As we are assailed with all the promises and alibis that accompany another presidential election year, I would like to offer my readers a healthy antidote to the mendacity of politicians. Take some time off from campaign watching to read Mencken.

Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was one of our most brilliant and penetrating journalists. He was also one of our most skeptical and acerbic. He believed in only one value –- liberty -– and he had absolutely no faith in politics, politicians or government.

He once declared, “The typical lawmaker of today is a man devoid of principle –- a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology, or cannibalism.”

How right he was –- and still is.

Here are some choice political nuggets from Mencken, all of which are as timely as ever.

“A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.”

“A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.”

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

“Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.”

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

“In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.”

“Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”

Mike Huckabee’s triumph in the Iowa caucuses forces Americans to contemplate the possibility that he will be the second ordained minister to occupy the White House.

The first was James A. Garfield, who was president for just a few months in 1881 before he was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker.

Because Garfield’s tenure in office was so brief, he is one of our lesser-known presidents. This is unfortunate, because he is a very interesting character.

Born in 1831, he was the last president to be born in a log cabin. His father died when he was two, leaving him to support his widowed mother and to scrape an education as best he could. Young Garfield worked as a farm hand, carpenter and canal boatman, and later helped pay his way through college by preaching Sunday sermons.

Garfield became a classics professor and later president of what is today Hiram College in Ohio. Entering politics, he was elected to the Ohio state senate in 1859, and was admitted to the bar the following year. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Union Army and proved himself equally successful as a soldier, attaining the rank of brigadier general at the age of 31.

Because of his skills honed as a preacher and a lawyer, Garfield enjoyed a considerable reputation as an orator. A popular story tells how he was in New York City in April of 1865 when the news broke that President Lincoln had been murdered by John Wilkes Booth. An angry mob gathered in the vicinity of Wall Street, ready to wreak bloody vengeance on anyone so much as suspected of harboring pro-Southern sympathies.

But as the tension reached the flash point, Garfield appeared on a balcony, holding an American flag. “Fellow citizens!” he called out in a booming voice. “God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives!”

Incredibly, the sheer drama of the moment quieted the crowd. The people dispersed and the city was spared a riot. Small wonder that Garfield would later be called the “Preacher President.”

Ironically, in light of the fact that Mormon Mitt Romney was Huckabee’s chief rival in Iowa, Garfield’s inaugural address included two paragraphs warning his countrymen about the dangers posed by the Mormon church.

At the time, the Mormons still practiced polygamy in what was then the territory of Utah, despite the passage of a federal anti-bigamy act in 1862. The Republican Party equated polygamy with slavery, and Garfield strongly condemned the practice in his address. He declared:

The Territories of the United States are subject to the direct legislative authority of Congress, and hence the General Government is responsible for any violation of the Constitution in any of them. It is therefore a reproach to the Government that in the most populous of the Territories the constitutional guaranty is not enjoyed by the people and the authority of Congress is set at naught. The Mormon Church not only offends the moral sense of manhood by sanctioning polygamy, but prevents the administration of justice through ordinary instrumentalities of law.

In my judgment it is the duty of Congress, while respecting to the uttermost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen, to prohibit within its jurisdiction all criminal practices, especially of that class which destroy the family relations and endanger social order. Nor can any ecclesiastical organization be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the National Government.

Mormon leaders officially abolished polygamy some years later, to pave the way for the admission of Utah as a state in 1896. But in the eyes of at least some of Huckabee’s evangelical supporters, Mormonism is still a heretical cult. It will be interesting to see how the man who wants to be our next preacher president handles –- or avoids -– this issue in the months ahead.

In my last post, I wondered out loud if Mike Huckabee’s win in Iowa would make him America’s second preacher-president.

In the interest of fairness, I am asking today if America will ever have an atheist president.

I think the answer is perhaps –- but not anytime soon. According to a recent poll, just over half of all Americans say that they would not vote to elect an otherwise-qualified atheist to the highest office in the land. At the present time, the highest-ranking public official in America to admit to having no religion is Peter Stark, a democratic congressman from the San Francisco area.

Still, as the Economist magazine reported last month, almost 30 million Americans professed “no religion” in 2001 –- twice as many as a decade earlier. So it may be that atheists will have to be taken seriously as a voting bloc before too long.

I wonder how the politicians will straddle that one.

Reading Newsweek’s recent profile of Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau made me feel old enough to have written speeches for Henry Clay. Ye gods! Favreau is only 26 years old.

But then, I brightened up, because there was a lot in the profile I could relate to. For example: “His boss is a best-selling author who really doesn’t need his help, having written the 2004 speech that catapulted him onto the national stage.”

O.K., I’ve written for Colin Powell, so I’ve been there.

Ditto the next line in the article: “At the same time, the same boss also happens to be capable of delivering a speech in ways that give his audience the goosebumps.”

