Once again we face the menace of new techology dividing the generations. The NYTimes runs a story today detailing fractured family relations, split asunder over cell phones, text messaging, computers, and that annoying shorthand (ykwim, dy?). The writer, Laura Holson, does a nice job stitching quotes from both teams of combatants and manages to get an Ivy League expert from MIT to provide a scientific overview. Did you know that kids are using new media differently than their parents? And that this is going to make those kids different from those parents?

In my previous life as a professor, I taught a large lecture (400 students) intro course on mass media and communication for 12 years. Given my penchant for quantitative and experimental tomfoolery, the course took a strong social science perspective, meaning that if you don’t have theory, randomization, and lots of numbers (including Greek symbols), it’s a bunch of opinionated crap you could get leaning over the fence with your neighbor. For a geek like me, reading such technical stuff is actually interesting, life changing, and perhaps the ticket to eternal salvation!

One of the most curious findings in the social science research on media and communication, especially in America over the past 100 years is the recurring theme of New Media Divides the Generations. It is a smaller example in the genre of topics that ebb and flow, like climate change. One of the strongest research programs ever conducted was the Payne Fund studies aimed exactly at understanding how New Media pitted young versus old. Here’s the fun part: The studies were done in the late 1920s.

Briefly, the Payne Fund was a nonprofit foundation, much like the Ford or Rockefeller Foundations of today, and it provided financial support to a wide range of scholars and scientists who banded together in a loose group to investigate the impact of the relatively new media of the time, motion pictures. The group produced an eight volume series of books that is still available in libraries and bookstores. What makes this series an amazing intellectual achievement is the range of talent, the variety of questions asked, the scope of methods employed, and the general cooperation of these different research teams. In its own miniature way, the Payne Fund studies were like those much larger and more famous research efforts, the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb or the Human Genome Project. It is an effort at Big Research and they did it in the 1920s.

My favorite from the series was written by Louis Thurstone and Ruth Peterson. It described a long series of experimental field studies of the impact of motion pictures on social attitudes, stereotyping, and prejudice. (If you study either or both media and attitudes, you’d find this book compelling. The methodology is rock solid and the results are as meaningful today as they were then. Of course, it lacks an fMRI measurement, so it may be a complete fantasy. Maybe you could write a grant application to replicate these studies with the latest toy in neuroscience. Might actually get funded even if it makes no contribution to theory development or practical application, but, hey, isn’t that the nature of funded research?)

Briefly Thurstone reported what we still find today: More exposure to a message creates more change and the direction of the message (positive or negative) determines the change. Thus, if people receive a lot of positive messages about a different ethnic or racial group, those people will have more positive attitudes. (Almost rocket science, isn’t it?)

If you trudge over to your favorite research library, you’ll find these books way back in dusty, ill-lit shelves, perhaps even in some ancient reserve building off-campus. Wear a breathing filter mask because you will be exposed to particulate matter from past! When you locate the books, just pull one down and start reading. You’ll actually be a little bit high from breathing in that old air and debris, plus you’ll be learning! Or else contracting tuberculosis!

The main point from these studies is that media messages did affect kids, and adults, too, and in similar and different ways. (Kids usually showed more extreme responses.) And, you’ll be struck at the identical worries people expressed back then to what the New York Times expresses today. In fact, there is a recurring pattern of media effects if you look over the long history of media in America: Kids embrace new media while adults eye it suspiciously. And universally, with every technological innovation you will find a chorus of parents claiming that the New Thing makes kids rude and impolite. Here’s a quote from today’s Times story to illustrate:

Mr. Pence is well aware of how destabilizing cellphones, iPods and hand-held video game players can be to family relations. “I see kids text under the table at the restaurant,” he said. “They don’t teach them etiquette anymore.” Some children, he said, watch videos in restaurants.

You can substitute any Old Media (movies, radio, TV) for the New Media (cellphones, iPods, handhelds) and you can reach back into the Payne Fund and find somebody saying the same thing about kids back then.

