Last night I caught a few minutes of the New Hampshire Shaheen-Brown debate on C-Span, and I must say, I never realized how rhetorically clumsy the challenger is.
It seems Sen. Shaheen once denounced the idea of another American "occupying force" in the Middle East, a comment that Scott Brown repeatedly assaulted in this way, or in some close variation of it: "We’re a liberating force, we’re not an occupying force, Senator, and I and every other person who has served in the military resents that you are calling us occupiers."
Though emotionally artificial and sentimentally contrived, that reads unrealistically smooth. Yet for all his rehearsal of that comeback, Brown barely got it out. He stammered, paused, and seemed to have trouble recalling his outrage--word for word, that is.
Brown aspires to good demagoguery, but he quite obviously lacks its first imperative: the ability to speak.