character armor, choice of metaphors and symbols, choice of dress and venues, timing... in truth, these cues generally communicate more, and with greater honesty, than the literal meaning or face value of a verbal statement. Sometimes these cues serve as a code to communicate what a speaker really intends to say, without doing so in the face value statement. (It might allow pandering to one audience while plausibly denying it.) Sometimes these cues communicate truths that the speaker is not aware of communicating. We can all think of a million examples of both, dating back to our earliest memories.
To maintain the pretense of civilization, in public discourse we are supposed to respond only to face value, since -- given that discourse is about our conflicts and given our that we generally lack scruples about how we win our arguments -- we would not analyze all of the other cues with rigor and honesty, but would instead descend to misrepresenting face value and imputing motives and spinning everything on the basis of word choice or posture or someone being too loud on a microphone or our own arbitrary associations or ad hominem qualities peripheral to the face-value issue.
Come to think of it, in what passes for public discourse, that is exactly what's happening all the time.
It's a tough and paradoxical situation, since (to reiterate) it remains true that much of communication is non-verbal and that verbal communication is conducted through many more devices than face value meaning, that speakers inadvertantly reveal truths about themselves through such non-face-value cues and also that they use such cues to engage in coded communication with chosen audiences. So the world of communicative cues should matter to us, and yet considering them will always open the door to interpretative abuse, and the interpretations that prevail will usually do so because they are compelling in narrative terms, or in conformity with hegemonic opinion, and not necessarily because they are true.
So yes! You're absolutely right on the face value. Romney did not say what his attackers are now attributing to him.
Nevertheless, out of the many ways he could have said what he intended to say, the words "I like firing people" came easily to him, and in context of prior statements around firing he seems to come to the subject easily, most likely because it makes him feel insecure, since it points to one of his greatest weaknesses as a candidate.
Thus, although the interpretation now being used against him is completely wrong as a reading of his statement's face value, it almost certainly identifies an unspoken truth about him: either he really does like firing people, or, even if he doesn't, it comes easily to him, since he did a lot of firing and firing was his business model.
It seems like a cute and fitting way to hang him for something that's actually true, and it plays to the audience as a "narrative beat." Of course, if we assign too much significance to this one statement, it distorts insofar as we are not applying an equally rigorous analysis of all textual and non-textual cues outside face-value statement to all other people at all other times. It's selective.
But how the hell are you gonna stop it? I think public discourse is already too far gone (and was so already decades ago) to pretend that this isn't how the game will continue to be played, in which both truths and untruths are far more effectively conveyed not on the rational but the irrational plane, often with puzzling, irritating and surprising results.
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