Grading the Obama Health Care Speech

Let’s look at President Obama’s speech for how it measures up on the standards of  effective oratory (and what you’ll learn more about in class next week)–organization, content, and delivery.

1.  Organization:  A

I didn’t listen to it contiguously, so this is a mashup of my observations and others’ commentary:

• Framing is an important part of a speech–something that you’d look for at a more advanced level of analysis.  Andrew Sullivan muses in his live-blogging discussion:  “His description of the public option – that it can provide more efficient treatment because it doesn’t need to make large profits and because it will have less overhead – is the best framing I’ve heard… He’s framing the public option in the conservative language of competition and consumer choice. Smart move. And he isn’t demonizing the insurance companies: he’s saying they are merely encouraged by the system to over-price and under-deliver.”
• Pivots are words pundits love to use but really are just transitions designed to draw contrast in order to make your original point.  Sullivan, again: “Classic Obama pivot: describe the right and the left and then say he is in the middle. And the Burkean twist: “I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch.“”
• Anticipating objections are a key rhetorical device, but complementing old enemies and even chastising friends (in what may be a straw man attack) can be useful to show you are really serious about trying to forge consensus. From Slate.com: “Twice Obama referred to Republican ideas. He praised John McCain’s idea of providing catastrophic care for those who’ve been denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition. He also said he was looking into medical malpractice reforms considered by George Bush. He made a detailed appeal for the public option, a favorite of liberals, but then downplayed it, saying it would cover only 5 percent of the uninsured.“

2.  Content  B+

• Good lines make for good speeches.  According to the Economist live blogging of the speech, this one worked:  “No one should go broke because they get sick.” That was a Facebook meme this week, turned into the “status message” of thousands of liberals. Mr Obama’s speechwriter is not yet 30, and it shows sometimes, not in harmful ways.
• Ultimately you have to say something–have a message.  Ed Rollins, Republican strategist on CNN.com sees that Obama “laid out his goals, he laid out his key objectives. The details will come from Congress” but failed to provide the full answers many sought.  “There’s a lot in this that could be challenged tonight.“
• Who is the audience, Congress or the people? (the latter).  Liberals or conservatives? (base + middle).  And in this sense, he didn’t have a lot new to add.  As John Dickerson in Slate.com notes,  “As for the substance, there were some new nuggets. But mostly the president sought to reiterate what he’s been saying for months.”  The problem:  he needs to reach that audience, and get them to vote his way.  And, more importantly, as David Gergen observes on CNN.com, “We saw the Obama we elected.” … “But for a lot of others, I don’t’ think it move them very much…the people he needed to move to reverse the tide.”  Hugh Hewitt agrees.
• Facts are useful things, but prone to misuse.  Politicians and diplomats employ information to their own ends.  Its always good to use them in your own speeches–but its also nice as a consumer to consult a factchecker, such as the NYT in this case.  (Summary: Obama isn’t perfect.)
• Summed up nicely by the oddball conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan:
  

  A masterful speech, somehow a blend of governance and also campaigning. He has Clinton’s mastery of policy detail with Bush’s under-rated ability to give a great speech. But above all, it is a reprise of the core reason for his candidacy and presidency: to get past the abstractions of ideology and the easy scorn of the cable circus and the cynicism that has thereby infected this country’s ability to tackle pressing problems. This was why he was elected, and we should not be swayed by the old Washington and the old ideologies and the old politics. He stands at the center urging a small shift to more government because the times demand it.

  And he makes sense. And this was not a cautious speech; it was a reasoned but courageous speech. He has put his presidency on the line for this. And that is a hard thing to do.

  via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

3.  Delivery:  A-

Tough to compete here–even if you’re a hard-core conservative.  This is Reaganesque, Kennedyesque, and whatever adjective you want to invent.  We are living with a U.S. president who happens to be a pretty amazing public speaker.  (Get over it/enjoy it.)

Still, one laugh line (or was it?) fell flat.  He seemed off on timing with the teleprompter on a few occassions–perhaps a tough critique but not typical for this amazing orator.

Conclusion?   A-  He has to do the work now.  Speechifying is just one part in politics or diplomacy.  Maureen Dowd turned another clever phrase in relating what Obama had to do tonight with what he tried to do in the ‘controversial’ school speech this week:

The president told students on Tuesday that “being successful is hard” and “you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.” He should take his own words to heart. He can live long and prosper by being less Spocky and more Rocky.

