Thomas LaFauci is a speechwriter who thought Jim Webb’s SOTU rebuttal was bad.
The Democratic response to the State of the Union lay there, flat, dead, uninspired. It did not tell the real story or paint a picture of the last six years. It lacked the confident tone of a resurgent Democratic Party and rhetorical constructions that combine politics, policy, propaganda, and poetry to reveal who we are what we stand for, lift us up, or console us in times of tragedy and trouble. A great speech should reach into our collective soul and touch what is most human in the human spirit.
I thought Webb’s rebuttal was the best political speech I’d heard on television in a long time. I found it thrilling, mostly because of its gut-level honesty. LaFauci hated it because it lacked soaring oratory.
But soaring oratory is as common as sparrows. Gut-level honesty, from a politician, is a much rarer bird. That’s why it grabs our attention no matter how plain its feathers.
We live in an age of collective psychological defense mechanisms. Too much of our public discourse amounts to denial, distortion, or delusional projection. News media and politicians alike tip-toe around ugly facts and work harder spinning rationalizations and maintaining pretty facades than facing reality.
So when anyone in mass media looks us in the eyes and speaks the plain, unvarnished truth, it is astonishing.
At the bottom of LaFauci’s column it says,
Thomas LaFauci is a speechwriter who has written for former House Speaker Thomas S. Foley and Senators John Kerry and Joseph Biden. Jr.
I say that pretty much speaks for itself.
If LaFauci wrote for Foley, Kerry, and Biden, then by his own admission he knows nothing of speechwriting or what constitutes a good political speech. I agree with Maha that Webb’s speech was exactly on target in tone, content, and delivery. Webb is the most presidential of all the nincompoops occupying the hallowed halls of our government.
“I thought Webb’s rebuttal was the best political speech I’d heard on television in a long time. I found it thrilling, mostly because of its gut-level honesty.”
Yes. This is exactly the same reaction I saw from the thousands of people who had the opportunity to attend a Webb campaign rally. Gut-level honesty is usually the last approach any politician will try and usually the first approach that will actually work for them.
I think the real problem for LaFauci is that his protective bubble of perceived expertise has burst wide open. Golly. If politicians begin speaking from their hearts and presenting us with nothing but a candid statement of their sincerely held beliefs, how will all the little LaFaucis (and little Carvilles, and little Begalas, and little DLCers) be able to afford college expenses?
I was so taken by Webb’s speech that I emailed the text to family & friends the next morning. Almost immediately I got a reply from one friend, a tenured university professor in English Lit and Comp, who said he’d heard Webb’s speech on the car radio, driving home from teaching a class Tuesday night. He, too, felt it signaled hope and change.
I can’t confirm, but I’d heard that Webb tossed aside a speech the Dems had prepared for him, and wrote his own. So I concur with Brian above, LaFauci feels threatened professionally. Boo freaking hoo. Maybe he should start working for the Republicans, since he understands the crybaby mindset so well.
Webb’s speech was brilliant. He has the experience and the credibility that Bush lacks.
Nevermind that Webb is an award winning, published author. He had the good sense to toss the speech prepared for him by the Democrats.
It’s great to see our party finding its voice, and that also means ignoring chronic losers like LaFauci, who can’t see the obvious.
Looks like LaFauci just wants to blow his own horn by showcasing his own talents in flowery rhetoric. His writing is not bad,but we don’t need more stardust to inform us of what we already know at this point. We need unadorned honesty, and Webb delivered just that. Webb connected with my spirit and validated my knowledge..which is the ultimate goal of a good speech. One point of Webb’s speech resounded with remarkable clarity..Bush didn’t weigh the lives of our servicemen and women against America’s rightful need for defense with an honest measure. Bush has used America’s servicemen as a prop and a tool to further his own agenda without regard for the national interest and he continues to spend their lives to avoid a reckoning with his incompetence, lies and deciets.
I say AMEN to Maha’s post and all the comments. LaFauci is entitled to his opinion, even if it’s wrong.
Thanks Maha
I wish we had more senators and congressmen like Webb.
Byrd, Feingold, Kennedy, Leahy, Murtha and Pelosi come to mind.
On the Republican side, all I can think of is Hagel recently.
Don’t we call this statesmanship?
Re defense mechanisms………The one not highlighted was “splitting”
This is the tendency to see people as all good or all bad.
Wikipedia has a concise discourse.
