Opinion: Hillary on the Hill

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She’s usually sitting on the other side in those marbled Senate hearing rooms, but today she’s at the witness table in her confirmation hearing to become Secretary of State, and the question is, will her colleagues give her a grilling, or just a light searing?

Senatorial courtesy already means she’s in the fast-track lane to confirmation, so in the likely absence of much in the way of substantive fireworks, it’s worth observing style.

This is a formidable veteran on the international stage, but still there are things about her speaking mannerisms that interest me: first among them is her oddly formal use of a long-a article, making her remarks sound slightly scripted. A long-a rhymes with ‘’play,’’ so Clinton says ‘’a final point, a new approach, a variety of ideas, a nuclear weapons state.’’ Once in a while, as she answers a question more spontaneously and casually, she slips back into the short ‘’a.’’ Wonder what a scholar of public speaking would make of this?

For such a disciplined and orderly speaker, I was touched to hear a little goof: in her opening statement, she meant to refer to a ‘’bottom-up approach’’ but she instead said ‘’bottoms-up approach,’’ which suggests a few drinks lined up merrily on the desk at cocktail hour in Foggy Bottom.

I’m always bemused when politicians screw up cliches. Cliches are their stock in trade -- how can they mess up? Like the Illinois state representative Mike Bost, who last week excoriated Gov. Rod Blagojevich for having ‘’snubbed his nose at the oath of office.’’ Blagojevich does have rather a snub nose, but what the governor has done is to thumb his nose at the oath of office.

One word Clinton and indeed a lot of people in government have used in the past is ‘’player,’’ meaning a government or agency with a role in political or diplomatic matters. Lately that’s fallen by the wayside, replaced by ‘’actor,’’ which is often spun negatively, like a poor movie review -- such-and-such a radical group is a ‘’bad actor’’ in the Mideast.

Has Hollywood noticed? Has Alan Rosenberg filed a complaint yet?