Al Smith reduced complex fiscal arguments to single devastating rhetorical questions
Evidence
The Governor wanted no technicalities in his speeches: he himself, with the genius that made him the greatest campaigner of his time, reduced every argument to its most basic terms. During the 1922 campaign against Miller, for example, Smith was scheduled to speak at a county fair in Rochester. Moses had written a draft of a proposed speech that disproved—dollar by dollar, it seemed—Miller’s claims that his economies had saved the state $14,000,000. When Smith arose, however, he looked out over the huge crowd of farmers and uttered just two sentences. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 610
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Moses’s later mastery of public simplification (parks bond issue rhetoric) and to Grafting article’s theme of powerful plain speech. — connects to: Bush’s rhetoric reduced Islam to a single object judged against Western values.; Moses dismissed Al Smith as a typical machine politician — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 385
- QUESTION: The $14 million figure keeps recurring — worth chasing: was Miller’s claim accurate, and did Smith’s dismissal carry unearned force?
Broader Connections
- Bush’s rhetoric reduced Islam to a single object judged against Western values.
#qualifies(0.80) - Moses dismissed Al Smith as a typical machine politician
#responds-to(0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 385