Chiasmus on the Campaign Trail

In a speech delivered on St. Patrick's Day at George Washington University, Senator Hillary Clinton uncorked a classic chiasmus--though nowadays it's more likely to be called a "sound bite":

The true test is not the speeches the president delivers; it's if the president delivers on the speeches.

Chiasmus (pronounced kye-AZ-muss) is the crisscross figure of speech: a verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first with the parts reversed.

Mrs. Clinton's remark isn't likely to bump John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you . . . " from the top of the chiastic hit parade. Still, it shows that even while belittling the eloquence of her Democratic opponent, she herself relies on rhetoric to make the case.

Of course, the oratorically gifted Barack Obama can cook up a chiasmus with microwave ease. In his widely covered speech on race relations, given the day after Mrs. Clinton's address at GWU, Senator Obama paraphrased a chiasmus even more venerable than JFK's:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand--that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

And in more than one speech he has said, "My job is not to represent Washington to you, but to represent you to Washington."

Though we'd like to afford the Republicans equal time, we haven't been able to track down a single chiastic observation from Senator John McCain. Somehow he just doesn't come across as a chiasmus kind of guy. But for what it's worth, we do recall Mitt Romney's remark that "Freedom requires religion, just as religion requires freedom."

And that brings to mind a cosmic chiasmus from another ex-contender, Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich: "The energy of the stars becomes us," he said, "and we become the energy of the stars."

Please don't ask us what Kucinich had in mind. The beauty of chiasmus, you see, is that even meaningless sounds can sound meaningful if crisscrossed in just the right way.

More About Figures of Speech:

• Top 20 Figures of Speech
• Figures of Speech in Advertising Slogans
• Effective Rhetorical Strategies of Repetition