I can also relate to a comment made by Obama’s communications director, Robert Gibbs: “If there were 48 hours in a day, we wouldn’t need a speechwriter.”

True enough. I’ve worked for some absolutely brilliant politicians and CEOs who would be perfectly capable of writing their own speeches –- if they only had the time. Fortunately for me, they didn’t. They needed me to do the research, the first drafts, the major re-writes and the other heavy lifting.

For example, I once wrote a speech for Colin Powell for the ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the unveiling of the monument to Col. Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry on Boston Common. The Massachusetts 54th was one of the first official black units in the U.S. armed forces, and inspired the 1989 Academy award-winning film, Glory.

In the course of researching that speech, I read about 20 books, including the complete letters and papers of Robert Gould Shaw. Obviously, General Powell had no time for such extensive research on his own. But the labor was worth it, because I unearthed some very interesting historical facts that ultimately found their way into the general’s speech. Among other things, I learned that two sons of civil rights leader Frederick Douglass served with the 54th, and that another member of the regiment, Sgt. William Carney, was the first African-American soldier to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. (Gen. Powell ended up being particularly grateful for this information, since a descendant of Sgt. Carney showed up at the ceremonies in Boston, bringing with him his ancestor’s Medal of Honor.)

Finally, I can share Jon Favreau’s strong sense of satisfaction when he gets to work one-on-one with his boss. “What I do is sit with him for half an hour,” Favreau explains. “He talks and I type everything he says. I reshape it, I write. He writes, he reshapes it. That’s how we get a finished product.”

“It’s a great way to write speeches,” concludes Favreau. It is indeed. This mere stripling is only 26 and he’s made it to speechwriter’s heaven. I hope he knows how lucky he is.

“Is eloquence overrated?”

Journalist Peter Applebome asked that question in yesterday’s New York Times.

I don’t know if there is a definitive answer. Hillary Clinton took a stab at it last week by quoting an observation she borrowed from Mario Cuomo: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.”

That’s a neat epigram, but is it true? Did Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan reserve all their eloquence for the campaign trail? Did they make no memorable speeches while they were engaged in actually governing the country?

I’m more inclined to agree with Ted Sorensen who, according to the Times article, believes that there is a real link between inspirational oratory and inspirational leadership.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address amounted to a second founding of America, an America in which all men were truly created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural address assured Depression-ravaged Americans that we had nothing to fear but fear itself, and his fireside chats helped to sustain national morale during the desperate days that followed. John Kennedy’s inaugural address fired the idealism of a generation. Ronald Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, and it happened.

The most eloquent candidate does not always win the White House. Compare the speeches of Dwight Eisenhower with those of Adlai Stevenson, for example. But eloquence is an invaluable asset to any leader.

In 1897, as a young army officer in India, Winston Churchill wrote an essay called, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.” In this essay he made an observation about the power of oratory that was to prove profoundly true in his own career, and the career of many a great leader before and since. He said this:

“Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command his power is still formidable. Many have watched its effects. A meeting of grave citizens, protected by all the cynicism of these prosaic days, is unable to resist its influence. From unresponsive silence they advance to grudging approval and thence to complete agreement with the speaker. The cheers become louder and more frequent; the enthusiasm momentarily increases; until they are convulsed by emotions they are unable to control and shaken by passions of which they have resigned the direction.”

Is eloquence overrated? Perhaps. But it’s still hard to refute Churchill’s argument. And maybe that's the best answer of all.

Since going weepy on the eve of the New Hampshire primary succeeded in “humanizing” Hilllary Clinton a bit, she’s decided to push the envelope by indulging in some self-deprecating humor.

According to a story carried by the Associated Press, Senator Clinton welcomed her traveling press corps aboard her campaign plane yesterday with the following announcement:

"Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard the maiden flight of Hil Force One."

"My name is Hillary and I am so pleased to have most of you on board. FAA regulations prohibit the use of any cell phones, Blackberries or wireless devices that may be used to transmit a negative story about me.

"In a few minutes, I am going to switch off the 'Fasten Your Seat Belt' sign. However, I've learned lately that things can get awfully bumpy when you least expect it—so you might want to keep those seat belts fastened.

"And in the event of an unexpected drop in poll numbers, this plane will be diverted to New Hampshire.

"If you look out from the right, you will see an America saddled with tax cuts for the wealthiest and a war without end. If you look out from the left, you will see an America with a strong middle class at home and a strong reputation in the world.

"Once we've reached cruising altitude, we'll be offering in-flight entertainment: my stump speech.

"Once again, thank you for joining us on Hil Force One. We know you have choices when you fly, and so we are grateful that you chose the plane with the most experienced crew. And so we are grateful that you chose the plane with the most experienced candidate."

