Listening to a political speech the other day was a disappointing experience. The speech was by someone who already had our vote. You just wished he cared enough about the audience and his speech to do it properly.
And a proper speech is not that difficult. It takes preparation and since he had taken the time to write his speech ahead it was obvious that he felt a level of obligation to his audience. And if he had thought to check on things ahead, he would also have had a lectern for his notes and a working microphone.
Did we mention that the speaker was paying for the event? Mind you, that crowd would be good for well over $20,000 in donations and would produce some key campaign workers. It was his campaign kick-off for re-election.
It would have been a better kick-off if the speech had been better organized. Sure the speech gave the obligatory thanks for the support last time, the excuses for what went wrong in the first term and the crowing about possible successes, reasons why some things did not work as planned and the high hopes for the next term. It was no barn burner. It was missing many of the ingredients that can take a speech from boring to a hit.
To be fair, the speech touched on a few notes to which the crowd was responsive. He was obviously chagrined by council’s unthinking sweeping out of town of people on lower incomes and he made the point strongly that he did not want his city to just be a bedroom community for the city down the highway. These points hit a deeper chord.
Maybe that was is good as you need to be to be a small town mayor. At the same time, there is no reason not to be better. When teaching public speaking there are only two texts that we use: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (specifically, Mark Antony’s funeral oration)and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Those texts and a willing student can work wonders
And it is more than just words. A great speech builds. It comes in layers. It creates images. It elicits nods of agreement. It uses the pull of power phrases. It weaves in ever greater crescendos. It evokes sounds of appreciation and spontaneous applause. This is because it involves the listeners, conscripts them and wins deeper and deeper levels of commitment. And it can create the actions that you want from them. Because without that success, what is the point of the effort?
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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