Friday, February 28, 2020

Are Elizabeth Warren's Poor Presentation Skills Keeping Her Out of the White House?


https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/image/Official_Portrait.jpg
Elizabeth Warren, US Senate Photo

Communication researchers often think that nonverbal communication is more important than verbal communication. I commented in my last post that Senator Elizabeth Warren is by far the most knowledgeable of the 2020 Democratic candidates for president. But we all know that she lags in the polls. Why? There are probably several reasons: too many people, sadly, don’t want a woman president. The media may be under-reporting her ideas and events while they underestimated her performance in early primary debates. Her economic ideas, which would be considered mainstream in Europe or Asia, have been branded as far left or radical, not just on Fox News, but even in the mainstream press.

None of that, however, fully explains why she’s not getting ahead. Her failure lies, not in her ideas, which I think are excellent, or in her reasoning and explanations, which are well-defined, but in the way she presents herself. In the media age, we often talk about what makes a person seem presidential. That is, certain undefined, amorphous qualities make a person seem like a world and national leader.  Elizabeth Warren would probably be an excellent president. Her ideas would probably improve the country. But it isn’t just what you say, it’s how you say it. Warren’s delivery – her use of voice, gesture, body language, and clothing communication, that is, her nonverbal communication – does not make her seem confident and powerful. She doesn’t project the gravitas to lead the country and the free world. I am not saying that she couldn’t do it, because I think she could. I am saying that she doesn’t look and sound as if she could do it.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a short speech that she gave last year at the “We the People” rally. Warren's content was typical: she complained that President Trump was a national security risk, that America’s economy had been deliberately modified in recent years to favor the rich against the working class, and that there was too much corruption in Washington. She talked about her own upbringing in a middle-class family that faced financial struggles. She said (shades of John Dean), “I want to talk about this cancer on our country.”

That’s typical stuff for a liberal politician. Her explanations were precise. She gave examples to support her points. Judged as basic economic and political policy, everything she said was just fine.

Unfortunately, although she said good things, Warren didn’t sound good. For one thing, she spoke in the upper range of her voice. Many speakers habitually speak above their voice’s optimal pitch range. They think this makes them sound excited and powerful. (I often catch myself doing the same thing: my natural voice is in the baritone range, but I often speak like a tenor. I have to fight not to sound shrill.) Other speakers force their voices down into an unnatural range, like Cliff Clavin in the TV show Cheers. It sounds comical when we hear Cliff trying to sound like a big shot. Unfortunately, too many speakers think that forcing their voices down makes them sound manly or forceful or something. They are wrong. When you speak outside of your natural range, you just sound tense and insecure.

Second, Warren speaks with obvious vocal hyperfunction. That is, her vocal muscles work too hard to produce sounds. During this speech, Warren sounded shrill, almost nervous, as if she were pleading rather than persuading. Good vocal production is almost effortless. When you sound like you’re working to speak, you can make your audience feel uncomfortable or, again, you can sound tense or insecure. (You are also more likely to get laryngitis.)

Perhaps as a result, Elizabeth Warren’s voice in this speech often cracked and sounded tense. Saturday Night Live’s brilliant mimic, Kate McKinnon, plays this characteristic to a hilarious hilt. Warren also sounded hoarse, which is not unusual for candidates during a political campaign. Still, a skillful speaker might overcome or prevent hoarseness by good breath control and relaxing the vocal muscles. Overall, Warren’s vocal skills, or lack thereof, often make her sound overeager, uncertain, and unserious. It’s quite a shame. Warren has a college degree in speech pathology and audiology, which makes me wonder why she doesn’t use her voice more effectively.

Political communication expert Jennifer Palmieri praises Warren's communication skills. Admittedly, Elizabeth Warren is, in many ways, a skilled and experienced speaker. She was a champion debater in high school. In the speech to the We the People rally, she paused with dramatic effect and used good vocal variety. That is, she adroitly varied her speed and volume; for example, slowing down and speaking quietly when she talked about her parents’ financial struggles and their problems with mortgages and foreclosures, but speaking loudly and quickly when she complained about Donald Trump’s corruption. She spoke loudly and firmly when she said, “What’s happened in America has been a series of deliberate decision made right here in Washington.” She spoke more quietly and slowly when she said, “what’s happening to working families  in this country. What’s happening to opportunity in this country.” She said “opportunity” more loudly, thus nonverbally making opportunity her main theme. That, as far as it goes, is exactly how I would teach my students to speak. That's all good. I just wish that Warren sounded better.

Let’s also look at her physical appearance. A speaker’s physical appearance is part of the nonverbal communication. During the speech, Warren wore her characteristic outfit: an ill-fitting maroon jacket, wire rim glasses, a simple black blouse, and black slacks. She looked like a schoolteacher or university professor. Well, of course, she’s both of those things. I don’t have anything against looking like a university professor; I taught at universities for many years and often wore plaid jackets and plaid ties. It was part of the uniform. A president, however, needs to look like a serious person. Warren did not dress like a serious person. Her entire appearance was insubstantial. Her appearance would serve just fine if she were selling furniture or used cars. Her manner of dress probably makes her seem approachable, friendly, and positive. That manner of dress, in fact, probably tested well during her campaign research and focus groups.  But could you look like that and beat Donald Trump? I don’t see how.

