Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't want to become a rhetorical speaker. My effectiveness is mastering all of the data and being able to respond.
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.
The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.
What you're doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to do anything. It has to do with listening, with humility and a sense of yourself.
Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist.
There are usually multiple messages that could be preached from the same text.
There's a problem with political polling in that you have so much pressure to do what your client wants you to do and say what your client wants you to say. I've never felt that pressure. I am independent of the political parties.
Part of my job is to make sense of all that I hear, and to retell it in a forceful way so that the decision-makers at Treasury can hear it. At least that's how I see it.
The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.
Be influenced by nothing but your clients' interests. Tell them the truth.