Avid readers of this Blog will recall the numerous posts on the 2008 Presidential Election and in particular my observations about the success of Senator Barack Obama. From my vast ponderings on all things persuasion, I think that the Senator defies persuasion gravity and that he’ll fall to Earth any day now. (Make the same prediction long enough and it will probably come true, right?) I don’t think that Mr. Obama is a highly gifted speaker and does not compare favorably with greats like JFK, Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, FDR, and Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name several. So, why is Mr. Obama so rhetorically effective?

Today, reading Stephen Hayes opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, a light went off in my head. Let me quote a couple of key lines.

His rhetorical gimmick is simple. When he addresses a contentious issue, Mr. Obama almost always begins his answer with a respectful nod in the direction of the view he is rejecting — a line or two that suggests he understands or perhaps even sympathizes with the concerns of a conservative.

At Cornell College on Dec. 5, for example, a student asked Mr. Obama how his administration would view the Second Amendment. He replied: “There’s a Supreme Court case that’s going to be decided fairly soon about what the Second Amendment means. I taught Constitutional Law for 10 years, so I’ve got my opinion. And my opinion is that the Second Amendment is probably — it is an individual right and not just a right of the militia. That’s what I expect the Supreme Court to rule. I think that’s a fair reading of the text of the Constitution. And so I respect the right of lawful gun owners to hunt, fish, protect their families.”

Then came the pivot:

“Like all rights, though, they are constrained and bound by the needs of the community . . . So when I look at Chicago and 34 Chicago public school students gunned down in a single school year, then I don’t think the Second Amendment prohibits us from taking action and making sure that, for example, ATF can share tracing information about illegal handguns that are used on the streets and track them to the gun dealers to find out — what are you doing?”

In conclusion:

“There is a tradition of gun ownership in this country that can be respected that is not mutually exclusive with making sure that we are shutting down gun traffic that is killing kids on our streets. The argument I have with the NRA is not whether people have the right to bear arms. The problem is they believe any constraint or regulation whatsoever is something that they have to beat back. And I don’t think that’s how most lawful firearms owners think.”

This illuminates in my mind an old and very effective conflict management tactic. You first begin with a statement of empathy and understanding that properly and correctly states the “other” side of an issue. You then glide into a rationale that describes an alternative position, then close with an action statement. Back in my professoring days I called this communication tactic, ERA, as a pun on the then hot issue, the Equal Rights Amendment (which tells you how old I am if I can pull that old chesnut out of the fire and remember when the nut had just fallen off the tree).

ERA: Empathy, Rationale, Action. A communication three step tactic. Empathy is about the other side. Rationale states a context. Action recommends a behavior.

What makes ERA so effective as a conflict management tactic is that first empathy statement. With a correct restatement of the other side, you disarm the emotional harm people usually feel in an argument. You tell them that you get it, you understand it, and you feel it, too. Empathy. From that goodwill, you then swing into the negotiation, but instead of immediately offering a counterproposal, you add that second step of the Rationale. You provide a context, a perspective, a point of view, a body of evidence, a recitation of history, that suggests alternatives are reasonable. Only then do you go to the third statement, action - here’s what I want.

Now, for a conflict management situation, you should see the power of ERA as a tactic. It typically lowers everyone’s temperature and keeps hot button emotional responding at a lower level. That’s great. Next, it keeps thoughtful, rational offers on the table and pushes a more mindful and realistic approach to the conflict. In virtually any interpersonal situation where there’s disagreement - dating and marriage, workplace, negotiation - ERA is a powerful and effective communication tactic.

Mr. Hayes observation that Obama is using this as a “rhetorical gimmick” opens my eyes to just how smart Mr. Obama is. He’s taking this interpersonal tactic and moving it into the arena of political oratory and argument. It also explains to me why I have been so persistent in my disconnect between what speaking skill I see in Obama (competence, but not greatness) and the obvious effect he’s having in the primaries (he’s winning against a proven machine and doing it in a unifying style that is hard to attack).

Senator Obama is not a great political speaker, but he is having the same kind of emotional and relational impact that great political speakers have. Obama has not yet and probably will not turn a phrase of enduring eloquence (”ask not” or “I have a dream” or “tear down this wall” or “blood, sweat, toil, and tears”) but will instead achieve his rhetorical effect through interpersonal communication tactics hidden in oratory.

Now, I don’t believe for a minute that Mr. Obama or his advisors would characterize the situation with the same terms as I’m using here. This is probably the way Mr. Obama has always thought and worked. It is both natural and evolved. In other words, he’s a smart guy who knew how to think and talk this way (natural) and modified that skill through experience (evolved). So, this isn’t some big secret the Obama camp’s been hiding and now, oops, the cat is out of the bag, the jig is up, and . . .

I see two interesting extensions to this observation. First, now you know how to attack Obama. Second, now you have a new political communication skill. I want to think on these two extension and post later on them.