My point in this, beyond playing the nagging expert who’s smarter than you because he is willing to risk tuberculosis while going to the library, is to point out the false conflict that often arises in people’s perceptions of daily life. We tend to focus so strongly on our own point of view in real time that we cannot or do not step back and think more broadly about the social and cognitive events we are judging. In persuasion terms, I’d call this an illustration of both biased processing and attribution theory. First, we tend to find what we look for (biased processing - those rude kids nowadays) and second, we tend to explain things with convenient, top of the head reasons (attribution - it’s the damn cellphone!).

If you take a seriously nuanced view on New Media (wouldn’t you expect that from the New York Times?!?) you’ll find that there are reliable patterns of response to it. Sure, younger people seem to “get it” faster and they make more “creative” use of the media compared to older people. Yet, at the same time when you dig deeper, you’ll find kids who hate the New Media and won’t use it unless required; and you’ll find adults who are the inventors and early adopters who always seem to be living like Max Headroom, 20 minutes into the future. Media effects are rarely large, simple, and direct even if that’s the party line at the New York Times.

And one fact never changes: Those youngsters nowadays are just simply rude!

Why do so many different people dislike Hillary Clinton?

The operative term in that question is, “different.” By different I mean people with wildly different political loyalties and philosophies. You would expect a similarity effect with Senator Clinton such that many Democrats or liberal leaning Independents would tend to support her, yet as a commonplace assumption, it is apparent that this similarity effect does not occur. Here’s an example from the Wall Street Journal. Peggy Noonan, former speech writer for President Reagan and conservative editorialist writes about Hillary Clinton and notes:

I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio’s Hugh Hewitt, because, “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power . . . people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”

Christopher Hitchens on almost all matters, barring the War on Terror (or whatever term you prefer to use), is a very left leaning thinker and yet Peggy Noonan, a very right leaning thinker, finds his stance on Mrs. Clinton congenial and quote-worthy. This is hardly a strange, unique example and I think that most readers would agree that Mrs. Clinton seems to unite a diverse audience of unhappy observers.

How do you account for this?

Certainly it is possible that Mrs. Clinton is all that Hitchens claims and Noonan quotes, so that sheerly upon the merits of the case any reasonable person would determine that Mrs. Clinton is a soul-less soul, a political Terminator ruthlessly aimed at one goal: Her own power aggrandizement. Put her in the room with Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin or Slobodan Milosevic or . . . you get the point . . . and Mrs. Clinton would blend nicely into the group photograph. It’s possible.

Consider, now, a psychological explanation: The actor-observer effect.

This effect stems from Attribution Theory, a theory that explains how people make explanations and how these explanations determine their following thoughts, feelings, and actions. Briefly put, the actor-observer effect says that people see the world differently depending upon whether they are the actor in a situation or whether they are observers of other actors in a situation. In other words, how you see things varies when you are actually in charge and making decisions and choices compared to when you are watching people actually in charge. Yet another way, we think we’d act differently when we watch others, but when we find ourselves acting in the same situation, we think and behave differently than we thought when we were observing.

I became acutely aware of the actor-observer effect when I was a scientific administrator in the Federal government. Prior to that experience, I had an observer’s perception of the Executive Branch of the Federal government. I’d watch the President or Cabinet Secretary or whatever the Fed Bureaucrat in action and think to myself, “What an incredibly stupid, naïve, ineffectual person they must be.” Then I had the job myself and had to make decisions in the same situations I’d formerly just observed. For example, I was part of a Congressionally mandated program aimed at improving fire fighter safety. Our research indicated that most fire fighters died from . . . what do you think? Fire, right? Either getting burned to death or maybe asphyxiation, right?

Nope. The leading cause of death for fire fighters is structural collapse. A burning building falls on them either killing them by blunt force trauma or else trapping them so that fire or asphyxiation kills them. If they didn’t get caught in the collapse, they wouldn’t die.

The research team I was part of developed a communication warning program with recommendations for fire fighters based on this research and distributed it nationally. The research we conducted included deliberate, ongoing, and close cooperation with every stakeholder in this issue: union and nonunion organizations, fire fighters and fire chiefs, government units, other safety organizations, scientific groups. It was truly a national, bipartisan, and comprehensive effort aimed at understanding the problem and developing practical solutions to it.

