So this means… he’s deteroiated?
Something from this article popped out at me.
This spring I watched dozens of hours’ worth of old videos of John Kerry and George W. Bush in action. But it was the hour in which Bush faced Ann Richards that I had to watch several times. The Bush on this tape was almost unrecognizable—and not just because he looked different from the figure we are accustomed to in the White House. He was younger, thinner, with much darker hair and a more eager yet less swaggering carriage than he has now. But the real difference was the way he sounded.
This Bush was eloquent. He spoke quickly and easily. He rattled off complicated sentences and brought them to the right grammatical conclusions. He mishandled a word or two (“million” when he clearly meant “billion”; “stole” when he meant “sold”), but fewer than most people would in an hour’s debate. More striking, he did not pause before forcing out big words, as he so often does now, or invent mangled new ones. “To lay out my juvenile-justice plan in a minute and a half is a hard task, but I will try to do so,” he said fluidly and with a smile midway through the debate, before beginning to list his principles.
…
The man on the debate platform looked and sounded smart and in control. If you had to guess which of the two candidates had won the debate scholarship to college and was about to win the governorship, you would choose Bush.
I bored my friends by forcing them to watch the tape—but I could tell that I had not bored George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California at Berkeley, who has written often of the importance of metaphor and emotional message in political communications. When I invited him to watch the Bush-Richards tape, Lakoff confirmed that everything about Bush’s surface style was different. His choice of words, the pace of his speech, the length and completeness of his sentences, all made him sound like another person. Even his body language was surprising. When he was younger, Bush leaned toward the camera and did not fidget or shift his weight. He arched his eyebrows and positioned his mouth in a way that, according to Lakoff, signifies in all languages an intense, engaged form of speech.
Lakoff also emphasized that what had changed in Bush’s style was less important than what had remained the same. Bush’s ways of appealing to his electoral base, of demonstrating resolve and strength, of deflecting rather than rebutting criticism, had all worked against Ann Richards. These have been constants in his rhetorical presentation of himself over the years, despite the striking decline in his sentence-by-sentence speaking skills, and they have been consistently and devastatingly effective.
Okay. So the George W. Bush of 1994 was a superior product from the George W. Bush of 2004?
Would this creeping dementia-like slide (and I’m going to refrain from making a reference to a dearly departed president) continue into the next term?
Dun. No.