A Speech is NEVER Just a Speech

John McCain gave a speech tonight. Barack Obama gave one last week. Inevitably, they will be compared. While Freud may have said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, at no time is a speech ever just a speech.

The right's been all over Obama for his gilded tongue, his oratorical skill. It's a backhanded compliment, of course. The insult masked in the praise is that it is all sizzle and no steak (shout out to Nebraskans with the beef reference).

On the one hand, hearing someone say something gives us a sense of the meaning that no transcription ever could. We hear the timber of the voice, the cadence and rhythm, the emphases and lighter notes. We "understand" in a way that we otherwise could not have.

Or do we? Are we so taken with all those techniques and skills that he could be reciting the telephone book and we'd jump up and cheer when he got to the cross-listing for Computers under Appliances-Electronic?

That's the fear, isn't it. It goes back to the old distrust of rhetoric, maybe, which is too long a discussion to really delve into. The term "smoke and mirrors" nicely conjures up the basic suspicion: we're being duped by stagecraft and vocal dexterity.

(It might be easy to point to George W. Bush as the antithesis of this, a plainspokeness that verged on unintelligible and incoherent. That's a mistake, I think, because there is something in the way Bush basically broke down the rules of language, making what he said and even how he said it signify nothing, that might be even more dangerous.

After all, it's one thing to say that someone is so good at something, makes it look so easy and convincing, that we are fooled into thinking we understand what they are doing or saying, like thinking you "get" diving from watching the Olympic finals. It's something all together different to so badly misspeak or misfire on a performance while still having the attention of the world and the media there to blithely interpret (as though for some Rain Man kind of idiot-savant), that it calls into question whether being able to speak or do something well is even necessary.

The latter, the possibility that following no implicit or explicit rules may be better than demonstrating flabbergasting expertise, is what scares me silly. It plays into the whole American mind-set that we need to have a president that is just like us, i.e. not overly bright. [I won't go into this. I'll save it for later.])

McCain's speech was not as good as Obama's. Clearly, Obama is a better communicator. Remember the last "great communicator" we had, it was a Republican who managed to create a class of voters identifiable by their binomial nomenclature which featured his name preceeded by the name of the party to which he was not affiliated. Who knows, perhaps Obama will win todays equivalent of the Reagan Democrats.

In the end, though, people would rather hear someone that communicates well than doesn't. After all, we like things that make sense. It's naturally satisfying to a species particularly adept at recognizing patterns. When things make sense and logic is employed, our sense of the rightness of the world, of its inherent symmetry, is reinforced. The cirlce is unbroken, if you will.

Anyway, that's why the speeches of both men are not just that. They get to the heart of who each man is in the grain of his voice.