, that leads him to choose very long words, whose true meaning he has never grasped, rather than short words that he understands but that would leave the emptiness of his point of view naked and exposed to a mass public. There is pathos in the meaningless gestures: the extended chopping hands, fingers rigidly held parallel and together, the rigid wayward thumb pointing to heaven. A knowledgeable theatrical director would cringe at these gestures and would perhaps faint when the extended palms, one held in front of the other, are made to revolve rapidly around each other, thereby imitating and emphasizing the convolutions of a mind that races like a motor not in gear. And Mrs. Malaprop herself would cringe at those long, wayward words, so much at cross purpose with the intent of the speakers. Or at the academic speaker’s strings of adjacent nouns, where all but the last noun modify adjectivally either the last noun or the nearest noun — it is anybody’s guess. We are all suffocating intellectually, not from the ungrammatical language of Cassius Clay, which is gutsy, forceful and eloquent. We are suffocating from a fausse élégance that scorns the honest, clear, four-letter word. And quite aside from the obscene ones, hundreds of splendid four-letter words are waiting to work for us. Is it possible that we discussants are oppressed by a subconscious suspicion that we are really saying precisely nothing, and that this nothing will stand up as conversation only if we say it elaborately? Is it this suspicion that forces us to speak in what our learned jargon recently christened “jargonese?” “Yoono Chinese, Japanese; well I am now speaking, yoono, jargonese.” Our failure at dialogue is building a Tower of, yoono, Babel.

Nevertheless, back of this tormenting, and tormented, babble is a ghost we cannot lay, the ghost of dialogue. We yearn, not always consciously, to commune with other persons, to learn with them by joint search. This joint labor to understand would be even more exciting than the multiplication of our gross national product or the improvement of our national defense or even than the elimination of war from the face of the earth. For we can never live wholly human lives without a genuine converse between men.

Barr’s whole essay is here.