Obama-Clinton: indruk en toon

Finding Political Strength in the Power of Words
Oratory Has Helped Drive Obama's Career -- and Critics' Questions
by Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 26, 2008; A01

Een indruk maken…

Een retoricus is zich bewust van zijn publiek.

"It comes from his sense of an audience," said Gerald Shuster, an expert in political communication at the University of Pittsburgh. "He's doing a lot of impromptu when he gets to the stage; he looks out over the audience and has the ability to adjust it."

Een toon bij het spreken…

The stump speech is far more freewheeling than his scripted addresses, mixing the colloquial and the lofty and dotted with laugh lines that Obama often chuckles at himself, enjoying his role. Contrary to Obama's reputation as a fiery orator who traffics mainly in abstractions, much of the speech is delivered in a conversational tone, and it includes a long middle section of policy prescriptions. But what audience members tend to remember are the handful of crescendos that punctuate it, which deliver all the more punch for how slowly he builds them.

"He uses highs and lows. He has a wide range of pitch and uses it effectively," said Ruth Sherman, a Connecticut communications consultant. "He knows where to pause and stop and let his audience enjoy him, and he knows how to ride the crest of the wave and allow the momentum to evolve."

While his speeches include more policy gristle than Obama gets credit for, critics note that those ideas amount to a fairly conventional left-leaning platform and are not as novel as the package they are wrapped in.

"People are commenting increasingly on the disjunction between the elevated and exceptionally fine rhetoric and the rather pedestrian policy proposals that form the Obama platform," said Berenson, the Harvard classmate and former Bush counsel.