But the fact is, making your speech turn into reality is tough. Dickerson summed it up best:

Barack Obama must envy Steve Jobs. In a speech Wednesday afternoon, Apple’s CEO unveiled several spiffy new product updates, and within hours, on millions of computer screens across the country, little windows popped up asking users if they wanted Apple’s new software. If they did, it was seamlessly a part of their lives in just minutes.

In diplomacy, beware the double positives… | David Rothkopf

My scant knowlege of Latin-based languages won’t help here:

In other words, it’s our turn to sing “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” which, of course, means, in the best interpretation, that our partners the Chinese are worried and at worst means, “worry!” (How things have changed since we were beating them up about their economic management.) Certainly every reassurance we offer is more a sign of an underlying concern than it is a true positive statement about the economy. Thus, the more positives, the more worries.

via In diplomacy, beware the double positives… | David Rothkopf.

Thinking Big, as in a few pithy thoughts on “Grand Strategy”

One colleague mentioned recently that we can’t ‘do’ grand strategy—its really only known years after policy has been argued and events played out.  I’m not sure what I think about that, but I do like to think about it…first being exposed to it reviewing the syllabus for John Lewis Gaddis’ application-only course at Yale (co-taught with Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill.)

Gaddis has noted that academics have a hard time doing the big think–listing several reasons. I agree that the lost art of teaching rhetoric has a great deal to do with it (which still survives at BYU, thanks in no small part to people such as Greg Clark and Gideon Burton).

But where, within the academy is the use of great language taught? Where would you go to learn how to make a great speech? Certainly not to political science, language, and literature departments at Yale, where as students advance they are spurred on toward ever higher levels of jargon-laden incomprehensibility. I think not even to my beloved History Department, where my colleagues seem more interested in the ways words reflect structures of power than in ways words challenge or even overthrow structures of power.

The art of rhetoric, within the academy, is largely a lost art – which probably helps to explain why the academy is as often as surprised as it is to discover that words really do still have meanings – and that consequences come from using them.

A new book by Leslie Gelb, reviewed by historian Michael Beschloss captures the practice of this shall-we-say-not-yet-but-soon-to-be-lost-art, a “plea for greater stragtegic thinking.”

Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, persuasively argues that the most effective presidents try to fashion a coherent strategy, explain it forthrightly to the public and resist the temptation to be distracted by sudden opportunities and crises. Others have made this point before. (See, for instance, John Lewis Gaddis’s landmark history “Strategies of Containment,” which shows how six presidents fought the cold war.) But Gelb’s treatment is distinctive, adorned with astute historical examples and reminiscences from his own high-level service in Johnson’s Pentagon and Carter’s State Department. It is filled with gritty, shrewd, specific advice on foreign policy ends and means that will be especially useful for a new president and secretary of state without deep experience dealing with the world (although the bulk of the book was clearly written before the world economic calamity of the past months).

via Book Review – ‘Power Rules – How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy,’ by Leslie H. Gelb – Review – NYTimes.com.

Obama Communicating Directly, but with Nuance

As President Obama traveled through Europe, he was a study in nuance. Speaking to a town hall in Strasbourg, France, he admitted American arrogance but also chided Europeans for their casual anti-Americanism. In another context, he quoted his college law professor: “Some are to blame, but all are responsible.” In a town hall with students in Turkey, he pushed for nuance as an end in itself: “In the Muslim world, this notion that somehow everything is the fault of the Israelis lacks balance. There are two sides to every question. … I say the same thing to my Jewish friends—which is, you have to see the perspective of the Palestinians. Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes—that’s how peace begins.”

via How a nuanced president uses exaggeration. – By John Dickerson – Slate Magazine.

Then again, one person’s careful use of language may be anothers’ failure to expresss clearly, as per the NYT.

Hillary Clinton’s Straight Talk Express

Hillary’s diplomatic Straight Talk express, world edition, gets a pat from from LA Times:  “Holy smokes Reality? Clear thinking? Diplomats of any nationality actually saying what they mean? In public?”  Glenn Kessler in WaPo notes the danger line crossed:

To a certain extent, these comments crossed taboo lines in international diplomacy. U.S. officials generally do not say their sanctions have failed, or speculate about the future government of another country, or suggest that a carefully watched human rights dialogue is largely a farce.

