http://www.figarospeech.com/talk-like-bush/SNIP
Every politician uses code words. What makes Bush different is his masterful way of using code words without the distraction of logic. He speaks in short sentences, repeating code phrases in effective, if irrational, order. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in,” he once said, “to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
But he does more than just repeat things over and over and over. He catapults his messages by leaving logic out of them. The result is what the poet Robert Frost called the “sound of sense” — the meaning you intuit from hearing people speak in the next room. You pick up the sense from the speakers’ rhythms and tone, and from an occasional emphasized word. If you ever played Sims on your computer, you know what I mean. The game’s simulated characters speak Simlish, a babble language invented by a pair of improv comedians. (An angry character will exclaim something like, “Frabbida!”) You suss out much of what they say by their tone of voice. Bush’s strange statement, “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream,” makes an almost poetic sense. It has the sound of sense. He has a masterful way of combining repetition, tone and code words unfettered by context.
“We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job.”
This is a classic Bushism, fractured syntax that seems to come out of a short circuit in the language center of his brain. You know what he means, though, don’t you? If you heard it instead of read it, you would probably miss the “hearing your vision” part and come away with “look forward” and “hearing” and “vision” and “do our job.” The resulting message conveys optimism, listening, and duty. . . .
The Italic Slant
Clearly, Bush didn’t practice speaking Bushimistically. But he has done nothing to fix his syntax, probably because he benefits from it. Logic-free speech italicizes the words he wants to stick in our heads. When he says,
“We’ll be a great country where the fabrics are made up of groups and loving centers,”
he isn’t painting any sort of realistic picture of America. You couldn’t even call his technique “impressionism.” It’s more like pointillism, dotting the rhetorical canvas with values to create a group identity. As he himself succinctly put it, “sometimes pure politics enters into the rhetoric.” It’s his job as a politician to keep everything else out, leaving only politically useful values. “I’m a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values,” he says.
SNIP
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