Interesting facts

From what I've been told--by people who have an obvious interest in making this fact well known--John Edwards' speech earlier today was delivered basically off the cuff. Which is not to say that he delivered it entirely extemporaneously, but that he didn't have standard prepared remarks at hand for either himself or for reporters to read before he addressed the conference. It's is impressive, I guess, in the same way that it's impressive to see a waiter take a large order at a restaurant without writing anything down, but it's also not necessarily something I'd consider a wise standard practice for presidential candidates.

Comments

Actually, Brian, a good number of effective pols do this kind of 'extemporaneous' speaking. They evolve a set of topic-themes during a stretch of platform speaking, and then riff on these themes in altered order and emphasis - depending on the orientation of the crowd. Bill Clinton was a master at this approach. Kerry did a lot of this as well. The standard name for this behavior is 'stump speech'. It is not a seemless, beginning to end narrative, but instead an apparently ad-hoc but actually practiced speech grab-bag. From time to time as the issue-focus changes, so do the water-balloons of content.

I noticed Obama had a teleprompter at TBA, but my guess is that he was using the same approach as Edwards, and wasn't literally reading his speech.

There is a time for 'delivered' speech - the best examples being presidential speeches on foreign policy. This must be done when no word can be out of place because of the consequences of misspeaking.

Reporters who are assigned to a campaign are quite familiar with the stump speech and can quickly tell when a new item is added, emphasis changed, etc. Usually that's what gets reported as 'news'.

Posted by: JimPortlandOR on June 20, 2007 11:24 AM

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