What exactly she said:

…as ABC’s experienced Martha Raddatz, among others, notes, Clinton has brought a refreshing new vocabulary to her diplomatic talk. As anticipated by her husband in his sales pitches for her, she smoothly used her long-running fame and recognition in public groups.

In Japan, she talked about playing baseball with boys. In Indonesia, she laughed and chatted with young women about her favorite music (the Beatles). And when someone in the audience cheered, the 60-year-old Clinton laughed comfortably and said good, then she didn’t feel so old.

The new secretary also opined openly about the possible succession after North Korea’s loony (our word), champagne-loving Kim Jong-Il passes from the scene. That’s long been a whispered topic for some reason, as it was during the endless aging process for his father, the allegedly revered, much-statued Kim Il-Sung. (Remember that huge goiter he wore for all those years?)

Scroll down or click on the “Read more” line to view a good sampling of videos covering various aspects of her trip.

Clinton put it bluntly. “I don’t think it is taboo to talk about the succession of the hermit kingdom,” she said, adding, it’s “worth being more straightforward and trying to engage on the reality that exists.”

In Seoul on Friday she had an admission. “Maybe it is unusual,” Clinton said, “but to worry about saying something that is so obvious is an impediment to clear thinking.”

Even former UN Ambassador John Bolton–a tell-you-what-he-things-guy, for sure–liked it.

[Bolton] said he thinks “our diplomacy should be more candid, with less doublespeak, so if she really meant to say what she said, I don’t mind at all. When the Democrats endorse candor in diplomacy, I’ll be a happy man.”

But he added, “the issue with whatever she says, candid or not, is whether it has an objective in mind, or whether she is just running at the mouth. This is the difference between an executive-branch official and a senator, academic, think-tanker, reporter, whatever. Executive branch officials, by definition, are not just bloviating, but executing policies.”

But others still see cause for concern:

James Mann, a Johns Hopkins scholar who wrote a history of U.S.-China relations, viewed Clinton’s remarks as part of a further downgrading of the importance of human rights in American policy toward China over the past two decades.

But he wondered if this honesty was now a general principle in the administration’s approach to the world. He asked: “Is Hillary Clinton going to not mention women’s rights to the Saudis because they already know what we think?”

Mann, in particular, was struck by the contrast with Clinton’s husband, who a decade ago gave strong speeches on behalf of political freedom in China.

“Bill Clinton told the leader of China he was on ‘the wrong side of history,’” Mann noted. “Now, Hillary seems to be giving them the reverse message: that China is on the right side of history.”

Solving the Arab/Israeli Conflict Requires Language & Negotiation

Not long ago I  hosted Ethan Bronner, a very talented journalist, on campus  and it was discouraging to hear from him how reporting on the Middle East is a quick ride to making enemies on all sides.  This story by him captures how difficult the barriers for peace are for a new U.S. president, including the use of different vocabularies to explain the various perspectives. (He has been covering the Gaza conflict for the last month, so its freshly informed by current events.)

I have written about the Arab-Israeli conflict on and off for more than a quarter-century and have spent the past four weeks covering Israel’s war in Gaza. For me, Mr. Husseini’s story sums up how the two sides speak in two distinct tongues, how the very words they use mean opposite things to each other, and how the war of language can confound a reporter’s attempts to narrate — or a new president’s attempts to mediate — this conflict in a way both sides can accept as fair.

One step further, this Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges’ research on  conflict shows a common-sense but critical distinction–putting the economists out in the cold on this one.  People fight for deeply-held values and beliefs, even if its against their economic or other well-being:

Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

This is important because oft-tired diplomatic and development-related projects often appear at the center of apparently ‘reasonable’ efforts to broker peace. Not so, they note:

Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters (electricity, water, agriculture, the economy and so on) will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues. But this is only a recipe for another Hundred Years’ War — progress on everyday material matters will simply heighten attention on value-laden issues of “who we are and want to be.”

So what works?  Symbolic gesture and concessions.  Good old fashioned negotiation.

Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.