As self-deprecating humor goes, I’m bound to say that this was a very effective performance. The bogus flight announcement is short, clever and genuinely funny. But does it show us a side of Senator Clinton that we have hitherto missed, or was she just putting on an act?

I’m reminded of a time over twenty years ago when First Lady Nancy Reagan resorted to the same type of humor. Mrs. Reagan’s image problem was that she was regularly depicted by the media as being concerned with designer gowns, expensive jewelry, fine china and very little else. So she made an appearance before the Washington press corps at the annual Gridiron banquet sporting an ensemble that looked like in had been pieced together with leftovers from some storefront church’s rummage sale.

For a punchline, she gave a hilarious rendition of “Second-hand Rose.”

Remember the song? If it was before your time, it goes like this:

I’m wearing second-hand hats,
Second-hand clothes,
That’s why they call me
Second-hand Rose.

The journalists present laughed, applauded –- and eased up in their negative coverage of Nancy Reagan.

Mrs. Reagan had discovered what Sen. Clinton has apparently discovered. Namely, that if you're a celebrity, and you abase yourself before a bunch of reporters, they’ll love you for it; at least for a little while.

Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.
(Amos 5:24, American Standard Version)

For many years, African-American orators have made powerful use of biblical imagery in their speeches. The above quotation from the prophet Amos, for example, featured prominently in Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at the march on Washington for civil rights in 1963.

Biblical imagery was likewise on display in Sen. Barack Obama’s tribute to Martin Luther King yesterday morning at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Sen. Obama used the story of Joshua and the Israelites before the gates of Jericho to demonstrate that if people stand together, walls can indeed come tumbling down.

Dr. King proved that, said Sen. Obama:

Because before Memphis and the mountaintop; before the bridge in Selma and the march on Washington; before Birmingham and the beatings; the fire hoses and the loss of those four little girls; before there was King the icon and his magnificent dream, there was King the young preacher and a people who found themselves suffering under the yolk of oppression.

What Dr. King understood is that if just one person chose to walk instead of ride the bus, those walls of oppression would not be moved. But maybe if a few more walked, the foundation might start to shake. If a few more women were willing to do what Rosa Parks had done, maybe the cracks would start to show. If teenagers took freedom rides from North to South, maybe a few bricks would come loose. Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Powerful words. The safe thing for a speaker to do would be to quit while he was ahead. But Sen. Obama had the courage to take a big risk. He raised the stakes on the people in the pews in Atlanta, on African-Americans, on all who call themselves Christians and on all Americans. He said this:

For most of this country’s history, we in the African American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays –- on the job, in the schools, in our health care system and in our criminal justice system.

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face –- war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

If Sen. Obama were to become president, could he match his fine words with equally fine deeds? We don’t know, but a growing number of Americans seem to find his oratory reason enough to give him the chance to try.

One of the prerogatives of writing a blog is that it gives you the opportunity to puff yourself every now and then.

Last month, for example, I won a Silver Cicero Award for a speech I gave to the Washington Speechwriters Roundtable.

The subject of the speech was speechwriter strategies for winning over tough audiences. I’m going to share the opening paragraphs of the speech in today’s post, because I think it contains some useful advice to speechwriters, along with a classic example of self-deprecating humor from Abraham Lincoln.

Here is the speech:

“Sooner or later the people we write for have to speak to audiences that are cold, skeptical or even hostile to them and to their point of view.

“How do we, as speechwriters, help our clients to crack those tough audiences?

“In one respect, there is no difference in writing for a hostile, rather than a friendly audience. The basic devices for moving audiences remain the same.

“Aristotle said that there are three main ways by which a speaker moves an audience.

As speechwriters, we know that they are:

“Ethos –- building a bond with the audience.

“Logos –- appealing to reason and logic.

|And pathos –- appealing to emotion.

“The basics don’t change when we have to write for a tough crowd. We simply adapt them to the occasion.

“I’m going to lay particular stress on ethos.

“One of the best ways of bonding with an audience is with humor. The best kind of humor for tough audiences is self-deprecating humor.

“For two reasons: First, it’s safe. Nobody can object to your speaker making fun of himself. Second, it works. It’s hard to dislike a person who is big enough not to take himself too seriously.

“You may know the story of how Abraham Lincoln was giving a speech, and a heckler accused him of being ‘two-faced.’

“Lincoln faced the heckler head-on and declared, ‘Friend, be fair! If I had two faces, why would I wear this one?’”

As President Bush prepares to deliver the last State of the Union address of his presidency this evening, two veteran Republican speechwriters have already delivered their own post-mortems on the Republican Party.

The elephant is dead, say Mike Gerson and Peggy Noonan. Who killed it?

