On Obama: Confessions of a Public Speaking Teacher

September of 2008 represents my 25th anniversary as a teacher of public speaking (PS). Most PS teachers, myself included, regularly bring into the classroom videos of prominent public speakers. The purpose of showing the videos is to provide students with examples--good and bad--of how real life speakers attempt to adapt ideas to audiences and audiences to ideas. Especially during presidential election years, I try very hard to expose the students to the rhetoric of the leading candidates.

I remember how frustrating it was in the 1980s to have Ronald Reagan anointed by the corporate media as the "Great Communicator" in spite of the fact that he rarely seemed even to have a grasp of the words coming out of his mouth. Reagan's rhetorical success did not surprise me, however, as all PS teachers know that sometimes the clueless can strike the right chord. Aristotle called that "pathos."

In 1984 I thought Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale had some good ideas. In fact, one of my all time favorite speech lines comes from Mondale's 1984 acceptance speech:

By the start of the next decade, I want to walk into any classroom in America and hear some of the brightest students say, "I want to be a teacher."

Great words--but Fritz could not strike the chord like Reagan.

Barack Obama strikes the chord. Appropriate for someone from Illinois, his speeches have a Lincolnesque depth hiding behind a surface level simplicity. Obama's ability to move people with platitudes and abstractions is met with suspicion by activists who, I fear, have bought too much into the "managerial" vision of the presidency. That is, the vision of the presidency as a place where we send someone who has "clear plans" to "fix our problems."

We should all know by now that any meaningful change that has taken place in this country did not happen because of the politicians in Washington who are more often than not a barrier to meaningful change. All the changes worth talking about have been the result of people acting at the street level and pressuring the elected officials to do the right thing. Obama is the first establishment party candidate in a long time who does not seem threatened by social movement activism.

The Roman rhetorician Cicero said:

Wisdom without eloquence has been of little help to states, but eloquence without wisdom has often been a great obstacle and never an advantage.

The great public speaker, for Cicero, reflects that union of wisdom and eloquence. I'm not ready to say that Barack Obama reflects that union, but he sure as heck comes closer than anybody else running on the Democratic or Republican sides.

I'm not completely naive, and way back in 2006 I expressed concern about "Barack Obama Incorporated." All I'm really saying in this post is that it's nice, for a change, to have an establishment party candidate in place who provokes a discussion of the great principles of rhetoric outlined by Aristotle, Cicero, and other great teachers of the art of public speaking.