Healthy Influence Blog

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.