Try­ing to cut through and parse the rhetor­i­cal bed­lam of cur­rent U.S. pol­i­tics can be tax­ing to the point of painful. A use­ful tool is the advice a dear depart­ed friend, who read vora­cious­ly and talked vol­ubly, prof­fered when­ev­er I lost track of what she was on about: “Lis­ten to what I mean, not to what I say.”

Eccen­tric as it may seem, if you lis­ten hard and often enough, it works, espe­cial­ly in  try­ing to make sense of politi­cians, of whom it isn’t much of an exag­ger­a­tion to point out, can lie as eas­i­ly as they breath, and some almost as often.
The Repub­li­can con­ven­tion was replete with exam­ples of their oth­er anil­i­ty, mak­ing “turn­ing on a dime” seen snail-like when applied to chang­ing what they once sup­pos­ed­ly held as prin­ci­ples and pol­i­cy positions.
In the pri­maries, J.D. Vance referred to Don­ald Trump  as“cul­tur­al hero­in” and  a man “unfit for our nation’s high­est office”.
Since that wasn’t an imped­i­ment to him rel­ish­ing being Trump’s run­ning mate, and since most of us tend to take the easy way out and lis­ten only to what we hear, it would be use­ful if Mr Vance could explain what he meant at the time, and how he’d like us to lis­ten to any­thing he says in the future.
The same goes for Nik­ki Haley, who once upon a time pro­mot­ed her­self (and was wel­comed by many) as the anti-Trump. Unless being the antithe­sis of that posi­tion when she stood on the con­ven­tion podi­um was some kind of ther­a­py through self-abase­ment, we were once again lis­ten­ing wrong.
Con­fused? Don’t wor­ry, Ms Haley seems to be too.
A will­ing­ness and abil­i­ty to change one’s mind on an issue after care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of intel­lec­tu­al maturity.
How­ev­er, while a Dam­a­scene con­ver­sion may have worked for St Paul, try­ing to claim one on the basis of  “what I said wasn’t what I meant” for polit­i­cal gain, is cyn­i­cism bloat­ed to self-denigration.
If any­one believed Mar­co Rubio when he called Trump a “dan­ger­ous con­man” unqual­i­fied to con­trol the nation’s nuclear arse­nal, and would  “frac­ture” the Repub­li­can par­ty if he were the nom­i­nee, he made it clear (in a man­ner of speak­ing) in his con­ven­tion address that he’d like you to re-lis­ten in a dif­fer­ent way.
How­ev­er, much as it may dis­com­fit him, I think I’ll go with the idea that what he said and what he meant were one and the same.

       IT’S NOT JUST THE MAGA-MOUTHERS

Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats alike owe it to those whose votes they cov­et to prac­tice what Kurt Hoe­fle, one of the great cam­era­men of my time at CBS called “clear speak”, say­ing pre­cise­ly what he thought some­one ought to hear, regard­less of rank or power.
After the assas­si­na­tion attempt on Don­ald Trump, Pres­i­dent Biden could and should have said of his call for a “bulls­eye” on his rival: “It was a mis­take to have used those words. I regret it deeply. I apol­o­gise com­plete­ly. It will not hap­pen again..”
That’s the kind of “clear speak” with which rea­son­able peo­ple of all polit­i­cal stripes can accept and then move on.
Instead, he tried the usu­al politician’s sleight of hand (or more cor­rect­ly mouth), a sub­tle accu­sa­tion that peo­ple weren’t lis­ten­ing prop­er­ly: “I meant focus on him .Focus on what he’s doing. Focus on his policies.”, 

                SAY WHAT YOU MEAN TO DO

One way to help drag Amer­i­ca out of the quag­mire of deceit, duplic­i­ty and obfus­ca­tion would be  every news­pa­per in the coun­try pub­lish­ing, on oppos­ing pages, exact­ly one month before the elec­tion, each candidate’s ver­sion of what he/she plans to address and how, in the first 100 days after being sworn in.
Of all peo­ple, Bernie Sanders more or less laid out what Biden should or should not do if re-elect­ed, with such clar­i­ty it was enough to make one wish he was the geezer run­ning to be the first geri­atric pres­i­dent. (Although that may be coloured by the fact that the writer of this blog fits well into the geezer category.)
Trump accept­ed his anoint­ment with ver­sions of the same promis­es he didn’t deliv­er on in four years as pres­i­dent, includ­ing the bor­der wall, a vibrant econ­o­my at the expense of Chi­na and any­one else who sells stuff to Amer­i­cans and more. He topped it off with affir­ma­tions he would have stopped the wars in Ukraine and Gaza before they even began, and will end them on Day One. (Are you lis­ten­ing and hear­ing, Putin and Hamas?)
Despite all the obvi­ous evi­dence of false­hoods and fan­ta­sy, the MAGA faith­ful appar­ent­ly remain con­vinced that what they hear and what is meant are one and the irrefutable same.
The line that sums up the “what-I-say-what-I-mean” conun­drum came from Flori­da Gov­er­nor Ron de San­tis: “We deserve a bet­ter class of politi­cian, one who actu­al­ly tells us the truth…”
How you heard it depends very much on what you want to hear.
Any odds on the vot­er split on that?

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