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The Great
Debate: The
Role of Public
Speaking Ability
in Campaigns
An Analysis of the First
2008 Presidential
Debate
Lindsey Kreckler, Suffolk University
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Introduction
An ability said to be characteristic of the typical politician is a strong oratory skill, the
capacity to win over crowds with something as simple as word choice. Sound bites, slogans, and
political rhetoric have become staples of political marketing, most especially during campaign
season, as each candidate for an office seeks to come up with the most motivational, or
manipulative, manner of speaking in an effort to stir the emotions of potential voters to the
degree that they turn out on Election Day to give that candidate their vote. Of course, the extent
to which campaign rhetoric actually effects a candidate’s chances of election are arguable, with
some arguing that campaigns are about the issues and others insisting that word placement makes
all the difference. This paper’s objective is to make some headway in that debate by taking a
closer look at the 2008 presidential election and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama’s use
of rhetorical and oratorical techniques during the three presidential debates of that campaign
season. The findings of this paper will provide a starting point for further research to be
conducted on the effects of public speaking ability on election chances, as very little research has
been done on the topic despite its potential value to candidates and campaign workers.
Literature Review
A candidate’s ability to deliver a speech with passion and persuasion is something very
difficult to recognize as it occurs, but something that can be instinctively identified when it is
witnessed. The same is true for his or her use of effective or ineffective rhetoric, something that
can rarely be identified in the middle of a speech but instead can be identified after the fact,
when the heat of the moment of delivery has cooled. Effective public speaking can be defined as
a combination of these two factors- effective delivery and effective use of rhetoric. For a
candidate’s speaking abilities to be considered good, he or she must be able to clearly
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communicate his or her ideas and to persuade voters to follow their cause. However, because
these traits are so difficult to define and track, very little research has been devoted to public
speaking abilities, use of rhetoric, and their influence on a candidate’s chances of winning an
election. On the other hand, much literature exists detailing case studies and particular instances
of good or bad use of rhetoric or public speaking ability, how rhetoric in other situations impacts
voters, and how emotions play into the voting process. This information can be used to make
inferences about the direct effects of candidates’ public speaking abilities.
The majority of rhetorical analyses are done with a particular candidate or situation in
mind. One such analysis (Waldman and Jamieson, 2003) applies specifically to the 2000 election
and how Gore and Bush’s use of ambiguous and similar rhetoric may have confused voters and
led them to vote for a candidate without understanding that candidate’s stances on certain issues.
Waldman and Jamieson point out that Bush and Gore used very similar rhetoric to achieve
opposite conclusions on issues. Their speech patterns, use of similar symbols and phrases to
describe issues, and their intentional ambiguity provide examples of the best and worst ways to
use the strategy of ambiguity in rhetoric. When politicians use ambiguity, they seek to not come
across too strongly on any particularly controversial issues, attempting to appeal to voters with
any stances by not alienating anyone with use of strong rhetoric. Ambiguity is typically
advisable when a candidate supports the less popular stance on an issue; by not emphasizing his
or her opposition to the majority’s viewpoint, the candidate prevents alienation of that majority
and can appeal to both ends of the spectrum. Bush was the candidate in the 2000 election
identified as agreeing with a minority of voters on most issues, but through his ambiguous
political arguments, by not appearing to be radically in favor of one side or the other in
particularly controversial issues, was able to maintain the support of a significant portion of the
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majority. For Gore, the clear strategy should have been to use strong rhetoric to maintain any of
the majority that he could, but by responding with equally indecisive language, he was unable to
win over any of the voters in the election who agreed with him on issues but were drawn to Bush
through projection, which is the situation ensuing when voters project their own beliefs onto a
candidate with an unclear platform. The winner of a presidential race is typically chosen for their
personality, background, or overall appeal rather than their platform. That overall appeal could
very well include the ability of a candidate to deliver a speech well. While Waldman and
Jamieson reveal little about how in general a candidate’s public speaking ability influences his or
her chances of election, they do reveal some dos and don’ts of campaigning.
A similar case study describes the rhetoric of Jimmy Carter (Hahn, 1984). While Hahn
says little about general approaches to public speaking and how that ability can affect a
candidate’s chances of winning an election, he does point out the strengths and weaknesses of a
particular situation, and in fact highlights a few strategies that can be both strengths and
weaknesses. The general consensus of academics, journalists, and critics on Carter’s speaking
was that his rhetoric was excellent, but his delivery was not. Carter was able to expertly use
ambiguity to appeal to both sides of the political spectrum during his candidacy and the first half
of his presidency, but as decisive action became necessary and his rhetoric continued to flounder
at midfield, his approval ratings dropped, as did the public’s perceptions of his ability to do
anything about anything. Carter is notorious for having an unimpressive appearance and very
little wow factor, both as far as his speaking and his physical looks went. Hahn’s analysis of
Carter’s speech content demonstrates that although an individual may show excellent use of
rhetorical technique, much stock should be placed in delivery, and sometimes content and appeal
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just isn’t enough if a candidate lacks a track record with equally appealing accomplishments to
back his or her appearance up.
