alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

September 27, 2008

I’d Rather Be a Violin Than a Trumpet

by AltHippo @ 4:56 pm. Filed under 2008 Elections

I continue to look through analysis of last night’s debate. In the process, I ran across this assessment from Politico that used a metaphor I hadn’t run into yet: (my emphasis)

But the 90-minute session put on vivid display the side of McCain that his strategists believe is his best hope: an emphatic, impassioned, even indignant leader with a more seasoned and more visceral understanding of a cynical capital and a violent planet.

Obama’s Ole Miss strategy seemed more complex. He tied McCain to the unpopular policies of President Bush, as he always does. But even these shots were delivered with a cool and dispassionate style, hoping to impress viewers with precision, fluency and logic. That’s the way debates are won in academic halls, though not always on television sets.

Obama’s answers were crisp in places, a bit wandering in others, but always aimed at what he seemingly defined as his imperative for the evening: not to land hard punches on McCain but to reassure people about his own knowledge and poise in the realm of foreign affairs.

In the end, McCain sounded most often like a trumpet, Obama more like a violin.

It’s an interesting way of looking at the world. A society whose outlook is primarily martial would probably choose the trumpet. A society dominated by nuance and complex inter-relationships would choose the violin. I would like to suggest that the society we live is indeed dominated by such complexity. Yet we choose the trumpet every time.

I don’t know that the analogy is entirely on target. It may be McCain is more of a trombone, while Obama is more like an oboe. The spectacle of these debates then becomes an evening where entirely different woodwinds and brass attempt to imitate a trumpet. And that’s how we grade them.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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