Ep 55 How To Stick to Your Message Without Sounding Scripted Marco Rubio Media Training Feb 24 16

So how do you stay on message throughout an interview or debate without sounding scripted?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life, speaking with TJ Walker.

Politicians, CEOs, others in the spotlight, constantly hear people like me saying, stick to your message, bridge back to your message. And invariably the question is, well, how do I do that without sounding scripted?

Newsmaker TALKS.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio gives a perfect example of what not to do in this situation. In the 2016 presidential debates leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the senator, who previously had a fantastic reputation, great reviews for his debate performances, said almost verbatim the same line three or four times. He repeated this, this canned soundbite of we have to get over this fiction that Barack Obama doesn't know what he's doing. He knows exactly what he's doing. And you know, he's this far left radical. Essentially he hit the sound bite, but he said it three times in a very short period of time and essentially said it four times throughout the debate. And that's when Governor Chris Christie latched onto it, said, look, there it is, the memorized 25 second script. Again, here's the problem. You do want to bridge back to your central messages again and again throughout a meeting, interview and throughout a debate. But, and this is a big but, you don't want to use the exact sound bite. What you can do is restate your message, but using different words, different examples, different case studies, different levels of abstraction. So for example, if Marco Rubio, a little background here. Marco Rubio is a first term senator running for president. So the people who are governors and have longer experience in public life than he did are constantly saying, you can't support Marco Rubio. Because the last time we supported someone who just had a few years of Senate experience, it was Barack Obama. We as Republicans, of course, all think Barack Obama is the worst president ever and horrible and his inexperience has destroyed the nation. I mean, that's essentially the message. Marco Rubio obviously doesn't want to play into that. He doesn't want to play into that set of assumptions. So he's trying to change the whole tone, the whole assumptions on the debate. So his point is, hey, the problem isn't that Barack Obama is inexperienced. The problem is he has this extreme left wing ideology and he basically hates America and he's doing all these things to try to destroy America and make us more like Europe and other countries. And therefore the problem is not his inexperience and youth. The problem he has is this extreme ideology, and to Marco Rubio's credit, that is a line, a meme that is repeated thousands of times a day on places like the Rush Limbaugh show and Fox News and the Mark Levin show. So it's a widely accepted viewpoint among Republicans and conservatives that view of Obama is a much better viewpoint for Marco Rubio. Because if the problem is not Obama's youthful inexperience and only a couple years in the Senate, but instead being really smart at instituting left wing ideology that lets Marco Rubio off the hook, then he doesn't have to answer the whole problem of just being a first term senator. So I completely understand it's completely rational for him to sort of feed into that line of attack because it eliminates a possible charge against him. So his message is a perfectly good political message when in a Republican primary debate the problem was his execution. Now, Marco Rubio in general in the debates so far has come across as articulate, forceful, more dynamic, more likable, more mainstream. He does have a slight lisp, by the way, but it's not that noticeable. And he's gotten high marks, frankly, from people like me and other nonpartisan speech experts. But this time, by using the exact almost word for word, exact same phrase, the exact same soundbite, he fed into this perception that he is sort of an empty suit, that he doesn't have experience, that all he's good at is feeding a canned line back, that he doesn't really have substance. So the problem with any gaff quite often isn't exactly what happened. It's in the context of people's perceptions of your strengths and weaknesses. The perception already of Marco Rubio is he doesn't really have the substance, the seasoning. He looks too young. He hasn't really accomplished anything so far, therefore he's not ready to be president. That's a part of the message that the media and his political opponents have been putting out there. So by just going right back to the same soundbite again and again and again, it made it look as though he can't really think. It also made him highly unresponsive to the questions. Now, how people say, well, easy for you to say, T.J. how would you have answered it? Well, again I step back to the message is, okay, Chris Christie is hammering him, saying, you're not governor, you haven't been a governor. All you've done is been a senator for a few years. That's like Barack Obama. He could have communicated the message that he wanted to about Obama, but instead of using the exact same words day in and day out, used a different example and say, hey, the real problem with Obama is he came in with, and I'm using Republican words and rhetoric now. The real problem with Obama is he came in with a specific desire to have socialized medicine. He said so when he announced his campaign. He said so throughout the campaign. He brought on Hillary and we ended up with socialized medicine. And he got it. He actually accomplished it. You have to give him credit for that. I don't agree with what he did, but the problem was that he competently corrupted our health care system. I come in with a different philosophy. My philosophy would be to eliminate Obamacare. He could have said it that way. And then the next time it came up, used a completely different argument and said, look, the problem with Obama isn't just that he was inexperienced. That's not issue. The issue was he. He thinks immigrants deserve to be able to come in any way they want. That's why he. So he could have given a different example every single time to show how Obama had made a successful policy change that was against his own philosophy. The message would have been exactly the same, but by not saying it word for word the same way, it doesn't seem scripted. Now, it can be a script, but the problem with a script if you're a politician is the second it feels like a script, the second it sounds like a script to people, you've destroyed the impact. You've made yourself seem like a phony, and therefore people can now poke holes at the machinery of what you're doing rather than focusing on, on exactly what your message is.