In the meantime, you might be interested to see how other bloggers have responded to Hayes. His column generated a fair amount of thoughtful comment. ProteinWisdom focuses more on Obama’s content than the Hayes noted process. The DailyKos detects signs of intelligent life among Republicans. The Independent Liberal worries about the comparison to Reagan. RealClearPolitics uses the column to pivot on Hillary Clinton and note how badly she compares. And NeitherPropertyNorStyle notes that they, too, have perhaps been underestimating Mr. Obama’s rhetorical powers.

A lot to consider here. I’ll close with one of the Rules:

There’s a difference between persuasion, and smoke and mirrors; with persuasion the illusion persists.

Shortly after I began this blog, I posted on the attribution and dissonance implications from physicians regarding Hormone Replacement Therapy. You might recall the shocking news that HRT, prescribed to reduce symptoms for menopausal women, was associated with increases in health problems, including breast cancer. I predicted - not too cleverly - an impending legal train wreck as women or their surviving loved ones sued. The train wreck is in motion.

Today we read reports of a major jury decision in favor of a woman again Wyeth. The jury awarded the plaintiff $2.75 million and will decide on punitive awards later. There are over 5,000 pending cases against Wyeth.

Okay, I got the legal train wreck prediction correct. (Big deal. Imagine predicting that people will sue after they’ve been harmed!?!) What surprises me here is how physicians have managed to elude legal and financial responsiblity here. They prescribed HRT like it was Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum and if they had done their due diligence, the HRT epidemic would have been seriously reduced. Typically you read counterclaims from physician groups that they were pressured by Big Pharma to do this (which ties back to the persuasion angle here with attribution and dissonance).

I still believe that making the Pharmas the bad guys here is a dangerous strategy for the health and medical community. Physicians in particular need to be perceived with high levels of trust and credibility to function effectively. In this case, physicians are avoiding blame on HRT by claiming that the Pharmas unduly pressured them into bad prescription. That looks untrustworthy and uncredible.

As these 5,000 plus cases work through the legal system, look for physician involvement and response. I think that the AMA should stand up and offer a collective mea culpa. It’s a tough hit in the short term, but would strengthen those perceptions of trust and competence. Everyone makes mistakes. Professionals admit that to their advantage.

This Sunday the NYT ran an interesting and unintentionally revealling story about the role of literature in the education of high school students, particularly the “brights” at Boston Latin. Teachers at that prestige Boston high school have their students read, “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald in their English classes. The teachers there have an unusual take on that classic novel and encourage their students to see the novel through this perspective. Let me quote key paragraphs.

Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated two years ago from China, has never seen anything like the huge mansions that loomed over Long Island Sound in glamorous 1920s New York. But F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, “The Great Gatsby,” with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to her.

She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said.

“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, “Gatsby” — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.

“They all understand what it is to strive for something,” said Susan Moran, who is the director of the English program at Boston Latin and who has been teaching “Gatsby” for 32 years, starting at South Boston High School, “to want to be someone you’re not, to want to achieve something that’s just beyond reach, whether it’s professional success or wealth or idealized love — or a 4.0 or admission to Harvard.”

I love American novels and have read and reread “The Great Gatsby” several times across my life. It in no way can be read an inspirational tale of aspiration for clever kids. It describes the failure of 1920s brights - Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan - and details exactly how aspiration is the source of their failure as people and as partners. And, if these characters had any insight into themselves, they would have seen their futility and its source making the novel a great tragedy in the classic sense of the term. Instead Gatsby and the rest lack any self understanding or awareness, learn nothing from their own lives, and fail in ignorance and pain.

Yet, the writer for the Times, Sara Rimer, and the instructors at Boston Latin see Gatsby as an educational exemplar for striving young talent and recommend it as a light by which they can plan their own achievements. Gatsby is an inspiration for aspiration for these misreaders. It astonishes me that the New York Times can publish this perspective on the cultural wonder that is “The Great Gatsby.” Both the Times writer and her editors appear to me to be in that embarassing position of holding yourself in great public esteem while behaving in the most provincial way all without any self awareness. It’s rather like preaching to the congregation on modesty with an unzipped fly.

Let’s keep in mind that I’m the guy who, last year, named Rudy Giuliani as the likely Republican nominee and we’ve seen how that prediction fared.

Today, I want to weigh in on Senator Barack Obama’s continuing success with a focus on his rhetorical skills. Currently, he’s getting flack for plagiarizing another politician. Mr. Obama’s been trying to address attacks on his thin resume - “he’s all talk, no action” - by quoting lines such as “I have a dream” and “We hold these truths to be self evident . . .” then asking if these words don’t have an action all their own, thus turning talk into concrete behavior. Some folks attack that as plagiarism.

I’m not particularly concerned here about the plagiarism charge because in this instance it seems to be weak, tangential, and peripheral. He’s saying things that other politicians have said because if you’re running for office, you have to address a set of common topics (war, crime, health, the economy, etc.) and common topics are likely to produce common rhetorics. Thematically almost all politicians sound like someone from the past. And, that’s not plagiarism in my book.

