To contrive not be moved by what happened in Denver last week, you’d have to be either a fairly hard-line anti-American or a nigh on professional racist.

But weep as I did - and I did - at all those speeches and all that pomp, there was something a bit off about the whole thing - the words. Too often in American politics they’re not really on.

Four years ago, at John Kerry’s nominating convention, the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee John Edwards got the crowd going by promising them: “hope is on the way”.

The dictionary tells us that ‘hope’ means “‘to entertain an expectation of something desired”, and “to expect with desire”, or “to desire with expectation”. So Edwards was telling his audience that the expectation of something desired was on the way.

Given that, clearly, he conceived of ‘hope’ as “something to be desired”, otherwise he wouldn’t have been promising that it was ‘on the way’, the line might just as accurately be parsed as promising his audience that the desirable expectation of something desired is to be expected. He was encouraging them to hope for hope; promising promise; a pretty modest and an almost insufferably imprecise offering.

George Orwell, in his cracking essay on this subject, Politics and the English Language has a good take on that sort of thing. Political language, he argues, consists “largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”, because “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible”.

It’s not difficult to interpret Edwards’s imprecision in this vein. Once your arguments are concrete they become open to challenge, censure, and ridicule; making it much safer to deal in stirring vacuities.

One can’t quite imagine the famous Republican attack-machine running 30-second TV ads excoriating Kerry and Edwards for consistently supporting an untenable policy of hope. Or routinely deriding them as the two most hopeful Senators in Washington.

John McCain has certainly tried to characterise Barack Obama as an empty sophist, and with some justice. There’s all that talk about ‘change’ for a start.

Then there’s Obama’s own sleight of hand with the word ‘hope’. In his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses he reminded supporters that hope isn’t “blind optimism”, but a belief that “despite all the evidence to the contrary that something better awaits”. Spot the difference? Quite.

My reaction on watching Obama’s speech for perhaps the dozenth time, (which was how long it took me to twig what was going on) was to harrumph ‘nonsense’ to myself. And really, political language like that is just a form of nonsense.

Not no-sense but non-sense. It conforms to internal conventions of sense, without relating to, or making sense within, its context. Obama’s distinction between blind optimism and a belief “despite all the evidence to the contrary that something better awaits” is nonsense.

It sounds like a kosher and appropriately moving definition of an abstract noun - it sounds like sense. But because most people use ‘blind optimism’ to mean something fairly close to, a belief ‘despite all the evidence to the contrary that something better awaits’, it doesn’t make sense in relation to its context. The context of people talking in the English language.

Much of what was said at the Denver Convention, and is said in American politics, is little more than uplifting nonsense. And it isn’t solely evasive, as Orwell’s analysis of the corruptions of political language implies.

Obama’s rhetoric is a substantial part of his appeal. Indeed, success in American electioneering doesn’t necessarily lie in winning a reasoned argument, but to a large extent in laying claim to nonsense words like ‘change’ and ‘hope’.

Armchair (or rather laptop) enthusiasts like me are complicit. Instead of finding it all inspiring, and welling up with tears, we should be making sure that candidates’ arguments stand up well to such tears as we find in them.

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