Bush Speech Fails to Warm

OK. So I'm a stickler when it comes to the virtues of warming up an audience. Some don't. Some speakers launch right in by telling stories or relating funny anecdotes. I've done it myself.

BUT … and this is the key … I've only done that when the audience members already had a mostly favorable view of me. I didn't have to warm them up.

Compare that to the jarring beginning of President Bush's wooden address to the nation on Jan. 10. Already down in the polls – I mean, way down in the polls – with an electorate that thinks his strategy in Iraq has failed and that has no confidence in him as a leader – he starts off his "new way forward" speech in the most impersonal way possible.

 "THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror -- and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America's course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror. "

Um. OK. That's kind of like trying to get a woman who you've stood up twice before at the wedding chapel to go through the whole shebang again by saying: "Tonight, thousands of couples are engaged to be married for a life of wedded bliss. The marriage I have outlined for us will change your life forever."

Maybe it will and maybe it won't. First, you'll have to get her to the chapel. President Bush, in many ways, was still standing on the front stoop, trying to plead his case twenty minutes after he started to a potential partner that never even opened the door.

And why would Americans open the door for him? He gave them no reasons to listen from the very beginning. The newscasters on CNN pointed out ahead of the speech that President Bush was giving this speech from the White House library in hopes of giving it a warmer feel. Too bad the words didn't match the setting.

Instead of the wooden recitation of the obvious that he did present, how about instead trying to curry a little favor with the American people by acknowledging up front that he knows they're concerned? That he knows American men and women are in harms way? That he realizes many American worry that the wheels have come off the freedom express and the whole thing is careening toward a deep chasm?

Acknowledging the audience's concerns is a good way to get from arms-folded stoicism to ears-opened engagement. Unfortunately, at the end of his 20 wooden minutes of prime time rhetoric (apologies to Aristotle), the bride was no closer to walking down the aisle than before.

Comments

[Kare Anderson]

Perceptive post. Thanks!

[S. LeVern Nunley]

Great post... Spoken like the true Fletcher Dean we all know and love!