ThiemeWorks - The Missing Link

I answered:

1. How much does a political candidate's public speaking abilities (note: not skills) reflect on the public (you?) opinion of their ability to lead?

Speaking for myself, it's an important factor but not the only factor, and glibness can eclipse an inability to be effective in other areas. Reagan said he could not understand how anyone could be president if they had not been trained as an actor. In the ministry, I often said (after I had lots of experience) that if you could fake sincerity, you could do the job.

That was not a cynical or smart ass crack. It meant that you had to know how to access that part of yourself from which meaning came, where it was generated by intentionality, how it was communicated, how to hit that button, time and time again - regardless of how you felt. You had to short circuit your normal human emotions as expressed through body language and language and "come from" that deeper place, and know how to get to it when you did not want to go there or feel much like it. That's what I meant, not insincerity or hypocrisy.

Work like ministry is often a junior subset of politics (e.g. Mike Huckabee) and requires that one speak to the same audiences, often in the same words, with effectiveness and above all - high intentionality – over and over again. When one articulates every Sunday morning, as I did as an Episcopal priest, words that had to convey the nexus between this concrete everyday world and liminal worlds of ultimate meaning (really different dimensions of consciousness, "world" is a metaphor, let he who has ears, hear), and say the same things again and again - one could only do so by knowing how to be INTENTIONAL in how one spoke, that is, intending to communicate the deeper meaning of the words no matter how often one had said the same thing.

After hearing/seeing both Obama and Hillary Clinton last night, here in Milwaukee at the Democrat’s Founders Day Dinner, that same truth obviously applies. I had heard many of these "talking points," having listened to more debates and speeches this election than ever before, but you could know, feel, understand when they said something with meaning and it got communicated to you.

I did a lot of workshops outside the church setting that significantly enhanced my understanding of communication. Bottom line: communication is a function of intentionality. If you intend that someone get what it is you are communicating, they will. And at the same time, if you intend to get what someone is communicating, you will. You can disable communications coming in and blame it on the communicator or you can blame it on the listener when they don't get what you are saying, but it is always YOUR responsibility, as listener and speaker, to communicate or to get the communication, and you have to own that responsibility 100%.

In some exercises we used nonsense syllables, and that did not prevent the intention from being the driver of someone "getting it." This learning process was experiential, repetitive, and empowering. Once you knew how to do it, you could never not know that you knew, so it was always your responsibility and your choice whether to do it – or not.

So a leader by definition must communicate on several levels and in several modalities to be most effective. Speaking and listening is the province of "speech acts" in a formal way and there's lot of data out there on those. But also obviously, "leadership" in a functional way involves a lot more than that, too. You have to do know how to fund the enterprise, get the deals done, negotiate complexities, and remain the same person regardless of the role of the moment. You had to know who you were and what you intended, regardless of the variety of personae you had to use to be "all things" to a lot of people if not all of them. That’s true in ministry and political life and other areas, too.

But ... yes, often enough, complex, clear, even profound thinking and effective speaking do overlap. You can’t say what you can’t think, and you can’t think what you haven’t got words to express.
2. How much do we as public speakers place on a candidate's public speaking abilities and their opinion to lead?
One can look at Bush's reelection and say, obviously, not much. But there are many other factors there too, of course. I mean it when I say I think there is something amiss in Bush's brain that disables the ability for us to sync with his thinking. You try, as he speaks, to align with the rhythm and the meaning, but it’s like his brain stutters, then the connection is dropped, like a bad cell phone connection. It’s sometimes frightening, listening as he becomes incoherent, because that incoherence is about the ability to think clearly, not just “effective speaking.” I wish that people who know him well would contradict what I see, but so far, they have not. Greenspan said his lack of intellectual curiosity was extreme. Other “insiders” tell me of his short temper, his refusal to listen to opposing points of view, his rigidity – all signs I knew well in the ministry of someone who had been an addict for a long time. His prior life seems to have been that of an addict, a spoiled child. It was not gratifying to come to the unhappy conclusion that the cocaine and drinking had an effect. I wanted to believe that, like Prince Hal in Shakespeare's histories, he would leave his carousing companions behind and grow into a mature man. But I have not seen anything that would suggest it. And the lack of transparency in his government, his cronies’ obsession with secrecy, his violation of the constitution and insistence on a pardon in advance for companies (e.g. telecoms) that he got to go along with illegal eavesdropping on American citizens, his ability to talk the IC [intelligence community] into violating their charters and laws - what can one say? He was reelected. Is that "leadership?" Or a lapse in good judgment? Or something else?

When people in other countries asked me how he could be re-elected, I said, he wasn't. But in America, if you steal an election fair and square you get to keep it. Nixon knew 1960 was stolen but did not contest it. Gore made the same choice. That's our process.

You know the definition of a schlemiel? It's someone who, when they finally leave the room, it feels like someone you really like came in.

That will be the feeling of a lot of people when he finally leaves office.

I hope I answered your questions. I could write a book about all that but it would be outsold so quickly by Ren the Japanese phone text novelist, what would be the point? The sentences would be too long, the words too big (two, no more than three syllables, please, professional speakers used to advise), and it would be too dense ...