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It does seem awfully select. There's a part of me that feels a little bit sorry for Marco Rubio because there are a lot of candidates who say stupid things. And I'm not pointing fingers at any one party here, but there are a lot of politicians who say stupid things, inconsistent things, things that are just factually, wildly untrue seem to get away with it here. Marco Rubio is saying something that frankly is said every single day by conservative Republicans on talk radio. Politicians, hosts. What he's saying isn't particularly controversial. What he's saying by the standards of his party, not factually incorrect. He's being criticized just because he used almost word for word the same language in his message. And you know what, folks? Politics is unfair sometimes. There have certainly been many, many politicians whose Entire careers have been destroyed because of gaffes that aren't considered one tenth as toxic as what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth in a typical just an average press conference or media interview. And yet none of those things seem to hurt Donald Trump, or at least haven't as of the time of this video being created. So sometimes the message is, frankly, life is unfair and you have to deal with it. Will this destroy Marco Rubio's political career? Here's the problem for Marco Rubio, as I'm recording this particular podcast, is that he came in third in Iowa. He came in fifth in New Hampshire. There simply isn't any precedent for someone actively campaigning, working really hard in a campaign, coming in third and fifth in the first two events, and ended up winning the nomination. There was a time after the Iowa caucus where there was tremendous buzz about Marco Rubio getting all the establishment behind him in the Republican Party, because the Republican Party establishment hates and despises and has utter contempt for Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas. So the fact that Marco Rubio could come in third place meant that he now seemed in a better position than Kasich, governor of Ohio, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and a few others. It seemed like he would be well positioned to really capture all the money, attention, endorsements of the party to stop Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. And then he had his debate meltdown and it all went away. He came in fifth place. Now, it was a close fifth place, but he came in behind Kasich, behind Cruz, behind Trump, behind Bush. And fifth place just doesn't get people excited much. Now, there have been some who've suggested this will go down in the history books as one of the single worst debate moments ever. And when you're looking at the history of televised debates, you of course think of Richard Nixon sweating, having that sweaty upper lip in his debate against John F. Kennedy. You think of that moment, and I still remember watching. I didn't watch the Nixon debate. I wasn't born yet. But I do well remember Carter vs. Ford, and Carter saying, well, I asked my daughter Amy what was the most important issue. I just remember falling on the floor saying, oh, my God, that sounds stupid. And then you have the moment of Admiral James Stockdale starting the vice presidential debate, saying, who am I? Why am I here? He was Ross Perot's running mate, and it just struck people as profoundly bizarre. And then you have the moment of Lloyd Benson just really dressing down Dan Quayle, saying, I knew Jack Kennedy you know, Jack Kennedy as just one of the most memorable moments and sort of. You could almost see Quale's career melting away at that point. The biggest meltdown of all, of course, in the history so far of presidential campaigns of major candidates. Rick Perry's oops moment. I do think we'll be talking about Marco Rubio's lapse for years to come. He will certainly be held up in all the classroom textbooks as a perfect example of how not to bridge back to a message again and again and again. If you're using the same words now, I think people are going to misread this lesson. They're going to say the lesson is don't repeat your messages. Don't bridge back to your messages too often. To me, that's not where he messed up. He messed up by being too literal and repeating word for word the message the same way. That was the real blunder. Hitting your message again and again is fine as long as you have a good message, an interesting message, and you're using different words, different examples, different case studies to make the message more memorable. I'm TJ Walker. I'd like to thank you for spending some time with me. As always, we take all of your questions about any aspects of dealing with the media crisis, communication, public speaking, presentations, PowerPoint, you name it. We answer your questions right here. All you have to do is send in your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or post them wherever you're hearing or seeing this show, whether it's on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, or my blog. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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