As Andrew Leigh remarks, if you want to get a sense of how powerful an orator Barack Obama is, you need to watch the video of his victory speech, rather than just read the transcript. For purposes of comparison, I’ve included Hillary’s concession speech. It was belated, and that’s done her some damage (and I suspect it was more of a matter of a personal concession than the power plays we’ve heard discussed that led to its delay), but it’s significant that she included reference to the issues her campaign has been pushing as well as a rather dignified endorsement of her erstwhile rival. There’s another interesting comparison which I’ll discuss over the fold.
A while back, Jeff Clark at Neoformix fed some of Obama and Clinton’s speeches through some software to produce document cloud comparisons.
Click on the thumbnails to see more. The first document cloud is “most common words” and the second looks at the associations and references of “hope”.
Using this tool to analyse the post Super Tuesday speeches of both candidates, he came across something which I think indicates starkly the different appeals each campaign had, and why those appeals worked with particular demographics:
This first image shows part of the list of most common words for both speeches. Clinton mentions ‘America’ most frequently, Obama the word ‘can’. Clinton uses the terms ‘god’ , ‘auto’, ‘veteran’, and ‘economy’ which aren’t mentioned at all by Obama. Interestingly, Obama’s top unique words are ‘time’ and ‘change’.
There are the differences between the two campaigns, writ large way back in February.
You can also see that:
The references to the word ‘hope’ clearly show Obama’s use of repetition and rhythm.
The Obama word clouds look far more coherent than the Clinton ones. It’s as if genuine oratory prevailed over focus-group tested soundbites. Intriguing.
As Clark says, you can have your own fun by downloading the application and playing around with it yourself.
“It’s as if genuine oratory prevailed over focus-group tested soundbites. Intriguing.”
Then there really is hope!
Obama is a seriously good public speaker. That doesn’t stop him being vacuous (all politicians are at least some of the time - it goes with the job), but as a speaker he is very, very good. I’ve had enough experience in the court system over the years to have encountered some very good speakers, and he’s up there with the very best I’ve ever seen. Whether he spent years as a Toastmaster or was heading for the Bar (probably both, as he’s both a Harvard law graduate and into self-help) I don’t know, but he is very good, and I suspect he will get better.
The fact that there is - legitimately - so much symbolism surrounding Obama’s candidacy, and that he’s such a good orator I think leads to the charge that he’s “vacuous”. Yet if you look at the actual policy content of what he’s proposed, a lot of it has been cooked up by Ivy League economists and foreign policy wonks. To what degree that reflects his own policy thought, I don’t know, but I’d note that neither Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush were charged with being “vacuous” despite both being notoriously uninterested in policy detail.
He’s careful not to say too much in his speeches, Mark. His website is another matter (as was Hillary’s, to be fair). Both have quite a bit of policy detail up. I haven’t checked McCain’s, but suspect he’d be similar. It’s not wise to introduce too much complexity into a public speech anyway - something Ronald Reagan also understood. Reagan was also a very good speaker, although I think Obama is better, if only because his youth allows him to move around a bit more, without looking fidgety.
I think part of it, SL, is that there really wasn’t much policy air between Obama and Clinton so personality became the main focus of the contest.
All of these speeches are pretty vacuous according to the SL definition. Throw in the Sermon on the Mount or Lincoln’s Second Inaugural or Elizabeth I at Tilbury while you’re at it - and all of a sudden a sentencing hearing for a drunk driver in Bundaberg is less vacuous than Rudd’s apology or Keating on the unknown Australian soldier.
Great oratory? You can’t be serious. Where have I heard all this sort of mush before? Oh yeah…
“The raging rocks
With shivering shocks
Shall break the locks
Of prison gates,
And Phibby’s car
Shall shine from far,
And make and mar
The foolish Fates.
This was lofty! This is Ercles’ vein, a tyrant’s vein. A lover is more condoling.”
– Nick Bottom, A Midsummernight’s Dream
Obama’s articulate and he’s quick on his feet, and he says a lot of silly things that people seem to want to hear. But they are silly and no mistake. I think the big effect here is just what a relief it is to hear a politician who sounds sort of melodious, after eight years of a beady-eyed twit who couldn’t speak two sentences together fluently.
The really interesting speech one looks forward to from BHO, will be about two months after his inauguration, after he’s been thoroughly briefed by insiders on the real state of the country, and actually finds out all the sticky stuff that only presidents get to find out…
“My fellow Americans, remember all that stuff I said before about hope and change and so forth? Well, um, it looks like there’s been a slight change of plans…”
Mark: “…leads to the charge that he’s “vacuous”. Yet if you look at the actual policy content of what he’s proposed, a lot of it has been cooked up by Ivy League economists and foreign policy wonks”
I don’t see any contradiction between “Ivy League policy wonks” and “vacuous”.
Mark: “I’d note that neither Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush were charged with being “vacuous” despite both being notoriously uninterested in policy detail.”
wtf? Where did you get this from? George W. Bush had his intelligence insulted in painstaking, heroic detail for every single day of his campaigns and his presidency. And it’s not true that Reagan was uninterested in policy detail, in fact he was something of a wonk, but he knew how to appear in public, and he used his stage image as a sort of weapon in a pretty crafty way. Show biz kid, and so forth.
– j_p_z, who after BHO takes office will open a novelty breakfast counter where you can watch the eggs actually frying on the top of my head, and see tea kettles heated by the steam shooting out of my ears… no, wait, I’ve already been doing that with Bush. Ugh. Well, here’s hoping it can’t get any worse.
Bush and Reagan were both praised for articulating a vision and a strategic direction, respectively. Why is Obama’s rhetoric more “vacuous” than Reagan’s “morning in America?”…
In the welter of post-mortems in the US over the last week on the Democratic party primaries, another issue that comes through is that Obama’s campaign has a consistency that Hillary Clinton’s lacked. It has the one slogan “Change we can believe in” and the same ‘look and feel’ (navy blue signs, blue backdrops, use of large auditoriums, indoor settings where possible). The large indoor settings contribute to another feature of Barack Obama’s presentations, which is the way in which he builds an audience response into them. The speeches have a rhythm, and the crowd goes with that rhythm. There’s a lot here for students of rhetoric and speech communication.
The comparison with John McCain is far worse. he has done few speeches over the last two months, and the one he did last Tuesday was a real dud. With a green backdrop and a slogan (’Experience you can believe in’) that was a bad pinch from Obama, he had a small audience yet delivered awkwardly from a teleprompter. You could contrast his lack of rapport with a small gathering of the party faithful (small number of boos on cue at lines like ‘He’ll talk to Castro’), to Obama at St. Paul a few hours later, and even Karl Rove on FOX would concede that Obama has a big advantage here.
Wow! I wondered if Obama had drafted Freudy or Don Watson to his speech-writing team.
It is charismatic stuff - a cut above Hillary’s effort, which was by no means poor.
He still has a big challenge given inherent racism and so on. And if he wins it gets even bigger in trying to turn around entrenched attitudes. But I’ve come to think it’s worth trying, and that people deserve to hope.
I found the comparison between Obama’s and McCain’s speeches last week most interesting. McCain was so bad, I felt embarrassed watching him. And against a great orator like Obama, McCain did look all the more pathetic.
j_p_z, can you name a Presidential speech that deserves the ‘great oratory’ tag?
I mean, if substance, truthfulness and not pandering to your audience’s hopes, fears and mythologies is good oratory, has is ever happened?