Years ago, I was a high school debater just like Elizabeth Warren. I was not as successful as she was; my partner, future scientist Kenneth Marton, and I at Virginia’s Oakton High School qualified for the state tournament but finished in the middle of the pack. We had three wins and three losses; one of our losses was to national high school champion Dennis Henigan, which is surely no shame.

Anyway, our local high school debate league was constantly looking for judges, and both of my parents volunteered – my father, an attorney, and my mother, a high school debater herself, were both considered qualified. After judging several debates, my mother commented that the female debaters had a difficult task. They needed, she said, to sound forceful and confident without sounding shrill. That is not fair, of course, any more than it is fair to judge a candidate by how she dresses. But it is reality. Neither Amy Klobuchar and Tulsi Gabbard, who also declared for the Democratic presidential primaries, has anything like Warren’s intellectual power. They do, however, have superb vocal control. They sound good when they talk: their voices are relaxed and rich. They project confidence without seeming eager. They sound serious.

Can a woman become president? I would like to hope so. Speaking only for myself, I think almost any of the female candidates in 2016 would be a better president than almost any of the men. If the Democrats could find a candidate with Elizabeth Warren’s ideas and Tulsi Gabbard’s voice, they might crush Donald Trump in a landslide.

I know that it seems unfair to criticize a female candidate for how she looks and sounds, but it isn’t just women. Let’s face facts: male candidate Pete Buttigieg sounds whiny; Bernie Sanders yells too much, for which he is justly criticized, and he needs a better haircut, while Andrew Yang never wore a tie during the primary debates. That was the end of the line for Yang: rightly so, in my opinion. If you’re a lightweight, you need to stay out of the White House.

We were all taught in high school to choose candidates by judging their issue positions and evaluating their qualifications to lead the free world. Donald Trump, however, won the presidency without passing either test: his issue positions were idiotic (Mexico will pay for the wall? Really?), and he demonstrated no personal qualities sufficient to lead a local hardware store. However, when he speaks, he sounds supremely confident. He manipulates his voice clearly, naturally, and powerfully. His voice expresses vast emotional range. He makes every word count. No, speech delivery is not the only thing that matters. It’s not even the most important thing: even in the age of the rhetorical presidency, many people think that presentation skills should have little bearing on choosing a presidential candidate. All the same, political candidates need to know how to convey a serious, confident impression when they speak.


P.S.: How can speakers improve their voice? I took two years of voice therapy from speech pathologists. I will never sound like a newscaster, but I sound a lot better than I used to. Furthermore, after treating my vocal hyperfunction, I no longer get laryngitis even when I have a bad cold. For some people, acting classes might have a similar effect. Colleges used to teach voice and diction classes. These are less common now than in the past, but I recommend taking one if you can find it. Or, if you simply train yourself to relax your neck and breathe from the abdomen, like a singer, you’ll sound at least a little bit better. 

Here is an old trick to find your natural vocal range: sit in a comfortable chair, close your eyes, relax, breathe slowly, and hum. You will be humming in your natural range. Your natural range, maybe much to your surprise, will probably be higher or lower than the way you usually speak. You do not sound your best when you force your voice to be high or low. You sound your best, by far, when you speak in the range that your voice wants to use.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Speakers Need Research, and President Trump Gathered a Little Bit of Research About the Coronavirus. Was It Enough? I Have My Doubts.


President Donald Trump, White House Photo

Speakers need research. I have blogged about that several times.

President Donald Trump’s talk yesterday in a press conference concerning the coronavirus was, well, to no one’s surprise, a case in point. If you watch TV shows and movies about presidential decision-making – The West Wing, for example – you get the impression of wise, informed people carefully discussing important issues so they can make the most prudent decisions. How naïve. I wish this were so, but it's not.

Let’s look at how being a bit uninformed made Trump sound a little silly.

Trump wisely started by showing that he had gathered information: “I have just received another briefing from a great group of talented people on the virus that is going around to various parts of the world.  We have, through some very good early decisions — decisions that were actually ridiculed at the beginning — we closed up our borders to flights coming in from certain areas, areas that were hit by the coronavirus and hit pretty hard.  And we did it very early.” Okay, I suppose that’s all debatable, and only time will tell whether he made the right decisions. Closing borders is obviously insufficient, but it is consistent with Trump's America First isolationism.

Still, kudos to the president for listening to a briefing. The President is notorious for ignoring policy briefings, and we should all be a tiny bit relieved that he at least attended this one.

But here’s what astonished me: President Trump seemed uninformed about influenza, an epidemic that the press often compares with coronavirus:

“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it that — and I spoke with Dr. Fauci on this, and I was really amazed, and I think most people are amazed to hear it: The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year.  That was shocking to me.”

