Bruce E. Gronbeck
University of Iowa

In any finely tuned political system, especially those of our time, the citizenry has come to expect competent communicative performance by its leaders. The electronic age has improved the flow of political discourses in all types of political systems; even highly centralized totalitarian states must be sensitive to the need for the public show of communicative competence.¹ What Chomsky has called specular politics around the world depends upon political machinery capable of displaying leaders' talents so as to guarantee political quiescence even in the most ideologically rigid societies.

Democratic political systems in the late twentieth century are especially delicate. Electronic channels linking leaders and the led create relationships not unlike the ideal Aristotle posited in his Politics when he likened leaders to flute players and citizens to flute makers (1277b).² Politics is dialogic in this conception, with politicians' performances always assessed against the cultural mores dominating any given collectivity. Among the aspects of political performances that are important when assessing political competency are genres of political communication.

Whether understood as matters of language use (speech acts) or as special kinds of cultural conditioning (as in Kenneth Burke's conception of rhetorical form),³ genres of political discourse in most societies give rise to public expectations for adequate or inadequate, proper or improper, communicative performances. Generic political rituals are mechanisms of collective understanding and perhaps even formalisms whereby citizens can be reassured (or not) that power is being executed competently. Such generic rituals as inaugurations, state of the union addresses, declarations of war, and the like clearly epitomize occasions in which performance is tied to legitimacy--and hence to mechanisms for reconfirming the right to rule powerfully. Violations of the conventions of political communicative genres can lead the electorate to question a politician's phrominos--the ability to act prudently--which in turn can raise questions about political competence.

The general public dissatisfaction expressed following President Bill Clinton's apology on August 17, 1998, after his testimony before Kenneth Starr's grand jury is testament to the power of generic violation and its political consequences. In this short paper, I will note three generic violations visible in Clinton's speech: the minimal evoking of the topoi of public apology, the shifting of genres in mid-speech, and his inadequate aural and visual performance of public apology.

Minimally Evoking the Topoi of Public Apology

President Clinton undoubtedly apologized in his short public speech following his five-hour testimony between Starr's grand jury: his relationship with Monica Lewinsky "was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure for which I am solely and completely responsible."⁴  "[M]y silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that." These sentiments were framed in the general statement that "I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private." Thus, Clinton evoked some of the usual topoi of non-denial apology: social recognition of inappropriate, even wrong, behavior; personal failure; injury to that most intimate of relationships, the marital bond. The apology featured both public and private lives--the duality Clinton recognized was important to his public performances even when dealing with the Gennifer Flowers question in 1992.⁵ Yet, in all this Clinton's apology was minimalist. I've quoted the only statements bearing upon non-denial apology.⁶ The rest of the speech was couched in justificatory prose--another genre altogether.

Shifting from Non-Denial to Denial Apology

 While framed as a non-denial apologia, the speech in fact was largely a denial of damaging behavior--a justificatory speech.⁷ Consider the string of claims framing the non-denial apologies I've quoted: "I answered [the Office of Independent Counsel's] questions truthfully"; "I can only tell you that I was motivated by many factors" (self-protection, protection of family, Starr's investigative techniques, attacks on friends); "Now, this matter is between me, the two people people I love most . . . and our God" (i.e., not between Clinton and the public or Starr); the country's been distracted from its "important work" too long; "And so tonight, I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse, and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century." The language and the lines of argument suggest the inconsequentiality of the Lewinsky matter: the force of denial rather than non-denial.

Underperforming Apology

Third, the "up close and personal" Bill Clinton--the man able to shift into a reedy voice, capable of adjusting the smallest facial muscles to convey his hurt, his love for the people, his indignation, his joy for future possiblities⁸--spoke contra his usual practice. The vocal characteristics of personal relationship were gone; his face was a rigid mask; his jaw was set through much of the speech; and his gestures were minimal. The sense of intimacy that is the trademark of Clinton's best public political performances was, simply, missing, and did not return to his public discoursing about the Lewinsky affair until his "I Have Sinned" prayer breakfast speech of September 11, 1998. The language of apology was not reproduced in the visual and acoustic channels on August 17. As a result, the genre's sincerity requirements (felicity conditions) were violated.

Two Preliminary Conclusions

We live in the era of the mass-mediated presidency. While Tulis's understanding of "the rhetorical presidency"--the office as dependent upon a public relationship with the citizenry--is a start to a conception of the president-citizen dialogue, we must push farther.⁹ Bill Clinton is the consummate, prototypical president of the electronic age. His personalization of his relationships with the electorate far exceeds that developed by Roosevelt via radio and Reagan via television. In poll after poll, it has always been the sense of caring he's developed with the public that undergirds his popularity ratings--even, perhaps especially, during 1998 and the Lewinsky matter. Until he was able to restore that sense of caring, his apologies carried little weight with the flute makers.

Gold¹⁰ declared the mass-mediated apologia dead after the 1960s and early 1970s. Bill Clinton--both when he's successful (the Flowers affair) and not (the August 17 speech on the Lewinsky affair)--demonstrates that it's still sometimes, at least, a benchmark for assessing political competency and, thereby, for providing the legitimacy needed by presidents to maintain their claim to power. That Clinton recognized this political fact is attested to by the series of additional apologies he offered all the way to the House votes to impeach on December 19, 1998. He was impeached, but with well over two-thirds of the voters supporting him--and hence in spite of what became his strongest argument to continue governing. He had learned and finally estimated properly his need to conform to the flute makers' requirements for acceptable political performance.¹¹

FOOTNOTES

1. Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda (Westfield, NJ: Open Media, 1992); on quiescence, see Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1964).

2. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. & intro. Carnes Lord (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 92.

3. For such a view of speech acts see Douglas Ehninger, "On Inferences of the 'Fourth Class,'" Communication Studies 28 (1977): 157-62; cf. Kenneth Burke's discussion of "the psychology of form" in Counter-Statement (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931).

4. All quotations are taken from the televised version of speech, the transcription made from the C-SPAN broadcast.

5. See my analysis of those dimensions of the Flowers Affair in "Character, Celebrity, and Sexual Innuendo in the Mass-Mediated Presidency," in Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, ed. James Lull and Stephen Hinerman (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), 122-142.

6. The distinction between "denial" and "non-denial" apologia is crucial. See Noreen Kruse, "Motivational Factors in Non-Denial Apologia," Communication Studies 28 (1977): 13-23.

7. The subtypes of apologia--denial, bolstering, justification, and transcendence--are developed in B. L. Ware and Wil Linkugel, "They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On the Generic Criticism of Apologia," Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (1973): 273-83.

8. I develop details about Clinton's ability to personalize his relationship with his television viewers in my "The Presidency in the Age of Secondary Orality," in Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1996), 30-49.

9. Tulis's idea is a step beyond Neustadt's classic articulation of the power of the presidency being the power to persuade. Neustadt discusses the multiple constituencies a president must persuade to initiate policy; Tulis examines the ongoing relationship with the public as the ultimate grounds for the legitimacy of the president's relationship with all other constituencies. See Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960) and Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987). The call to move beyond Tulis's analysis is implicit in most essays in Medhurst's volume (see n. 8).

10. Ellen Reid Gold, "Political Apologia: The Ritual of Self Defense," Communication Monographs 25 (1978): 306-16.

11. My thanks to Iowa's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies for providing me with a creative environment within which to do my work in 1998-99.