[Why do one-liners - slogan-generators - succeed or fail? A comparison of Bentsen's, "You're no Jack Kennedy" to McCain's "I'm not Bush.]
"Sen. Obama, I'm not President Bush. ... If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago."
Oct. 15 presidential debate at Hofstra University
By many accounts, John McCain's "Senator Obama, I'm not President Bush" may be the best one-liner of the presidential debates. As one website put it, "Republican operatives could barely contain their excitement afterward - or their wish that this had been said in the first debate and not the final one." It was a great one-liner, reminiscent of another from an earlier campaign. But unlike its predecessor, this didn't define the candidate. If it had come in the first debate, it wouldn't have been a "game-changer," and may have made things worse, not better for John McCain.
The predecessor was, of course, Lloyd Bentsen's retort to Dan Quayle, "...I knew Jack Kennedy. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." It had much the same setting as the Obama-McCain debate: a younger, relatively inexperienced Senator against an older, veteran Senator. So youth, experience, and political philosophy were on stage. On the campaign trail, Dan Quayle had been comparing himself to JFK, while Obama had been comparing McCain to Bush. Yet in one case the one-liner not only worked, but became part of the political lexicon. In the other, it became fodder for late-night jokes, but otherwise backfired. Understanding why helps us also understand why ultimately rhetoric must match reason.
A one-liner works when it becomes a slogan, a catch-phrase. It serves much the same rhetorical purpose as a cheer at a bowl game - to establish identity. That is, if the one-liner works, the audience will approve, then adapt it. It ends up on bumper stickers. It becomes an "in" thing. (If we want to categorize the one-liner, we'd say it's a demonstrative-ethos tool - it establishes the speaker's character in a way that demonstrates he or she shares the audience's values. It's an "us vs. them" strategy, with "us" being anyone who gets the point.)
The one-liner (which followed a classic series of set-up lines, beginning with "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy") "You're no Jack Kennedy" - or substitute some other iconic figure - now serves two parallel purposes: it deflates the opponent, or the opponent's claim, by negating an otherwise favorable analogy or comparison.
Why does Bentsen's line, and its formulation "You're no [analogous figure]", still work, while McCain's adaptation, after the initial impact, failed? We have to remember that Quayle was not comparing his accomplishments to Kennedy's accomplishments, but rather his experience to Kennedy's. But Quayle's argument was weak - and rather hubristic - to begin with. When asked what qualified him to be Vice-President, saying he'd been in the Senate longer than JFK had been doesn't really answer the question. By that reasoning we should always elect the least experienced candidate! Further, what people remember is not JFK's comparative inexperience, but his energy, leadership and accomplishments. Bentsen took advantage of the positive memories of JFK to deflate Quayle, who was in many ways JFK's political opposite.
In other words, the facts - reason - lent resonance to Bentsen's quip.
McCain's line suffered from two problems: it focused the negative on himself, and it belied his record. Make that three problems, since it thereby brought his record under the wrong microscope.
Bentsen's equation went Quayle does not equal Kennedy. McCain's went McCain does not equal Bush. If Kennedy is a positive number and Bush is a negative number and "not" means multiply by a negative, we see clearly the difference. Quayle was trying to multiply a positive (himself) by a positive (Kennedy), yielding a positive analogy, message or impression. Bentsen turned that into a negative multiplying a positive, which is always negative.
But a negative (I'm not) multiplied by a negative (Bush) is still a negative. And so, once the shock value of the denial wore off, one was left with, if not a negative, then another question: If McCain isn't Bush, who is he? The fallback answer has to be "a maverick," but that identifier had been dropped because, after McCain suspended his campaign in response to the economic crisis, "maverick" had been redefined, by Obama and the media, as "erratic."
But the other reason the one-liner didn't work was that in essence it wasn't true. McCain wasn't physically Bush, but philosophically he was. He'd voted with him 90% of the time. He boasted to Bill O'Reilly that he campaigned for and with Bush, doing everything he could to get Bush re-elected. The pictures of them hugging, or arm-in-arm, or eating birthday cake - McCain's birthday cake - the day Katrina drowned New Orleans, provided too much visual refutation.
Thus, Obama had to make only one small change to negate the line. All he had to do was add the word "policies" to the Bush-McCain identification tag.
Using the line earlier probably wouldn't have helped McCain, and it may have hurt, because it would have focused attention, in a different, perhaps more politically harmful way, on his conjunction with Bush.
As Jay Heinrichs points out in Thank You For Arguing, you can't fake decorum.