My puzzlement here is why so many people in the first place appear to think that Mr. Obama is unusually gifted as a persuasive speaker. I’ve been studying persuasion for virtually my entire adult life and in a wide variety of situations and applications from being a classroom public speaking instructor to consulting with government and business units on their “persuasion” efforts and even my own daily attempts at it. Mr. Obama is a better than average rhetorician, but he’s not even close to “excellent” or “great.”

I’ve read or heard nothing from him that approaches the writing gifts from the speeches of truly great politicial rhetoricians like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, Franklin Roosvelt, or Winston Churchill. Stated another way, Obama hasn’t yet turned a phrase that will outlive him.

Obama’s speaking style is dysfluent, pedantic, and stiff. You can easily see this yourself by listening to his pauses. I’m not talking about using a pause for emphasis, but rather those pauses that occur because the speaker is editing herself in midspeech. The pause occurs because the speaker wants to substitute a new word or has lost her train of thought or wants to pursue a new line of thought. The pause sounds awkward, not dramatic. Obama’s speech (even when apparently working from a script) is riddled with these editing pauses. These pauses indicate inexperience, confusion, and weakness. Please listen to speeches from that prior list of greats. They all delivered “great words” with great fluency. Great actors can do this and so can great believers. When your heart and mind are both united, your speech will be passionate, thoughtful, and fluent because you don’t need to edit.

Obama also aspires to a great style, but he clearly needs more rehearsal at it. He comes across to me as a talented speaker who simply needs more experience at the task in a lot of different situations. Right now he sounds to me like someone who’s been giving pretty much the same speech under favorable conditions and as a result does not have much range. He’s like a good high school student who’s participated in several speech tournaments doing the same speech and now he’s trying something new.

Here’s the secret for great political speaking: poetry. You need to have both the vision and the expression of a poet. The great ones either have this skill within them or else they can see the importance of the skill and can recognize it and produce it when someone gives it to them.

For example, it is well established that John Kennedy did not write most of his “great words.” He probably had the vision part, but lacked the ability to express it poetically. He had great writers to do this. And he also was smart enough to recognize another’s poetry and then deliver it as his own. He didn’t rewrite “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” He immediately got the poetry of that line and delivered it in his own voice.

By contrast, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote virtually everything he said. He was both a poet of vision and expression. This is also true of Winston Churchill. For most of the rest, it is a combination of their own effort united with skilled collaborators.

I suspect that Obama does most of his own writing and you can clearly read and hear that he lacks poetry on his own. He does not seem to have a clear, strong, unique vision and his poetical expression is more pedantic than pretty or persuasive. He does appear to have strong potential: He’s smart as hell, has a good voice with excellent range and control, and he’s relaxed in his body. He’s got the basic performance skills.

What he lacks is more and more varied speaking experience and that poetry skill. Right now he needs to find a better writer he trusts and he needs to develop 3 or 4 standard speeches. He thinks he’s better than he is and that makes him vulnerable to warhorses like Hillary Clinton or John McCain. He’s headed for one of those Dan Quayle “you’re no Jack Kennedy” moments.

Now, of course, recall that I divined Rudy G. as the Republican nominee, so, Mr. Obama, if you’re reading this, don’t panic just yet. But, you do need better writers. Go for the poetry, not the rhetoric.

Rarely do I find a gift-wrapped example of biased processing in media reporting. Usually writers try to obscure this characteristic because it makes them look . . . biased. Here’s the lead paragraph from today’s NY Times.

I listened to every second of Wednesday’s four-hour hearing, looking for hints to bolster my suspicion that the “American people” were being set up for an intentional walk for Roger Clemens. There were code phrases, like “We’re not here to convict” or “Let’s move on” and, of course, “Let’s get back to baseball.”

The article goes on in detail about the author’s concerns, gathering a long trail of evidence well supported by external sources. It’s a pretty well done piece of journalism especially with its outright declaration of bias.

My point here is not to condemn journalism or weigh in on Roger Clemens, but to highlight the key characteristic of biased processing. While the Times writer calls it “suspicion” he’s talking about a prior belief he holds and how he engaged in high WATT processing of the Clemens hearings to find persuasion arguments to support that prior belief. In other words, the writer was on the Central Route with that high willingness and ability to think, but rather than use arguments to find a conclusion the way an Objective processor would operate, the Biased Processor uses a conclusion to find arguments.

If you scan through the remainder of the article you find the “prior belief” of the writer: Race. The author is concerned that there is a disparity in the case of the white Roger Clemens compared to the black Barry Bonds and the black Marion Jones. Again, without taking any stand on anything in these cases, look at the processing characteristic of the writer. This case has clearly pressed the hot button on a huge human trait - race - and this “prior belief” is now driving the persuasive information processing.

Now, Biased Processing isn’t Wrong or Bad. It’s just not Objective Processing in the ELM sense of the term. And we can thank the New York Times for this nice little teaching illustration.