Swim or sink with the president of the European Commission


Preparing for speechwriting course in Brussels this week, I thought it would be nice to include an example of a 'local' using some of the main rhetorical techniques in one of my demo tapes.

Such are the wonders of YouTube that it took less than a minute to find this little gem from the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, which had been singled out for replaying in a news report on his 'state of the union' speech:

REPORTER: He said Europe has to move forward towards matching its monetary union with a real economic union among its member states:

PUZZLE: This is Europe's moment of truth.

SOLUTION: Europe must show that its more than 37 different national solutions.

CONTRAST (with swimming metaphor + alliteration): We either swim together or sink separately.

Not surprisingly, this selection of key rhetorical techniques worked well enough for it to be singled out by the media as a sound bite - but it didn't impress everyone.

Guess who doesn't want to be seen clapping
British readers may be interested to see that, of the five MEPs shown just before Mr Barroso starts speaking, the only one who doesn't join in with the applause is none other than Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP (the UK Independence Party).

Whether or not you're one of his supporters or opponents, it has to be admitted that his behaviour here is admirably consistent with his long-standing antipathy towards the EU.
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Osborne finds the Tories more enthusiastic about the coalition than they were a year ago








A recurring observation on this blog during last year's party conference season was that audiences at the Liberal Democrat and Conservative party conferences were rather lukewarm about the coalition government they had just formed (see below). This was indicated by the fact that applause for mentions of it tended to be either delayed or failed to reach the 'normal' 8 seconds burst (or both) - e.g. HERE and HERE.

But in George Osborne's speech earlier today, there was evidence of a greater willingness among Conservative party activists to show their approval of the coalition than they were at this time a year ago.

When the Chancellor commended the Liberal Democrats for "working as a coalition together in the national interest" (about 30 seconds into the above clip) the audience not only started clapping more or less straight away, but they also managed to keep it going for a healthy 10 seconds.

P.S. Blimey!
Since posting the above, I've just discovered that the whole speech can now be embedded from the BBC website - so serious anoraks can now watch it from beginning to end:









Conference season 2011 blogging update:
Last year's conference season posts:
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The snake (interview) that did for Nixon's reputation and the ladder (speech) that had saved it



The Frost-Nixon interview as the ultimate snake
Was it, I wonder, pure coincidence that BBC2's schedule last night included some archive footage of the original Frost-Nixon interview (including the above), followed by the film version of the events surrounding and leading up to it?

After all, the party conference season, with its mix of extended interviews with politicians, very short clips from their speeches and much longer clips from media commentators telling us what they're talking about, has yet to grind to a close.

From my point of view, having started the season by asking why our politicians are so willing to play snakes and ladders under media rules that give them little chance of landing on anything but a snake (HERE), the chance to see the Frost-Nixon film could hardly have come at a more appropriate time.

Here was a disgraced American president who thought himself smart enough to run rings around a talk-show host and salvage his reputation - only to be lured into landing on about as damaging a snake as David Frost and his media colleagues could ever have dreamt of.

The Checkers speech as the ladder that saved his career
A quarter of a century earlier, claims that vice-presidential candidate Nixon might have misappropriated campaign funds almost forced his withdrawal as President Eisenhower's running mate.

What saved him was not an interview, but the carefully crafted 'Checkers speech' (still ranked as the 6th greatest political speech on the American Rhetoric website).

Interestingly, both the name it became known by and much of its powerful impact derived from a simple anecdote about his children and a little cocker spaniel dog.

I think our current politicians could do worse than to watch both - and reflect on what a single interview and a single speech did for Nixon's political reputation.

Were they to do so, they might think again about what, if anything, they are gaining from their tacit collusion with broadcasters about the relative merits of interviews and speeches as alternative ways of communicating their messages (and conveying positive/negative images of themselves) to a wider public.

(You may have to put up with a 15 seconds commercial before this starts).




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Are Labour's leading women better speakers than Labour's leading men?

I know that some of my Twitter friends, like @MarionChapsal of Geronimo Coaching, have an interest in collecting examples of powerful women speakers and leaders.

Having kept an eye out on both male and female speakers at this week's Labour Party conference, I thought that they and other readers might like to see three good efforts from women who spoke there.

For what it's worth, my general impression is that some of the party's leading women are way ahead of their male brethren when it comes to effective public speaking.

Why?
Is this, I wonder, because oratory is a dying art among males in a party that has seen former trades unionists, trained at the factory gates, give way to a new class of of Oxbridge educated young men trained as backroom boys for older MPs (and with little or no experience of having done anything much outside professional politics)?

Or is it simply that, even in a party so lacking in charismatic male speakers, women still have to be far better than average to get noticed and rise within the party?

YVETTE COOPER, Shadow Home Secretary:


CAROLINE FLINT, Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government:


HARRIET HARMAN, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party:


Postscript
On reflection, and at the risk of offending Msses (if that's the plural of 'Ms') Cooper, Flint and Harman, it occurs to me that they arguably all have something in common with Margaret Thatcher when it comes to solving the problem of becoming a 'charismatic woman' (see HERE). That particular post concluded as follows:

'... one of Mrs Thatcher's major long term achievements may turn out to have been the undermining of age-old assumptions of the sort contained in Quintillian's observation that the perfect orator cannot exist ‘unless as a good man'. And, by finding a workable solution to the problem of being damned for being like a man and damned for not being like a man, her combination of uncompromising femininity with equally uncompromising words and deeds may have laid the foundations for a new tradition within which women politicians of the future will be able to operate' (derived from Our Masters' Voices, 1984, pp.111-121).

Conference season 2011 blogging update:
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Did the BBC change its mind on publicising the snake Miliband landed on yesterday?



If this blog's main theme during last year's party conference season was the way in which audiences failed to applaud things that they should have applauded, this year's is turning out to be the snakes and ladders theory of political communication - which proposes that, for politicians, speeches work like ladders (by bringing them good news), whereas interviews work like snakes (by bringing them bad news).

Ed Miliband's memory lapse 'exposed' in a BBC interview
As I was driving for about six hours yesterday, I spent much more time listening to the radio than tracking the blogging and tweeting from the last vestiges of the Labour Party conference.

But the car radio obliged - as an example of how a gaffe in an interview can generate embarrassing news for a politician, they don't get much better than Ed Miliband's failure to name one of his party's candidates in the campaign for the Labour's Scottish leader - which was headlined on the early evening news programmes from BBC Radio 4.

By the time I got home, the internet was awash with the news. By 9.17 p.m., Mark Pack had embedded the original clip from the BBC website on the Liberal Denocrat Voice blog (HERE).

A change of heart from the BBC?
But when I tried to do the same earlier this morning, I was thwarted.

Yes, you can still watch the clip on the BBC website, but you can no longer access the code needed to embed it on your own blog or website - which is why I've had to 'make do' with embedding the version posted on YouTube by Guido Fawkes (that's already been seen by about 5,500 viewers).

When it first became possible to embed clips from the BBC website, I welcomed it (HERE). Since then, however, how they decide which ones are allowed to reach a wider audience (by giving access to the embedding code) has remained a complete mystery.

Today it's become be even more mysterious than I thought. After all, why, having supplied the code for embedding this particular clip last night, has the BBC withdrawn access to it this morning?

If they've done it in response to complaints from the Labour Party (who else would want to restrict its accessibility to a wider audience) we could be witnessing an even more worrying form of collusion between broadcasters and politicians than I suggested we're already up against in Politicians & broadcasters: collaboration or capitulation?

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