Blog Post – Week 9
An innocent young girl stands in the midst of a peaceful meadow, birds clearly chirping in the ambience. The young girl has a daisy in hand, and as she slowly counts the petals she removes from the stem, her age becomes more apparent as she demonstrates not knowing all her numbers yet. “Seven… Six… Seven… Six… Nine.” At coming to nine, the inauspicious and ominous voice dominates the scene, counting down, “Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven… Six… Five… Four… Three… Two… One.” The frame goes black, followed shortly by a pluming nuclear cloud. The voice of Lyndon B. Johnson follows, “These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.” Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd.
http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1964/peace-little-girl-daisy
I couldn’t talk about Rhetoric and fact within a presidential election without bringing into the case the election of 1964. Where through skilled political campaigning, media, and slightly the poor selection of a Republican candidate, Lyndon B. Johnson won the election by a landslide.
In their writings, Plato and his student Aristotle have taken very different perspectives on the nature of rhetoric. Plato, through the literary use of Socrates, depicted a definition of rhetoric that could only be connected to Sophists and demagoguery. Expressing a hatred towards the practice, seeing that it conflicted in the path to truth. Plato established in this, two types of truths: one based on knowledge where there is no false, and the other based solely on belief where false and true are irrelevant with one another in their purpose.
The profound daisy ad from Lyndon B. Johnson in some ways could be seen in the eyes of Plato in some ways. The ad focuses more to appealing the viewers’ emotion while leaving hardly anything to the appeals of ration and truth. You could say the ads message was a bit dramatic – “If you vote for Barry Goldwater, this little girl, and everyone else… WILL DIE!“
This is to say that the ads of the time couldn’t maintain a sense of rhetoric that appealed to the knowledge base of truth, something that Plato fails to address but Aristotle makes emphasis of. Aristotle saw that rhetoric could be perverted in the sense depicted by his teacher Plato, but showed that rhetoric had expanded usefulness that was in good intention. For example, rhetoric had the powerful to persuade and instruct the un-instructable.
For this we can take into account that during the election, Goldwater was an extreme rightwing conservative. Goldwater was seen as a war hawk and encouraged the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam; promoting an idea of “total victory.” Some of the ideas focused less on the appeal to emotion, and focused more on a rhetoric that appealed to rationality and knowledge.
http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1964/confessions-of-a-republican
It could also be noted that all of the ads of Lyndon B. Johnson closed with the same line, “The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” This line proved to be a political advertising POWERHOUSE of rhetoric! Placing a sense of emergency, and obligation on the viewers to vote Johnson, this technique was again mimicked by the Republican Party in the 2006 General Elections. “These are the stakes,” was the closing phrase used in these advertisements claiming that the Democrats would be soft on terrorism and expose the country to danger and featured Al Qaeda members and a threat of a nuclear bomb.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X-fDqQ-Xcc