And yet I got some pretty hot messages from various local governments and fire fighter units blaming me for being a pettifogging Washington bureaucrat interfering in the lives of real people with these ridiculous government follies. Some people believed that I was personally motivated by a self-aggrandizing move to power, seeking to lord it over the lives of the “little people” in a relentless and coldhearted pursuit of my own vanity.

Now, I’m not trying to compare myself to Hillary Clinton, but the parallels are important here. If I’d been a fire fighter or fire chief receiving these recommendations from some dumbass branch chief from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, I’d probably have reacted similarly. The recommendations certainly didn’t and couldn’t account for all the variations in fire fighting operations across the country (gee, there were only 36,000 unique units in the US – and we couldn’t develop a one-size fits all solution?). Thus, as an observer the behavior of the actor looks stupid or venal or vain. But, then, since I was on the other side of the problem and actually charged by Congress with finding solutions for it, my view of the situation as an actor was decidedly different.

It’s interesting to note that most observers who disagree with the actions of an actor like Hillary Clinton or President George W. Bush, tend to discover personal flaws in the actor rather than simply looking at the problem and how to solve it. Thus, for observers like Noonan and Hitchens, it isn’t enough to disagree with Clinton policy or perception, but to go farther and determine that personal flaws in Clinton’s character are the problem here. I suspect that if either of these critics were actors in the campaign, they would see things very differently.

Here’s a final illustration of the actor-observer effect. I completed all my paperwork as a professor at WVU on a Friday, ending the academic year of 1997-8. The following Monday, I started as a branch chief in the Federal government. (My drive to work was actually quicker because the NIOSH facility was on the outer loop in town and my office on campus was downtown.) The Fed hired me to continue many of the same duties I performed as a professor – the basic and applied research skill in particular. So, in many ways I just changed jerseys and continued playing the same game just on a new team.

Except a couple of weeks after joining the new team I received a confidential memo from the FBI outlining a potential bomb plot against my new facility. Someone had stolen several tons of ammonium nitrate from a nearby agricultural supply depot. You need to recall this was 1998, just a few years after the domestic terror bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City by Tim McVeigh. The Fed was understandably nervous about ammonium nitrate and now law enforcement was warning nearby Federal installations of the potential threat. At the time, my wife, Melanie, was the chairman of my former department and in roughly similar administrative position as mine in the government. I casually asked her if there were any safety warnings at WVU regarding bomb threats and she said, no.

Thus, while I was essentially the same guy I’d always been simply because I’d changed teams, it was now hunting season on me. Because I was now an “actor” in a different organization outside observers felt comfortable seeing me as a threat and potential target.

This experience has led me to have a new perspective on leaders in all contexts, but most especially in public executive government settings. While I was never the big boss who ran for election, I did have legal responsibility as an operational leader in the Executive Branch. I learned to see government from the perspective of the actor rather than as the observer. It’s a different world. And I don’t think that people like Noonan and Hitchens and many other observers don’t appreciate the impact that this role difference plays in how they evaluate political and governmental actors.

Try running things, even in the small capacity, sometime. It will change your point of view and might even make you empathize with hated figures like Hillary Clinton or George Bush.

Through the primary season Barack Obama is doing a nice impression of Ronald Reagan. Nobody could lay a glove on Reagan and Obama is proving as elusive. In the 1980s, critics called Reagan the Teflon Candidate, then Teflon President because criticisms never seemed to stick to him. Now, Mr. Obama appears to have studied at the foot of the great man and learned many things. The first lesson is this: If they can’t hit you, they can’t beat you.

So, why is Mr. Obama so elusive a target? And, more importantly, how do you hit him?

