Words of Wisdom from Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton gave the keynote address at this year's Texas Book Festival.  C-Span 2 covered the event, and has a video of his speech on their website.  In his talk and Q/A session, Clinton talks about books, his book, keeping a journal, Walmart, the deficit, and the current state of political discourse.   I transcribed an excerpt on political writing that is extremely applicable to blogging today.

Final point I want to make is...too much writing on modern politics is about this argument and assertion and ideology and not enough about evidence and old-fashioned reasoning.  One reason I recommend John Hope Franklin's book to you is that if he ever says something you don't agree with in this book, you will feel like you are in a martial-arts wrestling match that you can not win unless you have similar rigor in your response.  You know, most of what's written about modern politics is "Well the Democrats say this and the Republicans say that and what do you expect."  As if there were no underlying facts, no arguments to be made, no rules of reason.

So that while we have access to more information and more words than ever before, we may understand less if we're just throwing around assertions.  A little bit of this, a little bit of that.  That's the sort of argument that's like on this intelligent design deal.  Well there's one PhD somewhere who believes that the human eye is so sophisticated that it couldn't have evolved from a monkey so there's another theory, and since the theory of evolution is just a theory, why not just throw all the theories in and teach them all in science class.  A little of this, a little of that... that's kind of the way we write about politics.

There are actually...you know, I was educated by the Jesuits and grew up in an age when, you know, there were certain rules that organized our thinking and our argument and everybody had to play by them in discourse, and that made it possible, I think, to have honest dialogue.  And so I'd like to see some of that again. 

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But I really do believe that the absence of rigor in the statement of facts in making a case and argument in so much political writing today is a big mistake.

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