Hi Clair, I'll ask questions later :^O
GB Who are the best speakers in the world today, politically?
JRS Long silence. The reason for which there is a ‘long silence’ is that, with the gradual bureaucratization of politics, we have ended up with – through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – politicians increasingly reading speeches written for them by somebody else; that is, politicians being made to feel that they were not the real political leaders, but rather – in a sense – heads of a large bureaucracy. The result has been that politicians may think that they have a responsibility to speak in a solid and measured way – with the consequence that they not only became boring and bad speakers, but sound artificial and are not listened to. Modern speech writers started adding in ‘rhetoric,’ which sounded artificial, and led to people listening even less to political speeches. This also came with a rise in populism; that is, we saw the revival of populist speaking – with populist politicians winning power here and there – meaning that the speech writers started putting populist rhetoric in as a gloss on top of the boring managerial material that they had been producing. So what we now have are sensible, elected leaders giving speeches that, at one level, are boring, solid stuff and, at another level, cheap rhetoric. For example, the introduction of the personal story – “the other day, I saw Private Joe, who lost his leg, and he said to me, and I said to him…” We hear heads of state and heads of government using this, which, of course, references back at a very low level to New Testament methodology, and at the same time to Hitlerian and Mussolinian rhetoric. If we go back and read their speeches, these 20th century leaders were already digging into the ‘personal story.’ What we end up with is the populist personal story and the boring, solid rhetoric of administration – all of which misses completely the purpose of public speaking, which is to talk about ideas and how they relate to the public good.
Who does political rhetoric well today? I think that when Barack Obama is on, and when he is not paying attention to the speech writers, he is very good. For example, his speech on race during the 2008 presidential election is one of the finest speeches given in the US in a very long time. It is a brilliant speech. On the other hand, the speech he gave in Tucson in January of this year – following the mass shooting in that city – was an example of him being scripted to do the said ‘personal story.’ It was not great speaking, and he missed an important opportunity there.
In Britain, there is nobody that comes to mind. In France, Sarkozy is extremely intelligent and talks ideas, but somehow he does not strike people right; and there is nobody else there. Italy is an embarrassment. Spain, no. Germany, no. There were great people like Willy Brandt – a great speaker in the full tradition of the great orator. Great speakers, like Brandt, are very much themselves; that is, they do not sound like anybody else. So the fact that they do all sorts of odd things is simply part of their character; it is a sign of honesty. In short, the more speakers sound like someone else, the less honest they come across, and the less people listen.
🙂
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