One answer to both questions emerges from an old line of communication theory related to leadership. Back in the 1950s, a couple of management professors, Tannenbaum and Schmidt, developed a model that had four types of LeaderComm: tell, sell, consult, and join. The four types refer to philosophy and style leaders may develop. The labels mean pretty much what a dead level decoding takes from it. Tell communication is direct, simple, power-based. Sell communication persuades from power as the leader motivates supports for a decision that is going to be made anyway. Consult communication holds the ultimate choice for the leader, but actively seeks input and support from followers. Finally, the Join occurs when the leader follows the followers in their choice and uses the leader positional resources to implement that choice. Clearly the four types vary on two dimensions: Dominance and Relationship.

You don’t have to watch the three leading contenders, Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Mr. McCain, more than a few minutes to discern their natural LeaderComm styles. Both Clinton and McCain operate most frequently as Tells. Sure, they will use Sells or Consults, but when you close your eyes and think of them, you see and hear the Tell. By contrast, Mr. Obama is the grooving embodiment of the Consult style.

Just think about that contrast in styles for a minute.

Tell leaders come across as authoritarian, disciplined, power-oriented, dominating, strong, hierarchical. Consult leaders, by contrast, come across as relational, provisional, open, trusting, collaborative.

What happens, then, when Tells criticize Consults? That’s easy: Tells look mean, authoritarian, and traditional while Consults look assaulted, attacked, and aggrieved.

The reason this occurs is not because Tell attacks are wrong or even badly stated. It occurs because while the Tell attack aims at the Consult’s arguments, the Tell attack also unintentionally offends the Consult’s relational ties. Because the Consult style seeks and validates input from followers, Tells can never just attack the Consult’s competence or character without also attacking the Consult’s audience.

Further realize that the blunt, simple, and brief communication style of Tells further works against effective attacks against Consults. Tells will focus on the fundamental issues from a power perspective – what’s the controlling legislation, what are the key facts on the ground, who’s in charge, who are the good guys and the bad guys, what’s the history – and ignore the relational element entirely because from a Tell’s perspective, relationships aren’t as important as the dumb policy statement made by the Consult.

Therefore: When Tells attack Consults they must show relational awareness first.

Let me demonstrate how to do this through the words of another writer. Stephen Hayes has already sharply observed a key Obama consult tactic. When I taught this tactic many, many years ago I called it ERA as both an easy mnemonic and a silly pun on a hot political issue of the day, the late and largely forgotten Equal Rights Amendment (and that tells you way too much about how old I am.) The ERA communication tactic is a three step dance. First, you offer an Empathy statement. Second, you pivot with a Rationale statement. Third, you get to the real point, your Action statement. Mr. Hayes has already provided a perfect illustration of this with Obama, so I’ll quote at length.

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.” [This is the empathy statement, right?]

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?” [A nice statement of Rationale]

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.” [The payoff – the desired Action]

Now, I can’t believe that anyone associated with the Obama campaign, indeed anyone in politics, has heard of my ERA idea. But, you don’t have to be a Rocket Scientist or have a doctorate in Communication to see how this ERA communication tactic is the marker of Consult LeaderComm. That first Empathy statement by design includes the “other guy” in a thoughtful, emotional way. “I feel your pain” is another variation on it. But what has this got to do with attacking Obama?

Tell leaders should employ ERA as a template for their attacks on Obama. They should use that Empathy statement to directly address Obama’s supporters in both a thoughtful and emotional way. Only after making those Empathy statements can the Tell leader (either Clinton or McCain) move to their Rationale and Action statements. Please realize that if Tell attacks do not address the relationship issues, attacks on Consult leaders will either backfire or be seriously weakened.

Further understand that ERA tactics in attacks mean that the attacks will require more time to deliver. Normally attacks are short and sweet, direct and jugular. You just look for the opening and jam it in. ERA style attacks, by contrast, will require considerably more thoughtfulness, planning, and setup.

Please realize that I am not saying that Tell leaders should never directly attack Consult leaders. Whether the attacks are direct statements against the competence or character of the opponent or longer ERA approaches should depend upon the issue at hand. When it appears that the Consult position does not have a strong relational element to it, then direct attacks should function as they always do. By contrast, when the Consult position does include that relational decision, Tell leaders must isolate the Consult leader from his followers before making the attack.

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.

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.