Remarkably, our survey results were mirrored by our discussions with political leaders from both sides. For example, Mousa Abu Marzook (the deputy chairman of Hamas) said no when we proposed a trade-off for peace without granting a right of return. He became angry when we added in the idea of substantial American aid for rebuilding: “No, we do not sell ourselves for any amount.”  But when we mentioned a potential Israeli apology for 1948, he brightened: “Yes, an apology is important, as a beginning. It’s not enough because our houses and land were taken away from us and something has to be done about that.” His response suggested that progress on sacred values might open the way for negotiations on material issues, rather than the reverse.

Obama Rhetoric

How does he do it? I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about this topic–starting tomorrow night with the Innaugural Speech.  Dr. Shel Leanne, professor of government at the Kennedy School at Harvard’s new book, Say It Like Obama follows up on her interview technique book to focus on the soon-to-be-president’s oratory skills:

Young leaders often ask me what they should consider the first steps in developing outstanding communication skills like those of Obama. My answer? Preparation, preparation, preparation. Then practice, practice, practice. By preparation, I mean start by studying those people who speak in a way you admire or in a way you seek to emulate. In reviewing the works of these great communicators, you will be able to discern blueprints for effective communication. How did they start off their speeches? How did the form strong connections with the audiences? How much detail did they provide for effectiveness? What rhetorical techniques did they employ?

In her Fast Company blog, she addresses the question “How He Won” with a number of prosaic yet true observations.  One key appears to be his role as a communicator (a la Reagan) and bridge builder (read: consensus).

His ability to use oration to win the hearts and minds of listeners. He has shown great skill in using key communication practices to inspire people, securing their loyalty and passionate support.

His ability to use communication to tear down barriers and build up bridges, focusing on areas of commonality that enable him to gain support from a diverse set of people.

Analyzing President Bush’s Farewell Speech

How did President Bush’s Farewell Speech fare?  Until I have time to go back and read through more closely, here are some external sources to consult:

• Full text from BBC
• Bush Farewell Speech Analyzed : NPR
• Tom Shales in WP, quoting Chis Matthews,  calling Bush’s speech “a score card that only he could design, and of course he did well on it.”
• Ross Douthat muses that the President “was at home in that rhetoric; he’s never seemed at home since.”

Tough crowd.  I suspect context is key; its hard to read the speech w/o looking back at the record–and depending on how you feel things turned out drive your analysis.  Send any dispassionate analyses you find—as I will likely have to let this slide.

Diplomacy: Making the Case for Your Capital

One important aspect of the role of a diplomat is that of taking the position directed by your capital.  In other words, diplomats generally aren’t freelancing.  This requires a great deal of interpersonal skill and intellectual capacity, not to mention the softskills of leadership that are hard to teach and even define. It also requires the ability to emply rhetoric to fashion a compelling argument.

For example, to follow media accounts on the California Prop 8 debate, those who are opposed to same-sex marriage have been routinely targeted, even demonized–even as that side won the popular vote.  Here is a guest article in Newsweek magazine–including Elder Bruce Porter of the Quorum of the Seventy of the LDS Church–taking the unpopular and very difficult side, and making a cogent, complex argument:

On Faith: Guest Voices: No Case for Homosexuality in Bible.

Diplomacy + Candor = Danger!

Speculation that, following the X Games and other adrenaline-driven sports, Italy may be developing “extreme diplomacy“:

In response, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French first lady who was born and raised in Italy, told a Paris newspaper that she was pleased to have become French. Now she, too, is facing a backlash in Italy.

The Italian press and blogosphere have recorded a wave of reaction to Ms Bruni-Sarkozy’s comments, including criticism some some prominent conservatives. As the Guardian reports:

“Keep her for good – and give us back the Mona Lisa,” wrote one. “Why does she have to be ashamed of 60 million people instead of one?” asked another. Her rebuke will do her husband no harm with the incoming US president, and may be seen as confirmation that relations between Sarkozy and the Italian leader are cooling.

From an academic perspective, scholars argue that statecraft can also be the opposite of direct communication.  It is ‘extra-linguistic,’ meaning that diplomats shape it through negotiation processes,  and subsequently can obscure or transform meaning:

According to Christer Johnsson and Karin Aggestam, “the classic diplomatic dialogue can be seen as a system of signals, based on a code shared by the members of the profession.” They point out that diplomatic signalling is characterised by “constructive ambiguity”