Nation

Practicing the art of saying little

Forget about the big issues - abortion, privacy and ties to a conservative Princeton alumni group. Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. wouldn't even take a clear stance on The Boss.

Asked in confirmation hearings this week whether he was a fan of Bruce Springsteen, the New Jersey native would only allow, "I am to some degree, yes."

Alito has been practicing, with varying degrees of success, the art of the non-answer answer. Employed by politicians, business executives and others facing public scrutiny, the non-answer has become particularly routine to those seeking judicial confirmation since 1987.

That was the year that Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court demonstrated to many that it can be suicidal to take loaded questions head-on. Bork refused to be prepped by the White House, argued fiercely with his Senate inquisitors and ultimately was not confirmed by a Democratic-controlled Senate.

"Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominees are close to the point of having no point," says Martin Flaherty, a professor of constitutional law and history at Fordham Law School. "The nominees say nothing, and the Senate doesn't make them say anything. It was evident in the Roberts hearings [for chief justice] but is reaching absurd levels with Alito."

Alito has frustrated Senate Democrats trying to pin him down on issues of judicial philosophy, executive power and Roe v. Wade. Asked if the high court's landmark decision on abortion was "well settled" law, Alito said, "I think that depends on what one means by the term well settled."

On a single day this week, Alito was asked 49 questions about his association with Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a now-defunct conservative group that opposed efforts to admit more women and minorities to the university. Alito had listed membership in the group on a 1985 job application. But this week he would only say, "I have no specific recollection of joining the organization."

The master of verbal fogginess, though, was former President Bill Clinton, who said both "It depends on what the meaning of the word is is," and "It depends on how you define alone" during a single round of grand jury testimony.

Alito's elusive style is the product of an America that is focused on generating media-friendly quotes, leaving little room for going "off-message" for even a moment, says David Kaufer, a professor of rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University.

"Candor, and talking like a human being, doesn't seem to have a lot of legs these days," he said. "No one wants to look like they're fumbling. No one wants to wrestle with things in public."

Those who do, after all, can get in trouble. Sen. John Kerry, in trying to explain his position on the war in Iraq, famously said, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." That came back to haunt his campaign for president and was used to depict him as flip-flopper.

Circumlocution has become so common in politics that strategists and communications experts have developed a vocabulary to explain its various forms. There is, for instance, the Fidel approach, named for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's history of lengthy speeches in which he says nothing.

"The idea is to occupy as much real estate as possible," said Chris Lehane, a crisis communications expert and Democratic strategist. "It was a good approach when someone asked about the situation in the Balkans to go through a very comprehensive, descriptive history of the Balkans without ever answering the question. By the end of it, people assume you must know what you're talking about."

Lehane said there's also the bridge approach - to tell the questioner they've raised a very interesting issue and then segue into something you really want to talk about.

And, Lehane said, "When all else fails, I always resort to Latin."

While working for Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign, Lehane was asked a question in New Hampshire he didn't want to answer. So he said, "Res ipsa loquitur" - meaning, the thing speaks for itself.

"About a third of the [reporters] were puzzled, a third wrote it down and a third giggled," he said. "But it got me past the question."

Alito's own foray into Latin took him to stare decisis, legalese for respecting precedent. He qualified his answer on whether Roe v. Wade was settled law by saying, "If settled means that it is a ... precedent that is entitled to respect as stare decisis, and all of the factors that I've mentioned come into play, including the reaffirmation and all of that, then it is a ... a precedent that is protected, entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis in that way."

In pressure-cooker situations, the point is always the art, rather than the substance, of the answer. In this respect, Alito is doing pretty well, communications experts say.

"The real skill in these hearings, and in many conversations in life, is answering the questions on your own terms and in a positive context," said TJ Walker, president of Media Training Worldwide, a New York-based company that prepares a diverse clientele - from prime ministers to beauty queens - for public grilling sessions.

In the face of a tough cross-examination like Alito's, sheer evasiveness usually doesn't fly, Walker said. "Dodging is just too obvious to people," he said. "People say, 'Hey, that slick con artist just dodged my questions.'"

The masters - Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Sen. John Edwards, in Walker's view - respond to questions directly but neatly turn the answer to their advantage, often without revealing new information.

Yet whether he'd like to delve deeper into the issues, as a judicial nominee, Alito is bound to deliver bland, abbreviated answers, particularly to questions predicting his future rulings, said Steven Goldblatt, the head of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University.

"I don't think the nominees have ever answered those questions, and I don't think they ever will," Goldblatt said. It is rarely appropriate for nominees to forecast their own decisions; this has been true since the start of the hearings in the 1950s, he said.

But the style in how questions are deflected can influence how the nominee is viewed. In his confirmation hearings to be chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr. was praised for his intelligence, fluency with the law and mastery of metaphors - most notably when he compared a judge to a baseball umpire.

Now Alito is suffering from comparisons to Roberts.

"I think that both Alito and Roberts made efforts at practicing the art of circumlocution," said Lehane, the Democratic consultant. "I think Roberts probably qualified as a Picasso, whereas Alito appears to be more like one who is painting by numbers, and as a result of that, it's a lot more obvious to everyone."