The Great Debaters
February 29, 2008
How do Obama and Clinton stack up in the wordplay arena, and how will the top Democrat fare in future face-offs with John McCain? Thomas Hollihan of the USC Annenberg School analyzes the candidates’ oratorical styles and offers advice on massaging their message.
Barack Obama
Obama’s debate skills have really improved over the course of the campaign, says Hollihan, a professor of communication in the USC Annenberg School.
“In the early part of the race he tended to give long, windy answers, answers that while rhetorically beautiful, weren’t very focused as arguments per se,” Hollihan says. It seemed to take Obama too long to get to the point, so he had trouble connecting with audiences.
As time went on, Obama gained experience through practice, Hollihan notes. “He has become much more convincing, much more succinct and much clearer.”
Hollihan outlines one particularly successful moment during the Texas debate: When Clinton accused Obama of being just about words, he defended himself with the retort that Clinton acted as though Obama supporters were delusional and the concept of change meant nothing. Obama then backed up his case with some nice evidence, by citing all the Texas newspaper endorsements he’d received, Hollihan says. With this exchange, Obama showed that it wasn’t a matter of innocent people being fooled by his rhetorical flourishes, Hollihan adds.
Hillary Clinton
“Clinton has throughout the debates demonstrated that her strength is specific policy knowledge, her ability to present tightly focused, well reasoned sorts of statements that demonstrate mastery of content,” Hollihan says.
However, he explains that there are two types of credibility at stake in a campaign: knowledge, and personal qualities like sincerity and niceness. An effective candidate must have the ability to communicate both, but at times Clinton has read as the technical expert to such a degree that she hasn’t come across in a personal way, Hollihan says.
Thus, in his opinion, the two most striking moments of Clinton’s campaign were the ones that captured her emotional side: when she cried at an appearance in New Hampshire, and during the Texas debate when she spoke about her experiences with adversity.
Hillary Clinton faces two major challenges in constructing her message, according to Hollihan.
First, the difference between her arguments and Obama’s isn’t huge, so in order to distinguish between them she has to stress her experience by denigrating his. “Democrats uniquely don’t like that. Republicans and independents are much more comfortable with negativity in their message. Democrats are much more likely to punish a candidate for negativity,” Hollihan says. He adds that Democrats, a more optimistic bunch in general, in this particular race like both candidates, so they become uncomfortable when one attacks the other. When Clinton made the comment about “change you can Xerox,” she got heckled by the audience.
Another problem, according to Hollihan, is that early in the race Clinton chose not to emphasize her gender, because she wanted to convey the front-runner image rather than that of a feminist candidate. And then she found herself facing Obama’s movement candidacy.
“I don’t think she can counter that kind of movement-inspired candidacy if she can’t counter with the concept that electing a woman is also a movement sort of goal,” Hollihan explains. “I think it was a mistake to allow her to run too much as a presumptive front runner. She has to reposition herself at this point.”
John McCain
McCain, as the Republican heir apparent, is unlikely to answer Mike Huckabee’s calls for another debate, so most likely his next debate will be against Clinton or Obama, Hollihan says.
McCain will attempt to use the exact same tactics Clinton has, he predicts. “But the primary difference is that he’ll be able to use them with a much harder edge, precisely because he’s not going to be appealing to Democrats, who don’t like negativity. He’s going to be speaking to independents, who almost relish such attacks,” Hollihan explains. Independents, lacking a partisan affiliation, “already hold a cynical view of politics, so a message that ‘this candidate isn’t what he appears to be’ is going to hit home with them.”
However, McCain has come across as cranky at times, and audiences don’t like cranky, Hollihan says. That’s one area McCain will need to pay attention to.
Finally, the matches between McCain and the top Democrat will be a debate of generational difference, Hollihan concludes. “In almost every case I can think of, the younger candidate tends to do better if the age difference is great. It’s the past vs. the future.”