The strengths of this case-study approach include the ability to examine particular
examples in detail. This comes in handy in particularly exceptional situations where a technique
was used very well or very poorly, or to examine just what was great about a candidate renowned
as a great public speaker. However, the major disadvantage is that this approach does very little
to present us with specific rules and theories to follow, instead leaving researchers to mostly use
inference and implications to draw conclusions about public speaking ability in general.
The second method for drawing information about the effect of speech on voters is to
draw it from scholarship examining how other factors influence voters. For example, in their
1987 paper, Page, Shapiro, and Dempsey describe how information influences public opinion.
They found that the public is most influenced by new information presented, and that
information presented by experts and by news commentators has the most effect. This is
interesting and pertinent to the study of the influence of political speeches on voter opinions
because the sources mentioned, experts and news commentators, are likely to exhibit some kind
of bias when presenting new information. Experts are likely to either be politicians or political
activists who will lean toward the party they are affiliated with, and news commentators often
have a clear bias toward one viewpoint or another. While these presenters may do their best to
discuss information in an unbiased manner, it is unlikely that they will completely succeed, and
voters may hear a subtly reworded version of their news. This will lead them to believe one thing
or another about the issue, and this can by proxy be applied to candidates’ presentation of new
information. If candidates can subtly incorporate rhetoric into supposedly unbiased presentations,
they may be able to sway public opinion without alienating those that disagree.
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Krukones (1980) deals directly with candidates and campaign promises, and addresses
rhetoric and public speaking ability only indirectly. Despite this distance from my own research
topic, much can be learned from his analysis. By analyzing fulfillment of campaign promises for
presidents from Wilson to Nixon, Krukones indirectly analyzes the persuasiveness of the
victorious candidates’ rhetoric by showing how effective those candidates were at convincing
voters that they were honest and trustworthy. Krukones found that candidates, on average,
fulfilled three quarters of their campaign promises, showing that they were, in fact, quite
trustworthy. In order to convince voters that they could be trusted, however, candidates would
have been required to use strong and persuasive rhetoric and exert confidence and charisma in
the limelight, proving to voters that they had the strength to accomplish their goals. According to
Krukones’s data, President Kennedy had the highest achievement rate of campaign promises at
96.2%. Kennedy is also commonly identified as one of the greatest orators in presidential
history; the connection between his efficacy and his speech abilities should certainly be explored
in greater depth. Implicitly, this article defines the essence of good public speaking: the ability to
have people believe what one says.
The third category of literature to be explored here is the one with the least to do on the
surface with campaigning and speech-making, but the most to do with effectively handling the
emotions of voters in a campaign. According to Marcus and Mackuen (1993), voters cast ballots
in a way very much dictated by their emotions, and are most particularly susceptible to emotions
like anxiety and enthusiasm. By this logic, if a candidate wished to use rhetoric to its fullest
extent to manipulate the emotions of voters in his or her favor, they would be using a very
effective strategy since emotions are so intertwined with the voting process. The logical methods
of dealing with voters’ emotions stemming from this research are to either speak strongly about
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issues and generate tremendous enthusiasm for certain approaches and policies, which is tricky
on the best of days in America, or to associate fear and uncertainty with an opponent’s policies
and platform, enabling the candidate to present a solution to the perceived problem which would
seem all the better in contrast with the opponent’s policies. This second approach is one
commonly exhibited in American politics, seen in the pervasive and common negative campaign
methods utilized by most candidates.
Clearly, the area of public speaking and its direct influence on voters has received
very little attention from academics, in large part because it is a difficult concept to pinpoint and
define. However, many implicit conclusions can be drawn from related works. The works that do
exist and that are cited in this review show that there is a great distinction between the actual
delivery of a speech and the rhetoric behind a speech or a campaign in general. In order to study
the efficacy of a candidate’s public speaking, a combination of the two factors would have to be
developed and studied.
Research Design
Throughout the 2008 campaign season and his presidency thus far, Barack Obama has
maintained a reputation as a highly effective and moving public speaker. Because of this
reputation, I hypothesize that his public speaking score in this research will be higher than that of
Senator John McCain, showing a correlation between a candidate’s public speaking ability and
his or her perceived success in a debate, although the research in this particular situation will not
show whether or not that relationship is a causal one. This section will explain how “public
speaking ability” is defined and tested in this analysis.
