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How the candidates' speaking styles play

McCain is unscripted. Obama is soaring. In these times, both styles have their advantages.

from the July 11, 2008 edition

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As part of a campaign shake-up last week, McCain handed more authority to aides keen on punching up his messages and sharpening his stagecraft. But in his 20-minute speech in Portsmouth, before opening the floor to questions, McCain seemed to spend more time staring down at a set of notes on a waist-high music stand than he did making eye contact with the audience.

In his days at Harvard Law School, Obama listened to recordings of sermons and internalized the cadences of the black church, with their patterns of call and response and repetition of finely wrought phrases. The Illinois senator sprinkles speeches with "we" and "you" – "Yes we can" and "you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do" – as if he were as much guiding a movement as running for president.

It is a style well-suited to large venues but one that has faltered elsewhere. Senator Clinton, his former rival for the Democratic nomination, was generally viewed as the stronger debater, because of her command of policy minutiae and a better ability to seem resolute in the face of persistent questioning.

Obama's soaring oratory was also less successful than Clinton's more grounded policy specifics at connecting with working-class voters more worried about making ends meet than making history.

"With a lot of people in our state and in Ohio and West Virginia, there was this missing connection Obama had in the primaries that was palpable," says G. Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pa.

Both McCain and Obama belong to strains of political oratory that date to the country's founding, says Bruce Gronbeck, an expert on presidential rhetoric at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

"Obama comes out of the more Puritan tradition – the vision of building a new Israel in the wilderness," he says. "McCain comes out of the Yankee tradition: Once we build a new world, we need practical folks who can help us face the environment, feed ourselves, produce an orderly government, and create a stable society."

If Obama's rhetorical forebears are Abraham Lincoln and Robert Kennedy, says Dr. Gronbeck, McCain's is perhaps Herbert Hoover, who called himself a "master of emergencies."

McCain, like Clinton, has raised questions about whether Obama is more style than substance. But the two are frequently inseparable in American politics, where voters as often act on gut as on a careful analysis of position papers, analysts say. In a USA Today/Gallup Poll last month, voters were slightly more likely to see McCain than they were Obama as a "strong and decisive leader" but far more likely to see Obama as in touch with the needs of ordinary people.

McCain might do well to acknowledge – or even poke fun at – his shortcomings as a speaker, while questioning whether Obama's rousing speeches are a smoke screen for inexperience, says Denise Bostdorff, an expert on political communication at the College of Wooster, in Ohio.

"You will have people who are immediately suspicious if someone is eloquent," she says.

Obama, however, has cast his oratory as an extension of his message. And if one measure is the number of new voters a candidate draws to the polls, Obama has been a runaway success.

"Don't tell me words don't matter," he said at a campaign stop in February, ticking off historymaking lines from speeches by Dr. King and Franklin Roosevelt. "It's true that speeches don't solve all problems, but what is also true is if we cannot inspire the country to believe again then it doesn't matter how many policies and plans we have."

One of the most anticipated moments in the four months till Election Day will be the candidates' first debate. But so far, there isn't one. With their different styles and strengths as speakers, they have been unable to agree on any.

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