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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 Kreckler 2 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 Kreckler 3 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 Kreckler 4 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 Kreckler 5 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. Kreckler 6 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 Kreckler 7 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. Kreckler 8 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). Kreckler 9 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 Kreckler 10 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 Kreckler 11 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? Kreckler 12 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 Kreckler 13 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.