In this research, I will observe the speeches given by Senators McCain and Obama during
the first presidential debate on September 26, 2008, in the heat of the 2008 campaign season.
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Although speeches at campaign stops also seemed like a good method of observing the public
speaking ability of each candidate, I ultimately selected the presidential debates due to the many
constants provided by having the two candidates in exactly the same position. Both men were in
the same room in the same heat, lighting, and other conditions, both were facing the same
audience, both had the same amount of time left until the election, and neither was reading a
prewritten speech. This regularity between the two men puts them on equal footing and ensures
that there were no external factors affecting one candidate and not the other, as there could have
been had I instead chosen to study speeches that the candidates gave on their own in a variety of
places, at a variety of times, and to a variety of audiences. Additionally, the improvisational
nature of a debate ensures that the focus of this analysis will be on public speaking ability,
defined as the effectiveness of content and appearance of a candidate’s speech, rather than on
speech writing ability, which would be more evident in situations where the speech had been
prepared ahead of time, as would be the case at campaign stops.
Public speaking is an extremely normative concept, one that can be quite difficult to
quantify. Therefore, there may be many different ways of quantifying observations about a
speech. The ones that I have selected for this research will take into account both the content and
the delivery of each candidate’s speech, observing both rhetorical techniques and oratorical
techniques. I have selected from a list of rhetorical devices provided online by the University of
Kentucky1 the devices most commonly used in daily speech, easiest to detect while observing a
speech, and most effective at moving the audience in a certain way. These terms are listed in
Table 1 along with a concise definition of each. Also included in Table 1 are certain oratorical
devices that could lend themselves to a particularly clear speech. Another category is that of
1
Scaife, Ross. 2004. “A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with Examples.” December 22, 2004.
http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html#45 (May 1, 2011).
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negative habits, under which fall certain behaviors that could detract from the speech’s clarity
and the speaker’s overall positive appearance.
To score the speeches, I will read transcripts of the first presidential debate from the 2008
campaign season. I will fill out the score sheet represented in Table 1 for each candidate, judging
the frequency and/or effectiveness of each device. The candidates will earn one point for each
time they use one of the rhetorical devices. To judge oratorical techniques, I will watch fifteen
seconds of a response given by each candidate at the beginning (in the first half hour of the
debate), in the middle (the second half hour of the debate), and at the end (the third and final half
hour segment). The oratorical devices will be rated on a scale of one to five, with five being the
most effective use of those techniques and one being least effective. The items in the “negative
habits” category will be added up like the rhetorical techniques, and the total for each item will
be subtracted from the total of oratorical and rhetorical techniques. The scores for each category
will be added together for each debate to create a final score accounting for the positive and
negative qualities of candidate’s speaking ability. The candidate with the higher cumulative
score will be named the better public speaker according to this analysis.
Because of the imprecise nature of the measurements associated with public speaking,
different researchers may develop different methods of measurement. However, the
aforementioned method is the best I can devise that my current resources will allow;
additionally, as it includes both content and delivery analyses, I maintain that it is a complete and
effective analysis.
Analysis
In the first presidential debate of 2008, Senator John McCain achieved a net score of 60
according to my scoring system, exceeding Senator Obama’s score of 49. These results were
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surprising, given Obama’s reputation as a superior public speaker. Despite McCain’s higher rate
negative habits in his speech, especially hesitation, he still used enough rhetorical techniques in
his speech to beat Senator Obama. McCain’s achievement here seems to disprove my hypothesis,
that the candidate with the higher score according to this system would be the publicly perceived
winner of the debate. According to a Gallup poll the day after the debate (Gallup, 2008) showed
that 46% of the citizens polled believed that Senator Obama had won the debate as opposed to
the 34% who said the same for McCain.
Although this seems at first to contradict my hypothesis and prove it wrong, I believe
that the discrepancy between my hypothesis and the data may have more to do with my research
method than the hypothesis itself. Most obviously, I did not track the content of the candidates’
speeches, and content is a very important factor in the campaign process, as it is what shows the
truest differences between candidates and what usually sways voters to cast their ballots with one
candidate or another. Additionally, I recorded only seventeen rhetorical techniques and three
oratorical techniques out of many more that exist that I could have tracked throughout the
speeches. With more time and assistance, I could have tracked more factors. Given the
opportunity to complete this study again, I would devise a more thorough research method by
including study of syntax, sentence structure, where I saw major differences between McCain’s
long and complex sentences and Obama’s short and simple sentences. Diction should also be
taken into account, with a focus on the connotations and imagery associated with particularly
noticeable words that each candidate uses, revealing what they are subconsciously bringing to
viewers’ minds. The list of rhetorical techniques studied should certainly be expanded, including
at the very least appeals to ethos (authorities), pathos (the audience’s passions), and logos
(logical trains of thought), three of the most effective rhetorical techniques that absolutely should
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have been included in this study. On a more basic level, this study should be completed more
thoroughly, with more attention paid to detail, to ensure that every rhetorical device is recorded;
in addition, more than one person should analyze the debates to ensure that the research method
is relatively consistent. With more resources, such as time and assistance, both of those obstacles
could have been eliminated.
