Finding Political Strength in the Power of Words

Obama views the 2004 race as the real training ground for his political speaking and says his earlier preparation came from his part-time law lecturing in Chicago as much as from his legislating.

"My general attitude is practice, practice, practice," he said in an interview with David Mendell, who wrote a new biography of Obama. In the 2004 race, "I was just getting more experienced and seeing what is working and what isn't, when I am going too long and when it is going flat. Besides campaigning, I have always said that one of the best places for me to learn public speaking was actually teaching -- standing in a room full of 30 or 40 kids and keeping them engaged, interested and challenged."

He added that David Axelrod, chief strategist in his Senate race as well as in the current campaign, "was always very helpful in identifying what worked and what didn't in my speeches."

The 2004 race also featured the debut of the "Yes, we can" slogan, which Obama used this year after his defeat in the New Hampshire primary, to great effect. As it happens, he resisted the C¿sar Ch¿vez-inspired line when Axelrod first suggested it in 2004, finding it too simplistic, Mendell said.

Obama's keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston marked his arrival as a speaking sensation. But it exhibited only one side of him as a rhetorical performer: reading a scripted speech off a teleprompter. Obama has relied on the device for most of his major election-night speeches, something politicians rarely do, and for the major thematic speeches he gives on the trail every week or so. According to the campaign, these scripts tend to be a group effort, involving the candidate's 26-year-old speechwriter, Jon Favreau, and other staff members.

But the vast majority of Obama's talking in the campaign has come in the form of the 45-minute stump speech that he has delivered, without notes, several times a day for nearly a year. In states where he has had more time to campaign, a substantial minority of residents turning out to vote have, in all likelihood, heard this speech -- more than 37,000 came to see him speak during his four days in Wisconsin, and 646,000 voted for him in the primary there.

The stump speech is far more freewheeling than his scripted addresses, mixing the colloquial and the lofty and dotted with laugh lines that Obama often chuckles at himself, enjoying his role. Contrary to Obama's reputation as a fiery orator who traffics mainly in abstractions, much of the speech is delivered in a conversational tone, and it includes a long middle section of policy prescriptions. But what audience members tend to remember are the handful of crescendos that punctuate it, which deliver all the more punch for how slowly he builds them.

"He uses highs and lows. He has a wide range of pitch and uses it effectively," said Ruth Sherman, a Connecticut communications consultant. "He knows where to pause and stop and let his audience enjoy him, and he knows how to ride the crest of the wave and allow the momentum to evolve."

While his speeches include more policy gristle than Obama gets credit for, critics note that those ideas amount to a fairly conventional left-leaning platform and are not as novel as the package they are wrapped in.

"People are commenting increasingly on the disjunction between the elevated and exceptionally fine rhetoric and the rather pedestrian policy proposals that form the Obama platform," said Berenson, the Harvard classmate and former Bush counsel.

In a recent column in the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, argued that Obama's addresses were not that eloquent, that some passages read quite trite on the page and lacked evidence of deep thought behind them. What made the speeches effective, she wrote, was that they were inextricably linked to the figure speaking them and to his inspiring life story.

Those who admire Obama's stump skills dismiss the charge by Clinton and McCain that he has been overly reliant on his speaking ability to win votes, arguing that politics is all about verbal persuasion. "The only way he can convince people that he can become president is his rhetoric," said the University of Pittsburgh's Shuster. "What other opportunity does he have?"

But some wonder: How can Obama keep meeting the rhetorical expectations he has set for himself, all the way through the summer and fall -- and possibly beyond?

"It's a terrible burden," said Baylor's Medhurst. ". . . Can that eloquence be maintained? No, it can't -- it's impossible."