Thursday, March 5, 2009

'Great' Orator's Constant Crutch

From Carol E. Lee at Politico:
President Barack Obama doesn’t go anywhere without his TelePrompter.
The textbook-sized panes of glass holding the president’s prepared remarks follow him wherever he speaks. Resting on top of a tall, narrow pole, they flank his podium during speeches in the White House’s stately parlors.
They stood next to him on the floor of a manufacturing plant in Indiana as he pitched his economic stimulus plan. They traveled to the Department of Transportation this week and were in the Capitol Rotunda last month when he paid tribute to Abraham Lincoln in six-minute prepared remarks.
Obama’s reliance on the teleprompter is unusual – not only because he is famous for his oratory, but because no other president has used one so consistently and at so many events large and small. After the teleprompter malfunctioned a few times last summer and Obama delivered some less-than-soaring speeches, reports surfaced that he was training to wean himself off of the device while on vacation in Hawaii. But no luck.
His use of the teleprompter makes work tricky for the television crews and photographers trying to capture an image of the president announcing a new Cabinet secretary or housing plan without a pane of glass blocking his face.
And it is a startling sight to see such sleek, modern technology set against the mahogany doors and Bohemian crystal chandeliers in the East Room or the marble columns of Grand Foyer. “It’s just something presidents haven’t done,” said Martha Joynt Kumar, a presidential historian who has held court in the White House since December of 1975. “It’s jarring to the eye. In a way it stands in the middle between the audience and the president because his eye is on the teleprompter.”
Obama has relied on a teleprompter through even the shortest announcements and when repeating the same lines on his economic stimulus plan that he's been saying for months – whereas past presidents have mostly worked off of notes on the podium except during major speeches, such as the State of the Union. . . .
In a break from his routine, Obama did not use a teleprompter during his pre-inauguration speech at a factory in Bedford Heights, Ohio - and his delivery seemed to suffer. He paused too long at parts. He accentuated the wrong words. And overall he sounded hesitant and halting as he spoke from the prepared remarks on the podium. . . .
Before Obama entered a room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Wednesday to announce his crackdown on defense contracts, a CNN reporter asked an Obama aide if the teleprompter could be moved further away from the podium or lowered. The answer was an unequivocal ‘no.’ “He uses them to death,” a television crewmember who also covered the White House under Clinton and Bush, said of the teleprompter. “The problem is he never looks at you. He’s looking left, right, left, right – not at the camera. It’s almost like he’s not making eye contact with the American people.”
Let's face it: A telepromter is a script.
And Obama simply cannot function without a pre-written script.
He's addicted to the script; the teleprompter. He can't give it up.
Why? As someone who has written speeches for people and helped people to speak in public all my life and as someone who teaches public speaking I can only say that this is a sign of insecurity. When you have to use a teleprompter (and speak from a script) all the time you are basically insecure. You're afraid you're gonna mess up.
I teach college students how to conquer this fear. I will not let them speak from a script. They must learn to speak extemporaneously without messing up.
But Obama messes up without the prompter. He cannot master the most common speaking style of the modern age; one that incorporates extemporaneous and/or impromptu remarks. He's incapable of being clear, lucid, articulate without a manuscript.
One other thing: He may actually like the "wall" that the prompter seems to create between him and the audience. That desire for some distance may actually be related to his own insecurity.

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