How Lincoln framed his picture-perfect Gettysburg Address Using An Extended metaphor

The terrific Spielburg movie on our 16th President provides a stunning contrast to the failure of Obama to be a rhetorically inspiring leader on climate. In my first post, I looked at how Lincoln had mastered the figures of speech, especially irony, with the help of the works of Shakespeare. This post looks at his mastery of metaphor and extended metaphor — two crucial inspirational figures that Obama virtually never uses.

This is material that comes from my recent book on rhetoric and politics — “Language Intelligence: Lessons On Persuasion From Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, And Lady Gaga,” which is available at Amazon.com [Kindle is here].

Metaphors are the Rolls Royce of figures. Or, to put it more aptly, metaphors are the Toyota Prius of figures because a metaphor is a hybrid, connecting two dissimilar things to achieve a unique turn of phrase.

Metaphor, like verbal irony discussed in the first post, is a trope, because it alters or enhances a word’s literal meaning. The headline quote is from Aristotle, who writes in Poetics, “To be a master of metaphor is a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”

A 2005 study on “Presidential Leadership and Charisma: The Effects of Metaphor” examined the use of metaphors in the first-term inaugural addresses of three dozen presidents who had been independently rated for charisma. The remarkable conclusion:

Charismatic presidents used nearly twice as many metaphors (adjusted for speech length) than non-charismatic presidents.

Additionally, when students were asked to read a random group of inaugural addresses and highlight the passages they viewed as most inspiring, “even those presidents who did not appear to be charismatic were still perceived to be more inspiring when they used metaphors.”

Given their power, metaphors have naturally become a weapon wielded by all great political speechmakers. Lincoln, a devout student of the two great rhetoric texts, the Bible and Shakespeare, understood that power more than any other president.

In 1848, when he was a Whig in Congress, he responded to the claim that his party had “taken shelter under General Taylor’s military coat-tail,” referring to Zachary Taylor, the Whig Party Presidential nominee. He turned the metaphor against his opponents, saying they themselves had run under the coat-tail of General Jackson for five elections. Then, instructing them in rhetoric, Lincoln added “military coat-tails, or tails of any sort, are not figures of speech such as I would be the first to introduce into discussions here.”

Lincoln launched a metaphor of his own, wishing the “gentlemen on the other side to understand that the use of degrading figures is a game at which they may not find themselves able to take all the winnings.” At this point, some in the opposition cried, “We give it up!” But Lincoln was just warming up. His reply was a rhetorical cruise missile:

Aye, you give it up, and well you may; but for a very different reason from that which you would have us understand. The point–the power to hurt–of all figures consists in the truthfulness of their application; and, understanding this, you may well give it up. They are weapons which hit you, but miss us.

The opposition was hoist with their own metaphorical petard.

Lincoln offered his most poignant metaphor in a June 1858 speech to the Illinois Republican state convention after they had chosen him as their candidate to run against Democrat Stephen Douglas in the U.S. senate race: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He then amplified the metaphor by listing divisions, one after the another:

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Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the lead Republican on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, held a climate-denial press conference at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on Thursday. Accompanying Inhofe were two rather questionable characters: an activist who believes the UN is starting the apocalypse and a British Lord who was banned from all UN climate conferences for impersonating the representative from Myanmar.

Inhofe’s first guest, Cathie Adams, is the President of the Texas Eagle Forum and former Texas GOP chair. She must have felt quite uncomfortable speaking at a United Nations function, as she has maintained for over a decade that the UN was the anti-Christ’s vehicle for stealthily taking over the world. From a 1999 newsletter:

The Bible tells us that in the end times there will be a world government headed by a world leader, called the anti-Christ, who will profess a world religion, but did you ever think you would live in the day when these things would come into being? That is exactly what the United Nations is doing behind the backs of most Americans.

Adams has singled out environmentalism as part of the UN’s sinister agenda, suggesting a fictional UN Pledge of Allegiance would require “worship[ping] the Earth.” She also believes, among other things, that the CO2 emissions do not cause climate change and that vaccination is a plot to steal American freedom.

Inhofe’s other guest, Lord Christopher Monckton, has a storied history of making things up, especially with respect to climate science. It’s a pattern Monckton fell into at the Doha negotiations, where he took the platform reserved for the Myanmarese delegation and claimed to be speaking for “Asian coastal nations.” The double pretense got him ejected from the nation of Qatar and banned from every future UN climate summit.

One might think this clown show would embarrass the Senator, but his record suggests otherwise: Inhofe has claimed that climate science is a hoax that contravenes the will of God and is currently working with the Heartland Institute — which suggests that climate change advocates are like the Unabomber — to de-fund the Environmental Protection Agency.

Opine away during this warm December of this warmest year on record for the contiguous U.S.

By Lee Judge, the Cartoonist Group