TJ Walker examines why it's hard to judge politicians' speaking skills while they're in office. Partisan bias clouds our view, but history reshapes reputations: Lincoln, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush all look different now than they did then. Successful politicians share speaking qualities that connect with their audiences.
Chapters
Is the President a good public speaker? This is a question I get a lot and have for decades all over the world. But by the President, I don't necessarily mean the president in 2017, I don't necessarily mean the US president, I just mean whoever is president at any given moment. People do like to talk about that person's public speaking skills. Here's the problem with rating any politician's public speaking skills is if you say something nice about the speaker, everyone who doesn't like that person's politics hates you, calls you an idiot, calls you a hack. And the opposite is true as well. If you criticize a particular president's speaking skills, you're instantly written off as some opponent, some low level political hack, some idiot, a fool. So it's a very, very difficult game. Even looking objectively at any politician's speaking skills while they're in office, it's far better to let a little time go by. Certainly there's not much controversy now saying Abe Lincoln was a great public speaker. His Gettysburg Address has gone down in history, at least in English speaking peoples. Is not the number one best speech ever, certainly top five for most people. And reviews of how he spoke throughout his career were very, very high. Not that many people talking about James Buchanan's public speaking or James K. Polk's public speaking. Now this, this has certainly happened in my lifetime where anyone who's in office, there's such a polarizing issue. There are exceptions. Back in the 80s, most people I know, regardless of whether they liked Ronald Reagan's policies, would concede he was a good public speaker while Bill Clinton was in office. If you said Bill Clinton was a good public speaker, you got a tremendous amount of hate, vitriol and condemnation. Something else I noticed that if a politician's speaking skill changes, it's hard for people to notice it because the image gets so set. So for example, I actually praised some of George W. Bush's speeches the last two, three years of his administration. He got visibly more comfortable. He was initially sort of frozen stiff, looked almost scared when looking at the teleprompter. In later years, he got more comfortable. He moved more. He, his head moved more, he seemed more relaxed, he put in more pauses. He got better. But if I went on CNN or commented on this on a major news website, I would get just bombarded with massive, massive hate mail and everyone accusing me of being in George W. Bush's pocket. So that's the challenge for really rating people. I'll say this about most politicians and certainly those who get to the presidency. Even if they don't have public speaking skills that stand up to all the traditional metrics of what good speaking is, they typically have something that really works and resonates with certain audiences in certain circumstances. If they didn't, they wouldn't have gotten to where they are. I'm TJ Walker. I help people speak their best. If you'd like to improve your own speaking skills, give me a call or check out some of our options below. We have online public speaking courses. We have public workshops every month and private one on one and group trainings conducted all over the world.
