Super Tuesday speeches: Running on rhetorical fumes

Well, how would you like to write speeches for a candidate who’s speaking several times a day for two straight years?

Two year-long presidential campaigns can’t be good for the candidates’ health. And they’re definitely not good for their rhetoric.

After blathering for more than a year, how in the world are the Republican and Democratic nominees going to stay on message for another nine months without running out of new yarns to tell, novel metaphors to draw, original sentences to utter?

All the candidates seemed, in their speeches during last night’s Super Tuesday vote-counting extravaganza, to be running on rhetorical fumes already. In fact, some of the candidates’ speechwriters seemed totally out of gas.

Mike Huckabee started reading straight out of the Bible. “Tonight,” he said after winning a number of Southern states, “we are making sure America understands that sometimes one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor. And we’ve also seen that the widow’s mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world.”