Adventures in Political Speaking

What a great experience getting to take my niece to see Bill Clinton speak! Seriously. It was not just a day; it was an adventure.

We started the day by deciding to try to see him speak in Chesepeake (West Virginia). That's a lot closer to home than Beckley and started at 1. As we drove up to the building, we could hear an address over the PA saying that the building was at max capacity, so we decided to drive on to Beckley (where the speech started at 3:15). That speech was being delivered in the old Armory (now called the Convention Center)—a much larger building, so we figured we would be able to get inside.

After driving down many wrong roads, we found the building and its long, long line of people waiting to get in. Once we were directed to a parking spot and started making the trek toward the building, Sugar Bear looks at me and says, "Just think: Right now we could be sitting in your living room watching Dexter." Of course, I was all WTF at that, but I offered to head back to Charleston if that's how she wanted to spend her day. I was pretty thankful that she wanted to go in and see Clinton instead.

We made it to the Beckley event with plenty of time to spare. Over an hour, in fact. An hour we spent standing in a very long line that didn't seem to move at all (other than a few inches that were created by people squishing up and making the line wider in their impatience). No one was getting in the building. Apparently there was one very overworked bomb-sniffing dog still making his way through every inch of the building, so outside we stood...in the sun...and I forgot that my antibiotic (which I finished last night) is an "avoid the sun" variety. My souvenir for forgetting that: a mild sunburn and a mild hives breakout later that evening.

Once we made it inside the building, we had great seats. That was a good thing too because we sat in those seats for about an hour before Clinton took the stage. I don't care where you stand on politics: Bill Clinton is one of the best public speakers alive. As someone who's studied and taught public speaking it was a pretty amazing event to take in. As an aunt who dotes on her only niece, watching the Sugar Bear take it all in with such rapt attention and cheering over public policy with the fervor generally reserved for rock stars was a moment where my little Grinch heart grew three sizes larger. Malach was right: The man could sell ice to Eskimos (or shit to a stable). Perhaps his traveling dad was the door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman who once sold an expensive vacuum cleaner to my grandfather (who had no carpet whatsoever).

If you know much about politics, you know Bill Clinton is a policy wonk, and that's what he spoke about: policy and how Hillary's camp plans to solve problems facing this country. He didn't mention Obama (other than referring to him as "her opponent"). He didn't mention race. He talked about real problems facing our country and tangible, sensible solutions. What a rare treat that seems to be in politics these days...at least if you listen to the sound-bytes-only world of TV journalism.

He spoke. And spoke. And spoke. The speech itself was about an hour and a half long.

I've seen long Clinton speeches on tape before. No one abuses the 'signal the end' rhetorical device more than Bill Clinton. True to form, we had at least four "I'm going to talk about one last thing" signals, each followed by "just a couple more things before we finish." A lesser speaker would totally lose a crowd doing that. He's able to spin an informative, entertaining, and interesting point so well that those telltale signs of losing the crowd to listening fatigue (seat shifting, watch checking, the blank when's-he-going-to-stop stares that follow information overload) would disappear each time he signaled the end and every "just a couple more thing" was groan-free.

The things that made Reagan, Clinton, and even George W. Bush more crowd-pleasing public speakers than other politicians are all the same. I won't bore you with a lot of details on rhetorical style (which are very similar among the three if you want to get down to brass tacks). I will mention one that pertains to people with accents: less shibboleths. A shibboleth is when a person tends to overpronounce a sound in order to say a word "correctly" to the point that it doesn't sound the way normal folks pronounce it—putting more stock in the written letters agreed upon for proper spelling and less stock into the word the letters were cobbled together to mimic. A speaker cannot sound natural clinging to "proper." You want a greater share of an audience to identify with your speech? Try sounding like a regular person (odd local pronunciations and all).

Consider the word "kitten": Do you say it as if it only has one t or do you bother to pronounce both t's distinctly? "Keh-tun" or "kit-ten"? If you pronounce the double t as two distinct sounds, you've got a shibboleth.

My local example for this is the overpronounced proper I that school teachers force onto students in Southern West Virginia. Some people overdo that to the point the a single letter word ends up having a overstressed collection of three distinct "i" sounds glommed together on a sliding scale (yes, glom is an Appalachian English word...a derivative of gum). It's Al Gore's "I" and that is why it was so easy to portray him as an egotistical liar: it was obvious he had lost a natural voice to a learned speech pattern that denied his roots, and that makes it look as if a person is hiding their true self behind trying to sound like they're from somewhere different from where they were raised. (In Gore's defense, he was raised in the DC area more than in Tennessee. Nonetheless, coming from TN, he should've sounded at least a little more down home for people to buy him as being himself.)

Deny your roots and lose your audience. Bill Clinton never does that. Neither did Reagan for our Republican friends.

For those of you who are fans of accent-eradication classes, you should know: When it comes to presidential elections in the modern media age, when an accented person runs against someone who has mainstream "unaccented" speech (as in they have have what it accepted as the 'normal' American television reporter speech), the accented candidate almost always wins.