The difference in rhetoric between presidents and poets can be identified through the audience each is addressing. Barack Obama is cognizant of his audience as an unimaginably enormous, general mass of laymen, professors and restaurant managers that are roped into the election regardless of their interest. A poet's audience is not a captive one, instead it is a group of followers and critics that are willingly viewing or listening to the material. It makes sense that the president generalizes his rhetoric into simpler, stronger, ironclad practices, since his audience may only be just learning his points or looking to pry open the rhetorical armor and tear him apart. A president's rhetoric will be founded upon basic repetitive statements and simple, muted transitions. A poet has the liberty to choose any language he wants, and address issues in a controversial, flamboyant, or even obscene, manner-certainly not the kind of enthusiastic outspoken technique a president wants to deliver.
Zadie Smith is advocating "tentatively" as she correctly puts it, that a president that is loosed from the doublespeak and blackwhite policies that pervade American politics can make an enormous difference. She actually wants a president to speak like a poet, freely and with impunity. A president that could express actual opinions could outline his actual desires in front of the public, to approval and disapproval. The relative transparency of the presidential would lend increase everyone's trust in government, regardless of political preference.
Once again, a great post here. I like what you have to say about how she views the president. I am not sure your view on the poet is right though. I think you have this idea that poets write just to critics and a sort of only one perspective. I'm not this is truly. Especially with her example of Shakespeare. Also when some of us went to see the poet laureate he had a variety of different poems each speaking to a slightly different group of people.
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