Word: dirksen
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...flinty, principled and perhaps fatally compromised by allegations that she participated in an orgy in her college days. If she is ratified, it will be over the sternest objections of Representative Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman, sporting a cornpone accent and the most preposterously wayward Capitol Hill hairdo since Everett Dirksen's). "We're both sticking to our guns," Runyon warns Evans. "The difference is, mine are loaded." He is determined to corner Hanson with the question she refuses to answer: Are you now, or have you ever been, a slut...
When I was a U.S. Senate page boy years ago, we took particular delight when Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois rose to speak. He was one of the last great American orators, given to decanting recondite vocabulary from his quivering basset's jowls. Fustian emerged in a sepulchral purr...
Would he criticize an erring colleague? "I shall," Dirksen would promise, in a voice like the finest whiskey aged in fog, "invoke upon him every condign imprecation." Dirksen was especially toothsome when praising the fig newton, manufactured in Illinois. "A man who has not sunk a molar into a fig newton," Dirksen would announce, his gray-golden ringlets vibrating with emotion, "has let much of life pass...
Even then, Dirksen knew that, with television, public speaking as high art had passed into decline in America. Dirksen gave oratory a humorous afterlife as self-parody, a touch of W. C. Fields. Orators gave way to communicators (not the same thing) - the geniuses of the form being Ronald Reagan and (because of his magnificent crowd sonar) Bill Clinton...
...Dirksen's oratory became, in the end, something of a mountebank performance. William F. Buckley Jr., on the other hand, though capable from time to time of the polysyllabic Dirksen purr, has used public speech for the most serious of intellectual purposes, as a sharply civilized weapon, an instrument of instruction and correction. This, when one is talking politics, is unusual. A protest without a program is mere sentimentality, as a political theorist wrote. Buckley's opinions have always proceeded not from emotion but from a structure of thought - agree with it or not. He appeals to the standard...