Obama’s Oratory Is Not Enough

November 13, 2009 by Jerry

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Last Sunday, the New York Times ran an article by Peter Baker, their political correspondent, who questioned whether President Barack Obama’s widely-recognized oratorical skills were being diluted by overexposure. Baker tracked the increasing frequency of the number of times presidents speak publicly from Harry S. Truman’s average of 88 times in a typical year, to Ronald Reagan’s average of 320 times, to Bill Clinton’s average of 550 times. Obama, who speaks five or six times a day in what Baker calls a “hyperactive media environment…is on pace to match Mr. Clinton and likely exceed him.”

Of course, the controversy over health care reform, two unpopular wars, and high unemployment are such difficult issues they would challenge the oratorical skills of Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Cicero combined. Baker quoted David Axelrod, Obama’s former campaign manager and now his senior adviser, on the subject: “No one ever believed that the power of communicating was in and of itself enough,” he said. “It’s important to communicate what you’re doing and why. But without the what and the why, the communicating is of little value.”

Axelrod’s point speaks to the balance between what you say and how you say it. Readers of this blog will recall three separate posts in an earlier series called, “It Ain’t What You Say, It’s How You Say It,” in which I stressed the importance of conveying your message effectively; and illustrated it with examples as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Frank Sinatra, CNN analyst and author Jeffrey Toobin, and playwright/screenwriter David Mamet.

Is this a reversal of my course? Am I now asserting, “It Ain’t How You Say It, It’s What You Say”? Not at all. The operative word is “balance.” Put equal effort on both sides of the equation. David Axelrod put it best, “I think it continues to be valuable…But ultimately we’re going to be judged not on the power of the oratory but the record.”

The point here—and in another prior blog—is that for any presentation to succeed, every presenter must give full attention to every component; and even more to the point, the presenter must be certain that each component integrates with every other component.

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