Kerry's Oratory Style Needs Work

Over the course of a few whirlwind months, John F. Kerry has been transformed from front-runner to forgotten man to comeback kid to winner of the Democratic primaries.

But one crucial thing has not changed much: Kerry's speaking style. Only Kerry's most ardent supporters would call him a stirring orator, even when he's flush with a primary-night victory or on the attack against President Bush. At a time when voters seem to respond to the conversational style perfected by Bill Clinton and adopted by John Edwards, Kerry's discourse tends toward an old-fashioned sonorousness. Two decades in the U.S. Senate will do that to a guy.

"Kerry's got that deep, deliberate voice," observes Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford University linguist and National Public Radio commentator. "He isn't the sort of person you want to sit down and have a drink with, necessarily. ... He is somebody whose speech was formed in boarding schools."

To be sure, Bush's scrambled syntax, especially when he works without a script, can make him hard on the ears. But the wealthy, blueblood Republican has used what Nunberg calls "faux Bubba-isms" to create a regular-guy image that the wealthy, blueblood Democrat cannot yet match. As Kerry seeks to win over uncommitted voters between now and Election Day -- and avoid the caricatures of woodenness that dogged Al Gore in 2000 -- Kerry may need to loosen up and de-Brahminize his delivery.

Former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen, national chairwoman of the Kerry campaign, does not see any problem. "I believe what average voters are concerned about, what we've seen through the primary season, is not ... speaking style," she said Friday. "It's whether John Kerry is going to do something to change their personal situations, and John Kerry has a plan to do that. He's got a plan for health care, he's got a plan to get the economy moving again."

Moreover, Shaheen insisted that Democratic primary voters were impressed by Kerry's "forcefulness, his ability to relate to them, despite what the pundits said," adding that many voters came up to her at campaign events to tell her they were struck by "how personable he was." Though she contended that Kerry fares well in settings large and small, she said it is when answering questions from voters that Kerry really shines, because he can demonstrate his "depth of knowledge."

A little tempo, please

Yet Kerry's speeches can be encrusted with a formalism that seems to belong to a bygone political age. Even some Kerry supporters, such as actress Dossy Peabody, say his delivery needs work. "He gets into a sort of da-da-da, emphasizing every fifth or sixth word," said Peabody. "If there's a steady kind of pattern, that can make people kind of sleepy. You want to change up, find different colors, tempos, notes. Go up into a higher register; go into a lower register. Whisper. Go staccato. ... You want to connect with the energy of the word."

Part of the challenge for Kerry is emotional, and part of it is technical. For one thing, a man whose candidacy has been marked by rise and fall and rise needs to have a lot more of that quality in his speeches.

"His voice seems to be pitched in a very narrow range," said Eda Roth, a former actress who advises business executives on how to communicate. "He doesn't have high pitches, so it begins to be" -- She switched to a monotonous rhythm -- "like this and like this and like this."

Some exercises Kerry could try, according to Peabody, are to imagine he is talking in a church, then imagine he is talking to someone over the noise of a subway car, then to an audience of children, then to an ailing patient. Kerry should also do breathing exercises to "uncover parts of the voice that may be unfamiliar or covered by habit," Roth said. In giving a speech, she added, he needs to be willing to go "off the page" in the manner of Clinton or Martin Luther King Jr., adjusting to the audience.

Kerry should employ more humor, strive for spontaneity in his speeches, and remember to speak to his supporters and not just against Bush, according to Peabody, who teaches acting at Emerson College and, like Roth, coaches businesspeople on communication. She also says Kerry could use more of the spirit he showed when he told a handful of supporters that his foes (a Kerry spokesman later said he meant the "Republican attack machine") were "the most crooked and, you know, lying group I've ever seen."

"That style said, 'Oh, he's like us. He uses our language,'" said Peabody.

Speaking of language: Three other sons of Massachusetts -- former Governor Michael S. Dukakis, the late Senator Paul E. Tsongas, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy -- have seen their presidential bids fall short in the past two decades. So will Kerry's high-toned Boston accent prove a liability in the rest of the country?

"Clinton was from Arkansas," Roth replied. "Accents become unimportant when you hear the message breaking through the accent." Shaheen agrees, noting that television has familiarized Americans with accents of all kinds. Nunberg added that Franklin Delano Roosevelt "was beloved, and he made no effort to sound like a man of the people." And of course, John F. Kennedy was both wealthy and from Massachusetts.

In fact, Kerry seems to model his oratory on that of the late President Kennedy, his idol. But in an age of TV sound bites and instantaneous Internet communication, one Kennedy trait that would be helpful to Kerry is the former president's gift for impromptu one-liners.

Get emotional

On an emotional level, some specialists say Kerry's speechmaking would improve if he showed a deeper personal connection to issues such as education and health care.

Alison Harris, who studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and now handles media relations for the Harvard Medical School, says Kerry could benefit from certain aspects of the method-acting techniques pioneered by Strasberg and exemplified by actors such as Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Eli Wallach.

Harris cites the "sense memory" technique employed by method actors, in which they get in touch with a sensation they experienced in the past in order to project a particular emotion in the present. In giving a speech on Medicare, for example, Kerry could summon an image of an elderly person whom he'd met on the campaign trail to give his words greater emotional force. "He is already getting an emotional narrative from his (campaign) journey, and he needs to be able to give that back," said Harris. "I'm sure there's a story he has heard on his travels, and a face he could see.

"That's why method acting would be so useful to him," she added. "It's a way of painting an emotional and passionate canvas without ever losing control."

Kerry also needs to find the right medium for his message. "Town hall" meetings showcased Clinton's ability to establish intimacy in large settings, but Nunberg, for one, is doubtful that the format will be equally effective for Kerry in the general election campaign, even though the candidate won high marks for his performance in such meetings during the primaries. While Nunberg doesn't think Kerry should return to "The Tonight Show" on a motorcycle, that doesn't mean Kerry should steer clear of the late-night TV arena altogether as he tries to loosen up his image.

"It would be smart of him to make fun of himself in the same strategic way Bush did when he ... made fun of his own mispronunciations," said Nunberg, who has some fun with Bush himself in his forthcoming book, "Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Confrontational Times" (PublicAffairs).

Of course, rules are made to be broken. Kerry may draw inspiration from a former longtime colleague in the Senate: the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "He did everything wrong in terms of media skills," Roth said of Moynihan. "He flapped his hands. He got excited about things. He didn't keep his hands quiet. He didn't talk directly to the camera. He was himself, and he was wonderful."