While the previous two election cycles featured an emerging base of highly organised evangelicals, this year’s "hot demographic” involves a group associated more so with I-Pods and Myspace pages than with crucifixes and Bible hymns.  Those voters who were once deemed apathetic to and ignorant of presidential politics are now, as exit polls indicate, flocking to the voting booths in record numbers. 

MTV’s Chris Harris reported that Super Tuesday drew triple the amount of youth voters compared to previous national elections, “bucking,” he writes, “the last decade's voting trends [with the youth] enthusiastically flooding the polls to have their voices heard.”  In Esquire, Rock the Vote director Heather Smith refers to this growing mass of pop culture junkies and Facebook addicts as the “Millennial Generation,” which will not only make up “a quarter of the electorate in ‘08,” but will – like the cherished bloc of Independent voters – “determine close races; they’ll define entire campaigns.”

Indeed this year’s national election – and most notably that ground swelling “movement” characterizing the Obama campaign – seemingly appears to be, as Sonic Youth once put it, a teenage riot.

Yet while Karl Rove’s beloved flock of fervent worshippers drew intense criticism for their fundamentalism and ostensible naïveté, those of us who fall under the youth demographic – that new powerhouse of voters – are now hearing analogous charges of fanaticism and stubborn disillusionment. 

That now popular and often ridiculed image of affected churchgoers who, while being “touched” by God, faint during Sunday mass is now supplemented by the image of felled Obama supporters who, while being “touched” by the exuberant calls for hope, likewise faint during Obama rallies.  And as neo-evangelical priests and priestesses alike strive to hit that emotional chord with their followers through riveting sermons of the coming apocalypse, similarly – as the Drudge Report once headlined – Obama’s summoning of “change we can believe in” or the “audacity of hope” have indeed induced the young and impassioned alike to tears of burning inspiration.

Additionally there are the obvious criticisms coming from our more seasoned political veterans such as Newt Gingrich, who, in a CNN article, disparaged this year’s election with comparisons to “American Idol” – that glamorised singing contest which so happens to have a dedicated youth following.  Other cynics have gone so far as to characterise youth turnout as a “cult” phenomenon suggestive of the 1922 Hitler-Jugend of German fascism.

So the question is: Are the youth in age – as well as the young at heart – easily duped and emotionally swayed by mere sentiment and sensation? Is the so-called “loftiness” or “emptiness” of Obama’s signature style tricking the young and the restless into his column?

From Hillary Clinton’s hallow charges of “plagiarism” to John McCain’s stiff warnings of the “empty calls for change”, the criticisms of Obama’s use of language largely presumes, according to Newsweek’s Robert J. Samuelson, that he has “hypnotised much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story”.  The result is not only a “mass delusion”, gripes Samuelson, but an “Obama delusion”. 

And more so than any other voting demographic in existence, it is undoubtedly clear that within all such criticisms of rhetoric that growing mass of Obama’s “worshippers” – those youthful devotees who never fail to clutter his rallies and dance the night away to the sounds of Stevie Wonder – are the most duped and deluded of them all.

What is therefore implicit within such denigrations of the rhetorical (if not also the poetical) are two fundamental yet interconnected assumptions, ones which undoubtedly implicate the young electorate: 1) voters are all susceptible to deception; and 2) insofar as many of such voters are newbies to the process, they are all likewise and increasingly susceptible to deception.

So are we, the incorruptible youths, being swayed by “speeches” as opposed to “solutions”?  Are all skilled uses of rhetoric in the political arena necessarily vacuous and immediately unreliable?

While indeed many experienced politicians and media pundits alike have weighed in on this debate like quibbling old literary critics, perhaps those who fall within the “deceived” demographic – us naïve and gullible youths – should have a chance, for once, to speak for ourselves.

For instance, those who study philosophy and literature are well aware that this debate between “rhetoric” and “substance” is centuries old.  One of the earliest philosophers in the tradition, Plato, long ago denounced rhetoric as one of the most disparaging characteristics of democracy; it is not only the art of blind persuasion, but is also the art par excellence of emotional trickery insofar as it suppresses, in the final analysis, the ordered workings of a rational mind.  In his dialogue about Socrates’ encounter with the renowned master of oratory – Protagoras – Plato’s depictions are all too reminiscent of this so-called war over Obama’s words.

“Well, that got Protagoras”, Socrates exclaims, “a big round of applause from a lot of people in the audience.  And as for me, at first I felt like I’d taken a punch from a champion boxer – everything went black"!

