"Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and
not worth another dime or another day," President Bush said recently.
Another time he said, "Some say that if you're Muslim you can't be free."
"There are some really decent people," the president said earlier this year,
"who believe that the federal government ought to be the decider of health care
... for all people."
US President George W.
Bush waves as he walks on the South Lawn of the White House towards Marine
One before departing for Camp David, in Washington March 17, 2006.
[Reuters] |
Of course, hardly anyone in mainstream political debate has made such
assertions.
When the president starts a sentence with "some say" or offers up what "some
in Washington" believe, as he is doing more often these days, a rhetorical
retort almost assuredly follows.
The device usually is code for Democrats or other White House opponents. In
describing what they advocate, Bush often omits an important nuance or
substitutes an extreme stance that bears little resemblance to their actual
position.
He typically then says he "strongly disagrees" ¡ª conveniently knocking down a
straw man of his own making.
Bush routinely is criticized for dressing up events with a too-rosy glow. But
experts in political speech say the straw man device, in which the president
makes himself appear entirely reasonable by contrast to supposed "critics," is
just as problematic.
Because the "some" often go unnamed, Bush can argue that his statements are
true in an era of blogs and talk radio. Even so, "'some' suggests a number much
larger than is actually out there," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the
Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
A specialist in presidential rhetoric, Wayne Fields of Washington University
in St. Louis, views it as "a bizarre kind of double talk" that abuses the rules
of legitimate discussion.
"It's such a phenomenal hole in the national debate that you can have
arguments with nonexistent people," Fields said. "All politicians try to get
away with this to a certain extent. What's striking here is how much this
administration rests on a foundation of this kind of stuff."
Bush has caricatured the other side for years, trying to tilt legislative
debates in his favor or score election-season points with voters.
Not long after taking office in 2001, Bush pushed for a new education testing
law and began portraying skeptics as opposed to holding schools accountable.
The chief opposition, however, had nothing to do with the merits of measuring
performance, but rather the cost and intrusiveness of the proposal.
Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the
president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security
Department against Democrats.