She’s walked the walk, but Hillary still hasn’t learnt to talk the talk
Obama’s vote exceeded hers almost two to one. But — thanks to the oddity of the primary system — a rout in one state can eventually prove to have been irrelevant.
The system gives each state a set number of delegates, related to population. In Ireland, if the same system applied to our presidential elections, while a candidate routing their opponent in Leitrim might be thrilled, and while the Leitrim victory could give their campaign a huge morale boost, Leitrim couldn’t deliver a tenth of the delegates delivered by winning, say, Cork or Dublin. Because of that statistical reality, candidates on the Republican side, like Rudi Giuliani, haven’t even gone near some of the early primaries, concentrating on those with the capacity to deliver density of delegate numbers.
Hillary, seeing the writing on the South Carolina wall, didn’t wait for the final result. She headed for Tennessee, where she made a speech. That speech was buoyant. Optimistic. Energetic. And disastrous.
In the first minute and a half, she used the word “I” 11 times, the word “me” almost as many. She was delighted to be in Nashville. She was even more delighted to have her daughter Chelsea with her in Nashville. And then — reaching unsuccessfully for lightness of tone and self-derogation — she told the crowd that they needn’t panic that she was going to damage the reputation of Nashville by breaking into song, because she knows she can’t sing. Her husband can get a roar of laughter from a crowd with a throwaway description of New Hampshire as “a ’lil election”. Hillary can’t get the same response even with a cleverly scripted joke, calculated to flatter the local area.
The speech was the quintessence of how limited good advice and good writers can be. The Clinton campaign’s advisers, at least two years prior to the election, needed to work, day in, day out, week in, week out, on Hillary’s communication habits. Because, under pressure, it’s those habits that emerge. Under pressure, a candidate may deliver a great line crafted by a good writer, but it’s going to sound imported. As did the line she used after her first victory, about having found her own voice in New Hampshire. She delivered it well, it made headlines, but it was never going to lift her into the same oratorical league as her main opponent.
Because they know their candidate has communication problems and — compared with Barack Obama — a charisma deficit, the Clinton people have Hillary and Bill attacking his rhetoric, as if the capacity to express ideas in a vivid, memorable way was a DISqualification, rather than a qualification for leadership. Those attacks may have led to the untypical intervention, at the weekend, of JFK’s “I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them,” Caroline Kennedy stated in a personal column carried on Saturday by the New York Times. “But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans… [Barack Obama] has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things.”
That “special ability” is precisely what Hillary Clinton needs to tap into. Attacking Obama for having it is based on the need to make Democrat voters fear being made to feel naive. The Clinton camp has to make precisely THOSE voters fearful of feeling foolish, if they go for Obama and then realise they got taken by a verbal con artist. Hence Hillary’s slashing performance in debates. Thus far, her accusations haven’t worked, and her harping on about it being a choice between rhetoric and reality has not captured voter imagination. For one very good reason: the two are not mutually exclusive.
The Bill Clinton who first won the White House had both rhetoric and reality in abundance. His reality included experience as a state governor. His rhetoric (once he learnt to control the length of his speeches) was stunning. His wife, in portraying rhetoric as a suspect irrelevancy, does his memory an injustice without serving her own future. It’s difficult to come up with even a short list of historic world leaders who could not stir the blood by the use of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a not an optional extra, in leadership terms, but, rather, an essential tool. Not because it falsifies, but because it makes the truth compelling.
Hillary Clinton’s unaddressed vocal and physical habits make her much less effective as a communicator than she should be. She grossly overuses the first person singular and inserts the vacuum-filling phrase “you know” three or four times in a paragraph, apparently deaf to the patronising tone it gives her discourse. She nods in self-approval while talking. But, worst of all, she thinks and talks in generalities and in processes.
“For those who have lost their job or their home or their healthcare, I will focus on the solutions needed to move this country forward,” she said after the South Carolina defeat.
That one statement breaks just about every rhetorical rule. It talks to no individual. At the end of a great communication, each listener feels the speaker was talking to them, personally — not to a cross-section of the population. It jams human tragedies into a list. It uses bureaucratic language: “focus” and “solutions”. Put it this way. If you go to A&E with the winter vomiting bug and the hospital staff tell you they’re going to focus on the solutions needed, you’re going to feel more connected to the plastic kidney dish into which you’re puking than to them). It changes point of view, moving from “for those” to “this country”. Point-of-view changes confuse the listeners. Finally, it suggests some undergoing to be moved forward in some vague way, which she relies on the listeners to assume is going to be good.
If Hillary Clinton makes it to the White House, she will do so because of a powerful cluster of advantages, starting with her husband and moving on to the relentless resilience of the Clinton machine.
If she doesn’t make it to the White House, she will fail because of recurring mis-steps in communication. Starting with the idiocy of her launch claim that she was starting “a conversation with America”, moving on to a claim to experience that doesn’t hold up. Either it was experience by osmosis, which isn’t possible because she wasn’t present when crucial policies were debated and decided, or experience-by-pillow-talk, which isn’t valid currency for a feminist.
Her communication will be pivotal to her success or failure on Super Tuesday.
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