I can't remember who started it. I believe it has been within the last 30 years or so. I think it might have started with Ronald Reagan. But I'm not certain so I won't lay the blame at his feet.
What I'm talking about is the trend by politicians, especially presidents and presidential candidates, to relate a poignant story that they encountered while on the campaign trail.
You know, it always goes something like this: "I'll never forget the young man in (fill in any small, rural town here) who was a double amputee. He had lost one leg in the war in Iraq and the second in a tractor accident on his family's small farm. He had no health insurance, he had bad experiences with his medical treatment at the VA clinic, which was 50 miles away, and the big corporations were taking over all the farms in his state and he would soon have no way to make a living. I saw the pain and the worry on his face. As I held his hand he told me to keep up the fight. That he was counting on me. That's the American I'm fighting for in this campaign."
OK. That was over the top, but you get the idea. Do the speechwriters sit around the table and someone says: "Listen up, team. The speech is tomorrow night and we have to come up with one of those poignant stories. Any ideas?"
The other scheme is to have someone, usually a mother of a soldier, sit in the box next to the First Lady. That gives the president the opportunity to point her out to the admiring and cheering crowd.
Am I the only person who feels uncomfortable when this happens? Am I the only one who feels that the entire deal is contrived and is only used to manipulate my emotions?
Am I the only one who thinks those stories about the farm boy or the single mom or the veteran are simply made up? Maybe they are composites of many stories heard on the campaign trail.
Do politicians believe that voters are so stupid that they need visual aids to make their points? I and likely many other Americans are painfully aware of the health care crisis. We understand the difficulties of working, single moms. We know the plight of so many of our veterans, not Iraq war veterans alone but those who served in Vietnam, Korea and even World War II. We understand the issues.
Maybe I'm just too cynical. I love a good political speech as much as the next guy, maybe even more. For all my political differences with President Ronald Reagan, I was the first to admit that the Gipper could give one helluva speech. Same with President Bill Clinton. I loved seeing those guys get a crowd in tears.
So, bring on the ballyhoo. Ramp up the rhetoric. It's the season and high time for some barn-burning, butt-kicking partisan political speeches.
But can we skip the poignant prose for a while?