Influenza/pneumonia has been among the top 10 causes of death in the United States for decades. Why did that surprise President Trump? Why did he say that this was “shocking to me?” If he knew nothing about influenza, why should we trust him to handle the coronavirus?

So, on the one hand, we should all be happy that President Trump received a briefing from qualified experts and acquired basic information about the possible oncoming pandemic. On the other hand, it bothers me that the President of the United States found an ordinary public health fact "shocking," that he was "really amazed."

So, yes, President Trump did his (last-minute) research. Good. But why didn’t he know more to start with? I, for one, would feel more comfortable with leadership that is not always playing catch-up with the facts. Trump complained bitterly about President Barack Obama's ultimately successful handling of the Ebola outbreak, so one would expect him to be supremely well-prepared for the current public health crisis. One might be wrong to expect that.

Do I think that all of our recent presidents  were well-informed? No. Trump just happens to be the problem this time. When leaders face emergencies – public health, foreign policy, economic stress – they are dealing with people’s lives. Our leaders should be smarter and better informed than the rest of us, not less so.

And maybe we should blame the voters just a little bit, shouldn’t we? Hillary Clinton was better informed about almost everything than President Trump, but she lost the election. Several of the Republican candidates in 2016 were far better informed than Trump, but they also lost. Elizabeth Warren is hands-down the best-informed of the Democratic candidates in 2020, and, judging from the polls, she doesn’t have a chance. Voters like to support candidates from their own group, who share their underlying attitudes. But, maybe, just maybe, we should pick people who know what they’re doing. And we should pick people who consistently gather information before they make critical decisions. Health experts are already questioning the accuracy of the Trump administration's response to the impending crisis. Not good.

Let’s give President Trump a B- at best for speech preparation this time. But, with a public health emergency looming in front of us, let’s hope for better.

P.S.: I didn't take time in this post to talk about Trump's speech organization. That was a problem with this press conference: Trump wandered rather aimlessly from one point to the next. This weakens the impact of whatever his central point was. I may or may not talk about that in a future post.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Why Did It Take So Long For General John Kelly to Say What He Really Thinks?


John Kelly
Retired General John Kelly, who served the Trump administration as Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, gave a speech yesterday at Drew University. He contradicted President Trump on political and legal issues. But why now? Timing is everything in public speaking, as in most of life, and if you miss your moment, well, you’ve missed your moment.

For one thing, Kelly defended Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a former National Security Council official who testified against President Trump during the House impeachment  hearings. President Trump recently fired Vindman and threatened him with military discipline. Kelly said that Vindman “did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave” and “he went and told his boss what he just heard.” He explained that all military personnel are trained not to obey an illegal order and, in fact, they should report an illegal order up the chain of command. Kelly further explained that Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky represented a dramatic change in American policy and that Vindman was therefore correct to express concern.

Kelly also refuted Trump’s claim that the press was “the enemy of the people.” Maybe Kelly’s most important point was to disagree with President Trump’s statements about immigrants and migrants. He said that migrants were not evil and that, “In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people. He continued that "they’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”

Okay, fine. Decent people already understood all of that. But the question I started with was, why now? 

1.  If Kelly found the President’s policies offensive, he could have spoken out publicly at the time. Instead, he chose to work from within the White House, while publicly assenting (silently or otherwise) to Trump’s policies. Was that right or wrong? The history of domestic and foreign policy is full of people who supported policies that privately repelled them. Maybe they thought they could be more effective working from within. I’m sure that Kelly felt that way. Rarely has that been true. People who struggle behind the scenes usually just get co-opted, exactly as happened to Kelly.

2.   It’s fine for Kelly to defend Lieutenant Colonel Vindman now, but no one stopped him from defending Vindman during his testimony. The conservative media and President Trump attacked Vindman viciously, and then – not now – is when Vindman most needed his support.

3.   I expect that, over the coming years, a whole flock of cackling former Trump administration officials will write books and give speeches to explain how wrong Trump was. That’s too little, too late. At least Kelly is speaking up while Trump is still President, and his comments might have an effect, albeit a tiny effect, on current political opinion. For all of these people to speak up too little, and too late, is a disservice to the American republic.
 
There is a reason that President John Kennedy’s best-selling book Profiles in Courage, which describes courageous acts by American public figures, is so short. Few public officials seem to have much moral courage. Let’s give General Kelly a C+: he spoke up before it was absolutely too late, but he didn’t speak up in time.

Yes, in public speaking, timing is everything. It’s not just what you say; it’s also when you say it.


Technical note: Rhetorical theorists talk about kairos, which is the art of saying something at the best moment, the right time. If you're interested, I wrote about kairos in one of President William McKinley's speeches in chapter 9 of my book about the 1896 presidential campaign. The book is available in paperback, and you can read it free in many large university libraries.

More about Kelly: This is not the first time that General Kelly’s public speaking has irritated me. You might want to read my earlier post about him. In that post, I explain how a 2017 speech that Kelly gave was full of vicious errors and misstatements.