In the January 28 issue of Newsweek magazine, former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson fingers an unlikely suspect: austerity. According to him, the GOP is facing disaster in November not because President Bush blundered –- or manipulated -– the country into an unnecessary war; not because his administration resorted to torture and rode roughshod over civil liberties; not because his administration has been characterized by cronyism and incompetence; not because Mr. Bush tried to usurp states’ rights by pushing a federal marriage amendment to the Constitution; not because Mr. Bush was responsible for the biggest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson; and not because he did nothing while congressional Republicans went hog-wild in voting themselves disgraceful pork-barrel spending projects.

No, according to Mr. Gerson, the GOP is doomed because it reacted parsimoniously to Hurricane Katrina. Republicans, he says, didn’t spend enough to help the victims, and the American people recoiled in horror from such mean-spirited penny-pinching.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan issued her own coroner’s report in the January 25 issue of the Wall Street Journal. Her finding: “George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, on the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.”

Ms. Noonan’s is the more accurate finding. She’s not kidding herself in print. Gerson, in contrast, is not only self-deluded, he has the gall to say that those in the Republican Party who want to return to what used to be its fundamental principles –- such as limited government, free markets and individual freedom –- are not true conservatives, but libertarians. He then trots out the late Russell Kirk, one of the intellectual giants of 20th Century American conservatism, to bolster his point. He quotes Kirk condemning libertarianism as “an ideology of universal selfishness.”

That’s a shabby trick that won’t work on anyone who has even a nodding acquaintance with Russell Kirk’s writings. (In my case, I knew him personally.) It’s true that Dr. Kirk was sharply critical of libertarianism. But that doesn’t mean that he would have approved of the brand of big government conservatism being peddled by Mr. Gerson. We are, after all, talking about the same Russell Kirk who, some quarter-century ago, defined a conservative in these terms: “Typically, such a person holds strictly by the Constitution, maintaining that it should be strictly interpreted; he endeavors to oppose the drift toward political centralization; he dislikes organizations on the grand scale, in government, in business and industry, in organized labor; he is a defender of private property; he resents the heavy increase of taxation and many of ‘transfer payments’ of the welfare state …” Kirk, in short, would have viewed any kind of big government conservatism as an oxymoron.

It doesn’t much matter what President Bush says tonight. He’s already history, along with the Republican Party that he has managed to immolate. The question now is whether a phoenix will arise from the ashes. If so, what kind of bird will it be?

My good friend Professor Carl Dolmetsch is one of the most learned men I know. Some years back, he wrote a fascinating and highly acclaimed book called Our Famous Guest, which details the 20 months that Mark Twain and his wife spent in Vienna so their daughter Clara could study music.

On my own two visits to Vienna, I was privileged to have Carl as my host and guide. He loves the city, where was born and spent his early childhood, and he also loves to tease unwary tourists like me. I remember an occasion when he was showing me one of Vienna’s many beautiful churches. As we were about to leave, he turned to me and remarked, with studied casualness, “You know, don’t you, that Mozart composed the C-minor Mass for performance in this church?”

He paused to let my jaw drop, and then pointed a finger to the organ loft. “Mozart conducted from right there,” he concluded with an impish grin.

Carl is now retired and in his mid-eighties, but he’s as mentally alert and playful as ever. He just published an essay on “The Joys of English” for the newsletter of the retirement community where he lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The following excerpt from this essay is reprinted with his permission and good wishes:

“English is, so to speak, like a sponge. It began developing that way in the fifth century A.D. when the Roman governor of Britain invited the Angles and the Saxons, Teutonic tribes who spoke a dialect of Old Low German, to cross the North Sea and help him defend his Roman colony against its Celtic natives. Anglo-Saxon (or Old English to give it its proper name) began almost immediately to pick up words and pronunciations from the Celtic languages –- Welsh and Scots Gaelic –- and, soon after the British Isles were Christianized, from Vulgate Latin. Then, a few centuries later, came the Norman conquest of England, after which French became the language of the ruling class and many generations later was amalgamated with Old English to become what we call Middle English –- the language of Chaucer…

“One could say of our language in the poet’s words, 'I am a part of all I have seen.' Consider, for instance, the contribution of our 180 Native American languages, with words like canoe, wigwam, raccoon, opossum, succotash, hickory, pecan, tobacco, moccasin, potato and dozens more as well as the names of many of our cities, rivers, mountains and states. Think of the words brought here by the Africans we enslaved: yam, okra, banjo, jazz, voodoo, zombie and many more. The British went out to India and other parts of the Far East and brought back to us as well as to England words like bungalow, veranda, pajamas, kimono, et al. In short, we have borrowed freely from every language on the globe.”

Carl also wrote a book about The Smart Set -- a literary magazine of the early 1920s edited by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken. It was the forerunner of The New Yorker. As part of his research for that book, Carl interviewed Mencken himself a few years before the celebrated journalist died.

But that’s another story.