Well, somebody was bound to disagree with me. :)
From: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/01/30/sotu_critique/print.html
Jon
Excerpt:
"Horrible" speaker, great speech
An expert on great speakers says President Bush is among the worst ever, but
on Tuesday night, he tapped into his inner Clinton.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Edward W. Lempinen
Jan. 30, 2003 �/ Veteran speech consultant and communications expert
Richard Greene doesn't mince words when it comes to criticizing President
Bush as a public speaker. "He is the least articulate president that I've
ever seen or I've ever listened to," Greene told Salon, just before Bush's
State of the Union address on Tuesday. "He is a horrible communicator."
But sitting in front of the television watching Bush address Congress
Tuesday night, Greene was pleasantly surprised by what he saw. He says the
speech was the president's best ever, and Greene should know. The author of
"Words that Shook the World," a 2001 book that assembled and analyzed 20
speeches he identified as the best of the last 100 years, he's been an
advisor to high-powered clients in the corporate and political worlds, from
Princess Diana to presidential candidates. And he's studied Bush's oratory:
Before the 2000 election, he informally advised campaign strategist Karl
Rove on the many and profound weaknesses in Bush's performance on the stump.
He's even met Bush a couple of times.
Perhaps, in such speeches, most of us hear what we want to hear, and believe
what we're predisposed to believe. The New York Times called Bush's speech
"his strongest effort yet to convince reluctant allies and anxious Americans
that war with Iraq may be unavoidable." A poll by CNN, USA Today and Gallup
showed an overwhelming 84 percent positive response to the speech. Yet Bush
critic Maureen Dowd thought it fell short. "At a moment when Americans were
hungry for reassurance that the monomaniacal focus on Iraq makes sense when
the economy is sputtering, Mr. Bush offered a rousing closing argument for
war, but no convincing bill of particulars," Dowd wrote in her Times column
Wednesday.
Greene admits that Bush didn't deliver the ultimate case for war with Iraq
-- but he says that's not what the speech was meant to do. "Here's the great
truth about selling a case, whether it's front of a jury or in front of the
world like Bush was Tuesday night: If you like the messenger, if you feel a
connection to the messenger, you will be receptive to the message. And his
job last night was to make people like him and be more receptive to the
message that was to come." Bush pulled it off, Greene says.
It is surely a controversial conclusion, and Greene himself is surprised by
it. In interviews before the speech and after -- our abridged conversation
follows below -- he was a stern critic of the president, both as a speaker
and as a policy-maker. But when assessing a leader's ability to persuade, he
has ample grounds for comparison. In assembling his book, he reviewed
hundreds of speeches by dozens of speakers. The Rev. Martin Luther King, the
slain civil rights leader, was the best of them all, Greene says. The late
Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from a formerly
Confederate state, followed King. Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald
Reagan and Albert Einstein were also at the top of his list.
Bush, in his State of the Union address, did not reach that standard -- but
Greene insists he came close.
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