Mean or infelicitous?

Today's headline for Paris Hilton's response to John McCain's ad comparing Barack Obama to Britney Spears and her: "Paris Hilton issues tart rebuttal to McCain ad" (emphasis added). Wow, looks like Yahoo! News doesn't like to hide its biases against certain people.

McCain’s principal problem

In a recent post on the left-wing political blog ThinkProgress (I will not abbreviate its name to TP, as they do, because of the unsavory connotations that TP has...), they stated that recent statements by John McCain followed by assertions from his staffers indicates that McCain does not always speak for the McCain campaign. The statements in question (for this post at least--two other incidents are cited in an update) concern the presumptive Republican nominee’s stance on raising the payroll tax in order to remedy any shortfalls that Social Security might otherwise face in the future. Senator McCain told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, “There is nothing that’s off the table.” Later, McCain spokesperson Tucker Bounds told Megyn Kelly of Fox News “No, Megyn, there is no imaginable circumstance where John McCain would raise payroll taxes. It’s absolutely out of the question.”

So, McCain and his staff seem to not have a coordinated message. Why should this be of any concern to a blog about language. Well, it struck me as I read this post that this is an example of unconventional “footing.” Footing was a concept developed by Samuel Goffman, a sociologist, which describes the roles of speakers and listeners in interactions. Here we are only concerned with the speakers. There are three possible roles for any speaker in any utterance. They may be the author, the animator, or the principal. The author is the person who comes up with the utterance that is delivered. The animator is the person who actually voices the words. The principal is the party responsible for the content. To take a political example (thanks to Scott Kiesling for furnishing this example), when White House Press Secretary Dana Perino reads a statement from the podium, she is the animator of those words, but it is likely that she is not the author of them; the author is probably a White House speechwriter. She is certainly not the principal of the statements; that role is filled by President Bush. Indeed, it would be hard to think of an example in which the head of the entity in question (in this case, the executive branch) would not also be considered the principal of the statements.

It would be difficult, that is, if not for Senator McCain’s campaign. ThinkProgress has claimed, indirectly, that McCain is the author and animator of his words, but, curiously for a person running for president, is not the principal of them. Instead, the principals seem to be his staff; they are the ones calling the shots and who have the last word, at least in the eyes of ThinkProgress.

Politically, this could be bad news for McCain. If he cannot project an image of being in control, or projects an image that his advisors know more than he does, he runs the risk of playing into characterizations that he is little different from the current President.

I haven’t seen similar criticisms of Barack Obama’s campaign, but the Jeremiah Wright controversy of a few months ago also had a footing that seems increasingly common in U.S. politics. In that case, the pastor of Obama’s church, and a man who Obama said had been influential in getting him to become a Christian, had been caught making incendiary remarks about America, the most (in)famous being “God damn America!” It is uncontroversial that Wright was both the author and the animator of those comments, but the question was, Who was the principal? Many people shifted the blame to Obama, demanding that he repudiate those comments, suggesting that he was, in some way, a principal of the harsh words (not necessarily THE principal, however). 

It seems that many politicians are becoming the principals for what their friends and associates say, even when those people are not members of the campaign organization. Whether this is a negative development (“Now I’m not only responsible for what I say, but for what my friends say too?”) or not (“When people who are important to you make public statements, the public ought to know if you share those beliefs”) is a matter of social perspective, not linguistic. For now, I think the question of how this footing plays out is sufficiently fascinating.

Welcome to my blog!

Hello all,

Welcome to my blog! Over the coming months, I hope to share some of my thoughts and insights about language and linguistics with anyone who stumbles across this page. I encourage people to leave comments and questions after any post. I don't expect to update this blog frequently, just as my schedule allows.