Conclusion
The results of this study were surprising, with McCain garnering a higher score according
to this research method despite Obama’s reputation as a more powerful public speaker and
higher rating in the Gallup poll the day after the debate. However, this could be due more to a
need for research refinement than to better public speaking ability on McCain’s part. This study
should absolutely be repeated in a more thorough manner, learning from its mistakes and
accounting for variables not included in this version.
Although in its current form this study may not prove much, it certainly has the potential
to bring attention to the true relationship between public speaking ability and public perception,
information vital to the fields of campaign work and political marketing. There is plenty of room
for more research in this field, especially given the upcoming 2012 election and the many
debates and campaign speeches it will bring with it. For starters, all three 2008 presidential
debates should be examined in more depth, but the debates of the 2012 season, which are fast
approaching on both the primary and the general election levels, offer greater opportunity.
For now, the question remains: what is the role of public speaking ability in campaigns,
and how can candidates use that information?
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Table 1: Score Sheet for Debate
Rhetorical Devices
Definition
Alliteration
Repetition of beginning sounds in a group of
words
Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginnings
of consecutive clauses
Repetition of a word or phrase at the ends of
consecutive clauses
Contrast of opposite ideas with parallel phrasing
Repetition of the same sounds in words close to
each other
Eliminating conjunctions between phrases or
clauses
Building up to the strongest example in a list
Exaggeration
Use of terms to reach an unexpected conclusion
Understatement
Comparison without the use of “like” or “as”
Reference to something by replacing it with the
name of something closely associated with it
Use of seemingly contradictory terms
Giving human qualities to something non-human
Use of unnecessary conjunctions between clauses
or words
A question that is answered within the next
sentence or two, or that doesn’t need an answer
Comparison using “like” or “as”
Anaphora
Antistrophe
Antithesis
Assonance
Asyndeton
Climax
Hyperbole
Irony
Litotes
Metaphor
Metonymy
Paradox
Personification
Polysyndeton
Rhetorical Question
Simile
Oratorical Devices
Eye contact
Use of sound bites
Looking at audience/camera
Catchy, short slogans that can be easily
remembered
General
The confidence a speaker has in himself or herself
charisma/confidence that is portrayed while speaking
Negative Habits
Excessive hesitation For example, too many pauses, excessive, use of
“like,” “um,” or other placeholders
Awkward
Phrases that simply don’t sound right
phraseology
TOTAL
Obama’s McCain’s
Score
Score
6
1
7
14
3
7
6
2
8
1
6
3
1
4
1
4
2
0
1
7
0
5
2
0
0
3
3
0
0
15
7
6
0
0
4
3
4
13
4
3
-16
-24
-1
-6
49
60
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Sources
•
Commission on Presidential Debates. 2009. “2008 Debates”
http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=2008-debates (April 20, 2011).
•
CSPAN YouTube Channel. 2008. “First 2008 Presidential Debate (Full Video).”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-nNIEduEOw. (April 28, 2011).
•
Gallup. 2008. “Debate Watchers Give Obama Edge over McCain.” September 27, 2008.
“Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation.”
http://www.gallup.com/poll/110779/Debate-Watchers-Give-Obama-Edge-OverMcCain.aspx (May 3, 2011).
•
Hahn, Dan. 1984. “The Rhetoric of Jimmy Carter, 1976-1980.” Presidential Studies
Quarterly 14(02) 265-288.
•
Krukones, Michael. 1980. “Predicting Presidential Performance through Political
Campaigns.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 10(04): 527-543.
•
Marcus, George, Michael Mackuen. 1993. “Anxiety, Enthusiasm, and the Vote: The
Emotional Underpinnings of Learning and Involvement during Presidential Campaigns.”
The American Political Science Review 87(03) 672-685.
•
Page, Benjamin, Robert Shapiro, Glenn Dempsey. 1987. “What Moves Public Opinion?”.
The American Political Science Review 81(01): 23-44.
•
Waldman, Paul, Kathleen Hall Jamieson. 2003. “Rhetorical Convergence and Issue
Knowledge in the 2000 Presidential Election.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33(01):
145-163.