Intervention

http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/
Time for an Intervention

DIDLS: Diction, Imagery, Details, Language, Syntax.

Peggy Noonan obviously has experience with these techniques. In her article, "Time for an Intervention," she uses them to illustrate the faults of Mitt Romney's election campaign.

Noonan uses diction to convey Romney's hesitation and childishness. "He should peer deep into the abyss...He must look down unblinkingly," Noonan says, referring to Romney looking within himself, the country, and the campaign in order to figure out the flaws in his strategy. Abyss is a particularly strong word to use, making us feel as if the gap in reason is in fact huge and potentially unfixable. And Noonan goes on to imply that Romney needs not only to look into it, but to stare it down, take it all in, without fear or hesitation. Another way Noonan uses diction is to mock Romney and illuminate the gap between him and the average American. With her frequent use of slang, Noonan portrays herself as an average American while standing in stark contrast to her ideas about Romney discounting that very same average American. When discussing Romney's ads, Noonan describes them as boring, and, considering how momentous an event the election is, "That musta taken effort!" The slang is repeated at the end of the article, emphasizing American values which, as Noonan implies, Romney doesn't have. "If you’re gonna lose, lose honorably. If you’re gonna win do it with meaning" (Noonan).

With her syntax, Noonan further mocks Romney's campaign, especially his idea that 47% of the people depend on government and therefore will not vote for him. "My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning...We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points." (Noonan). At first, Noonan's sentence structure is distinctly mocking, showing readers the ridiculousness of Romney's 47% theory. Then she goes on, using parallelism to give the sense of reinforcement, as if she seeks to sink each sentence into Romney's supposedly thick skull. "We are...We are...We are." Noonan is pointing out that just because people need help doesn't necessarily mean they won't vote for him, but they definitely won't if he treats them like data points. Noonan also uses parallelism to enforce the depth of the issue. "The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good and big and right and serious subject." In the latter half of the sentence Noonan forgoes commas and uses and's instead, probably to solidify just how many facets of the campaign need to be addressed.

 Noonan's imagery further shows the depth of the issue, with an image of what, to Romney, must be a contradictory old woman. She is a "rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

"She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

And she’s watching this whole election and thinking.You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her" (Noonan).

But Romney doesn't see this, says Noonan. The issue is deep, but Romney is a shallow thinker. With her imagery and language, Noonan portrays Romney and his advisers as inept and completely out of their league. "Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative," Noonan says. Those "old operatives," they are "jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race." This is all figurative, of course, because Romney is as much five years old as his advisers are jockeys. But with these images Noonan shows readers how childish Romney's campaign really is.

Even if this could be fixed, the damage is practically done, according to Noonan. Romney, considering his huge war chest, has saved much of it for one last advertizing blitz before the election. "For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?" (Noonan). This language gives us the impression that Romney's ads will be the things stomped on, that it is in fact too late for him.

Noonan's use of diction, imagery, language, and syntax help to emphasize and support her criticism and scorn of Romney's campaign stance. She is openly disdainful toward Romney and his advisers' attitudes, but she also tries to show where Romney went wrong with her diction and especially imagery. Overall, the piece does what Noonan no doubt wanted: it creates disapproval toward Romney, and an understanding of exactly why 47% of us are not quite so hopeless as Romney seems to believe.