Why Do Politicians* Talk Like This?

Liz Cheney risked her career to uncover the truth of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. A month before her Republican primary in Wyoming, she was 20 point behind her Trumpist opponent. Once a darling of the Right, she was now its most bitter foe. She faces the ugliest attacks, including death threats, because of her mission to expose You-Know-Who’s role in the attempted coup.

In her statements and questions as the vice chair of the January 6 committee, she is clear and direct. She also knows how to create a cliffhanger and throw shade.

But she talks like this when interviewed:

Jake Tapper of CNN: If you end up losing your job in Congress because of your work on this committee, it will have been worth it to you?

Liz Cheney: There’s no question I believe that my work on this committee is the single most important thing I’ve ever done professionally. It is an unbelievable honor to represent the people of Wyoming in Congress. And I know that all of us who are elected officials take an oath that we swear to God to the Constitution and that oath has to mean something. And that oath means that we cannot embrace and enable a president as dangerous as Donald Trump is. And my obligations and my responsibilities on this committee are to ensure that we understand exactly what happened so that we can establish legislation and recommendations to help ensure it never happens again.

Cheney answers the question. She says what she means. She does not equivocate. But she takes 114 words to do it. That’s almost half of a double-spaced page of type. If you break it into four sentences, that’s 28 words per sentence. Research shows that people understand best when sentences average fewer than 20 words.

Worse, the response is as lively as lead. There are no sensory words — no words that evoke sights or sounds or texture.

Why do politicians do this? Who do bureaucrats and corporate people do this? Why do intellectuals do this?

I can see six possible explanations, not mutually exclusive:

  • Orwellian obfuscation: This is the most obvious explanation in official-speak but does not apply here. In 1984 and “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell warned about the tendency of people holding or seeking to cover up the truth with circumlocutions as well as outright lies. Any time someone faces some uncomfortable situation, they try to talk their way around it. Most famously, Bill Clinton claimed he “didn’t inhale” when he was a college student trying pot. In a sense, Clinton didn’t have any choice but to dance around the topic. Self-righteous pundits, politicians, ministers, and moralizers treated smoking pot as a disqualifying action. Douglas Ginsberg, remember, lost a seat on the Supreme Court solely because he smoked pot while a member of a university faculty. So it’s understandable when public figures dance around inconvenient truths. But when it becomes a habit–when every public utterance is processed by the Truth Obfuscation Machine–it’s a dire problem.
  • Thinking while talking: Politicians talk all day, under the glare of TV lights and with opponents waiting in prey nearby. They are expected to produce an answer to every question, without thinking through the words they will use. Oh sure, they can fall back on previous utterances and talking points–and they do. Still, it can be overwhelming to speak continuously. They have to start their answer before they think through how to answer. They can’t pause for five or ten seconds or the interviewer will begin to press them. Five seconds is an eternity on TV.
  • Hedging while being emphatic: Public figures want to be stalwart and provocative in their pronouncements. They want to appear not only knowledgable but also strong. They want to stake out strong claims. There’s no room on TV for the mealy-mouthed. So so they proclaim and declare and challenge and pronounce–emphatically. The desire to be bold runs into the wall of wanting to be safe. So she talks about the “single most important” and “unbelievable honor” and “swear to God,” but buries these emphatics in a mush of bureaucratese.
  • Holding the floor: On TV–and in the other forums where politics, media, and egos converge–you always risk losing the floor. So Liz Cheney uses the technique that her droning father Dick used: Just speak without interruption till you’ve made the points you want to make. The point of Sunday talk shows is not to deliberate or debate or reconsider anything; it’s to leave with soound bites that get coverage in the media. Who cares if it’s lost in a bog; it’s still there, fodder for friends and foes alike to use in the next round of argument and posturing. Therefore: speak till you drop your talking points.
  • Living in abstraction: Politicians, technocrats, academics, and (shame on them) journalists live in a world of abstractions. They talk about “the American people” and “public opinion” and “the narrative” without any real care for the flesh-and-blood people and issues that make up those categories. If you live in a world dominated by fundraising, polling, gerrymandering, and talking points, the human element gets buried. Pols try to fight this with their anecdotes: “Just last week in Dubuque, I met a farmer named Ned struggling to pay for seed…” But it’s still lifeless and bloodless.
  • The long game: The best-case scenario is that Liz Cheney is channeling Ike. President Dwight Eisenhower was famous for his bland and meandering speech in press conferences and other public appearances. But behind the scenes, as Fred Greenstein shows in The Hidden-Hand Presidency, he was sharp and concise. He used bland Ikespeak to lull the public (and his opponents) to sleep. Ike cared more about his agenda than winning praise for cleverness. Maybe that’s Liz Cheney’s game, too.

So how might Liz Cheney have done a better job answering Jake Tapper? Try this:

Jake Tapper of CNN: If you end up losing your job in Congress because of your work on this committee, it will have been worth it to you?

Liz Cheney: Oh, God yes. No job is worth endangering the Constitution. Donald Trump is a walking, talking threat to everything I care about. Look, I love representing Wyoming in Congress. It’s an amazing honor. But Donald Trump is the greatest danger to American democracy since the Civil War. The January 6 Committee must make sure he never gets close to the White House ever again.  That matters more than my job.

This response is 70 words in eight sentences–an average of 8.75 words. Each sentence is punchy and direct. Speaking like this, she would never lose the audience in a long drone of bland and abstract language.

Whatever the reasons for Liz Cheney’s manner of speaking, she and other public figures would do better to speak with greater clarity and verve–not just for their own cause, but for the larger cause of truth and honesty. If you lose a little wiggle room or deniability along the way, so be it. In the long run, direct language will produce a better payoff for your cause and for your own state of mind.

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*Not just politicians. Other public figures, too, as well as academics and professionals in all fields — anyone, in fact, with something to gain and lose with their speech. More than we would like to admit, the rest of us follow these models of speech. *sigh*

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