Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appealed to the collective reason of colonial America. Reason was very much in vogue at the time, with uppity intellectuals across the pond like Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau fermenting discontent and promoting radical ideas. You know, sort of like community organizers. Paine’s famous revolutionary pamphlet detailed grievances with the British monarchy and policy prescriptions (like armed revolt). It was all about change; change that rational Americans should embrace. But Paine’s rhetorical gift wasn’t his ability to persuade his reader to agree with his argument; it was his ability to persuade them he was pissed off. Righteously, unambiguously, inconsolably pissed of. And that they should be pissed off too.
Paine went to the trouble of introducing himself to his reader with four short paragraphs. (He’d only been chased out of the U.K. a few months earlier, so it was probably a necessity.) And he did so not with an even-tempered assurance that he was a reasonable man. No, he assured Americans that he could be motivated by passion. The uniquely inspired rhetorical maneuver of his text was his assertion it was entirely natural for him to be angry. That the British violated American “natural” rights, he argued, was “the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure, is The Author.”
It would benefit Barack Obama enormously in these final weeks of the presidential campaign to learn the same trick. His even-tempered demeanor has served the Democratic candidate well as he introduced himself to the country, but it’s time he showed a little “power of feeling.” He has been so afraid to make himself vulnerable to Angry Black Man Jackson-Wright stereotyping he is abandoning the “natural” rhetorical advantage of change agents: righteous anger. The hardest hitting line of his very reasonable Democratic convention speech consisted of two syllables. “Enough.” Empathy is how great politicians win constituencies otherwise way out of their reach. (Bush had it and it looks like Palin has it.) And shared anger is a bountiful source of empathy.
So get pissed off, Senator. Your future constituents already are.
