Well, yes.

Is 35 times too many? Would one time have signaled a better rhetorical performance? That’s interesting to think about. My evaluation rests on what happened: He stopped the discourse. Could he have done it “better.” Depending upon what one means by that, the answer is certainly “yes.”

I remain unconvinced. I can’t claim to have ever taught Aristotle, but it seems to me he treats rhetoric as a tool and persuasion as an end. I would argue with the characterization of McClellan’s performance yesterday as persuasive. If anything, it seemed spectacularly unpersuasive. A child could read that transcript and parse the dogged avoidance in McClellan’s responses.

Even taking your criterion for rhetorical success — stopping discourse — I think McClellan clearly failed. True, the discourse never advanced beyond a very basic point. However, it marched to that point again, and again, and again, and again, despite all his best efforts to kill it. The press corps dealt McClellan no fewer than 35 questions on the Rove matter, 34 questions after he made the first attempt to, as you say, stop discourse. It would seem to me that a more skillful rhetorician would have concocted responses so circuitous and devious and propagandistic that he would have silenced the questioners early on.

By McClellan’s standard of stopping discourse, repeating “No comment” 35 times would be a stunning display of rhetoric. And I’m not sure I buy that.

Cross-posted to Snarkmarket.

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