The people that “split” mostly seem to be in the Republican column…..Santorum, Cheney, Rove, Scalia, Tancredo, Coulter, Heil Hanity, Rush, Robertson, Falwell come to mind.
But there are times, when she loses it, that Hilary seems to split.
This guy’s qualifications to critique speeches remind me of Bob Shrum’s qualification to advise Kerry’s 2004 campaign. Shrum advised eight failed Democratic presidential candidates– including Geoirge McGovern, Ed Muskie, and Al Gore before Kerry signed him.
Is it any surprise that Democratic presidential candidates lose when they keep hiring operatives with a losing track record?
Lafalsi said he wants a speech to ‘point us to the stars’, so I guess his op-ed was designed to point us to the star he thinks he is [and may be] as a speechwriter. Too bad he’s been a speechwriter for so long that he no longer knows how to simply listen as we can and did to Jim Webb. We heard, felt, and especially valued Webb’s authenticity; Lafalsi heard the same speech only in terms of ‘I could do better’.
I hope this discussion means that Americans are maturing and are getting better and better at discerning what is genuine expression from what is only ‘heart’ maintained by intravenous script-support [think dubya].
When one has been dragged down into the hole that the President is digging deeper, a speech that says, “You know, it’d be good to get out of this hole” is inspirational! Confident tone? What is more confident that “I understand reality, like you, and unlike that guy you just heard yammering at you.”
LaFauci is an inspiration to all us underemployed people out there – if a guy with an ear like his can make a living as a speechwriter, just think how far we can go in fields we actually have some ability for!
“We live in an age of collective psychological defense mechanisms. Too much of our public discourse amounts to denial, distortion, or delusional projection. News media and politicians alike tip-toe around ugly facts and work harder spinning rationalizations and maintaining pretty facades than facing reality.”
Couldn’t agree more. For example, Maha, your dogged and increasingly absurd refusal to face up to the reality of 9/11. You deny the ugly facts, spin absurd rationalizations a la Eagar/Musso, deny the floor to any but your own acolytes, and project delusional motivations on anyone who sees through the pretty facade.
Too bad. You could be a really useful force for truth. But that would mean facing your own psychological defense mechanisms.
“predictable and predicted”
Yes Webb was great especially compared to Dem rebuttals of recent years that just stank
Couldn’t agree more. For example, Maha, your dogged and increasingly absurd refusal to face up to the reality of 9/11.
Sent to Chris via email, to be sure he sees it:
“I thought you’d like to know that I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11. I watched the World Trade Center towers collapse with my own eyes, not on television.
“I do believe I understand the ‘reality’ of what happened a damn lot better than you do.
“The difference is that I’m not as big a coward and am not prepared to chuck the Bill of Rights to get a false sense of security.”
I am a dinosaur who can’t avoid what I know from history.
Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address after a famed orator whose name escapes me had spoken for over an hour. In a speech that lasted only a few minutes, Lincoln laid bare the essential justification for a war that wracked the souls of men of conscience on both sides of the conflict.
Webb did not try to fill all the time allowed for a rebuttal. He hit a few points hard and clear about the failure of domestic and international policy with the promise of oversight and leadership. I found his arguments compelling and his sincerity exhilarating. I wanted to cheer his speech. No, it won’t go down with the Gettysburg address, but it may mark the turning point for the Bush tyrany, the beginning of the end.
You would have enjoyed Sherrod Brown’s maiden speech on the floor of the senate. It had passion and guts. It spoke about the middle class. It moved Robert Byrd to stand up right after and comment to the house that it was one of the best maiden speeches. He said it was elegant, passionate and spoke from the heart. He said he hoped the middle class would know they had a rare champion and afterwards, Kennedy complimented him as well.
I saw Byrd sitting behind Brown as he spoke and his eyes were closed and his head moved to the words like he was being carried away.
Um – Chris? The fact that I am able to respond to your comment pretty much undermines the premise of said comment. I challenge you to go to a site like – oh let’s pick one – I know – how about HOTAIR. Then come back here and talk about:
“deny the floor to any but your own acolytes, and project delusional motivations on anyone who sees through the pretty facade.”
Re: Gettysburg, it was Edward Everett, and his speech went on for two hours. (No, I didn’t know this, I looked it up in Wikipedia.)
I thought Webb’s speech was terrific.
This idiocy about soaring rhetoric and eloquence is another sad legacy of the Reagan era, when people became habituated to Noonan’s blarney and bullshit, and learned to mistake that for eloquence.
I’d forget about LaFauci. He’s just a chiseler who is out of a job.