While Socrates’ metaphor no doubt alludes to the image of an embattled Clinton waving boxing gloves in the air during an Ohio rally, some philosophers would hold that her crying foul the moment she takes any rhetorical punches is misguided. 

It is in the first place fruitless – according to Plato’s disciple, Aristotle – to pose rhetoric against substance. 

Contra Plato and all other haters of good oratory, rhetoric for Aristotle indeed possesses a peculiar kind of substance, one which differs from the justificatory bases of other forms of speech. 

This implies, in the end, that there is truth to that seemingly uncanny ability of speaking with distinctive eloquence.

So if Obama’s literary critics allege that “experience”, “action”, or “solution” is lacking in his stump speeches and that we younguns, as a result, are deceived, then what kind of vindicating proof, if any, resides within rhetorically-crafted speeches? 

Following Aristotle, the ultimate proof or justificatory grounds for rhetoric lies precisely in one’s character.

That is to say: the truth of one’s discourse is readily displayed to an audience  “whenever”, reads Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, “the speech is given in such a way as to render the speaker worthy of credence”.

Along the terrain of rhetoric, “character contains almost the strongest proof of all”, Aristotle writes, since an oration with all is poetic embellishments and metaphorical flourishes also paints a picture of “the speaker’s reasonable image”.  This image of one’s character, disposition, or “way of being” (as the existentialists would have it) is not only one of the most persuasive aspects of rhetoric, but that which is artistically produced as the “substance”- the grounds – of the one who utters beautiful words.

So while the Clinton campaign and other critics of rhetoric seem to rely on one’s resume – a list of previous accomplishments – as the only justificatory basis of one’s words, Obama and his youthful aficionados appear to rely on one’s character – of how one is as a self-styled individual – as the more persuasive and substantive grounds of one’s discourse. 

 Thus, the question remains: Does the so-called Millennial Generation encapsulate some kind of new and nutty form of political evangelicalism for 2008?

If the “cynics”, as Obama famously calls them, hold that all of us are being deceived with empty rhetoric and false promises, then perhaps the youth are the most susceptible to such chance effects.  Over 2000 years ago Aristotle was already well aware of such a prospect when he characterises young audiences with a distinctive trait, one which we so happen to hear a lot of these days. 

In The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle writes that the youthful receivers of rhetoric are, above anything else, hopeful. 

“For the most part they live in hope; for hope is of the future and remembrance of the past; and for the young the future is long and the past short; for on one’s first day one can remember nothing but hope for everything”. 

If one really begins to think about what hope is in the first place, it becomes evident that it concerns some kind of desire for what is unknown, something which CNN’s Donna Brazile had once characterized as “metaphysical”.  However, we can substitute such cryptic and grandiose titles of the unknown and the metaphysical for something simpler: i.e., the future.  

Hope is the desire for something or some event to happen in the future; and since one can never know nor control what exactly the future will bring, the hopeful and their wilful experiments are therefore prone to the chances of error, delusion, and deception.

So yes, the philosopher admits, the youthful “are easily deceived for the reason given (that they easily hope).”  They can indeed, as Clinton once remarked, be deceived by masks and simulacra – hope that one can “Xerox”. 

(But when one thinks of, say, Andy Warhol’s 1964 silkscreen “Campbell Soup”, such an evaluation dwindles into antiquated cliché.)

For insofar as the youthful types take a chance for being deceived, they are “relatively courageous … spirited and optimistic”, which also implies that they operate with an “absence of fear” and with unshaken “confidence”.  

And if, following Aristotle’s reasoning, the traits of courage and confidence are indeed necessary in the very act of taking a chance for the future – of hoping and experimenting as such – then one is brought back to the very substance of rhetoric itself: i.e., the character and style of one’s existence.

Thus, Aristotle concludes that what is most characteristic here of the youthful audience as well as their eloquent spokesman of hope is that 

“they prefer doing what is noble to what is in their interest; for they live rather by character than by calculation, and calculation is connected with interest but virtue with nobility”.

In the end, Obama was no doubt correct in his assertion during the Texas debate that the differences between him and Clinton are in fact philosophical: on the one hand, one confronts the claim that a quantifiable (if not calculable and manipulable) laundry list of previous merits serves as the only credible justification of one’s words; on the other, one encounters the appeal to character and style – the ways in which one fashions and communicates oneself and one’s history – as the trusted source of one’s discourse.   

Perhaps, then, those teenage-like rioters of the Obama camp are on to something when it comes to their commitment to the substance of rhetoric.  Yet just like a work of art in general, some see the beauty of it while others do not.  

MCF

London, UK - 13 April 2008