Yes, unlike GWB, Harding was a lover not a fighter. Moreover, in amorous mode he was apparently more discreet than groper-issimo Bill Clinton, since Harding apparently carried out White House assignations with his young mistress Nan Britton in a *closet* next to the Oval Office rather than in the O.O. itself. That's class!
Like GWB, Harding was typically a deeply inarticulate man. He could be clear enough on occasion -- e.g., as I recall, he once sent Nan a note saying, "I love you garbed but naked more!" -- but he usually practiced a form of communication that H. L. Mencken termed "Gamalielese." Nevertheless, in contrast to GWB's monkey grunts, Gamalielese was a very high-flown form of diction. Sample: "I would like the government to do all it can to mitigate, then, in understanding, in mutuality of interest, in concern for the common good, our tasks will be solved." Mencken summed up Harding's rhetoric this way: "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. ... It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."
Carl
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