Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee, the two big winners in Thursday's Iowa presidential caucuses, both talk a lot about hope. For all their political differences, they also share something else: the ability to deliver their hopeful messages in a way that sounds inspiring, heartfelt, and real.
What's clear from their victory speeches in Iowa, however, is that they reach the same end in two nearly opposite styles. Obama seems most at ease with high, polished oratory, while Huckabee sounds most eloquent when he's folksy and relaxed.
"Barack Obama is very much an orator in the classic, eloquent style," said LeeAundra Temescu, a Los Angeles-based, nonpartisan communications coach who studies political rhetoric. "Huckabee is also a great speaker, but he does it on a level that is so folksy, low-key, and colloquial that you don't recognize him as a great speaker even though he is."
Both candidates, she noted, "are playing to their strengths. Both of them are very, very smart, and both of those styles are extremely effective."
Both styles, which help them win over voters, come out of long but divergent traditions in American public speaking. In Democrat Obama's oratory, Kathleen Hall Jamieson hears echoes of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and even that old populist preacher, William Jennings Bryan. Republican Huckabee, meanwhile, follows the homespun path of GOP icon Ronald Reagan.
"They're coming from opposite ends of the rhetorical spectrum," said Jamieson, professor of communications at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Wayne Fields, who teaches rhetoric at Washington University in St. Louis, also notes the preacherly foundations of Obama's style. "Clearly there were echoes of King; there were echoes of Kennedy," he said in a telephone interview yesterday. "It wasn't a black sermon in the stereotypical sense; it did not sound like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. But at the same time it acknowledged that influence." ...
| • | Huckabee oratory deemed 'low-key,' Obama's classic
Different delivery, but same audience The Boston Globe, Saturday, Jan. 5, 2008 Byline: Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff |
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