The other day, I had all sorts of clever openings
being pitched to the creative director inside my brain, openings that would engage
and dazzle with amusement, openings that would perk up a droopy head in need of
something uplifting after the first presidential debate. Now that I’m in front
of my keyboard, I have no idea to where those words vanished. Whatever.
What happened to President Obama? Instead of
being outraged at the clear shift from the hard-right platform that Romney had
been running on for two years, Obama kept looking for the right logic to
retaliate. When Romney accused the president of “trickle-down government,” a
comment not often launched at Democrats and Socialists, Obama cleared his
throat and remained in search of the perfect set of facts. When Romney attacked
the Dodd-Frank reform, Obama didn’t remind people that the law limits greedy
chicanery like the derivatives trading that led to the 2008 crash, he stayed the course, ever rational and professorial.
He’s a smart man, Obama, but you get the feeling
that while he obsesses about the substance, all that other stuff, however much
a reality, he finds difficult to endure. While he had the facts on his side, he lost
the debate. So what happened?
He forgot the fundamentals. The moment Romney claimed he had no plans to lower the
taxes of the wealthiest 1% (WHAT?????), I suspect Obama was taken off track; and, being internally driven and
focused on the argument, he delved into his notes and thus into a proclivity to
neglect the audience. But this is about winning over people’s minds, and in
being such, Obama became unable to arouse in the audience the one thing that
makes persuasion possible: Emotion. You can have all the facts in the universe,
but it is emotion that has the power to modify people’s judgments.
Look, this is 2000 year-old stuff, going all the way
back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric: If you believe you have
suffered a slight from someone who is not entitled do so, from someone who does
not have the facts straight, from someone who has just attempted his biggest flip-flop ever, there must be some sort of outrage. The speaker has to
highlight such characteristics of the case that are likely to provoke outrage,
even anger in the audience.
I keep a quote handy that pertains to this exactly.
It’s from an 18th century writer named George Campbell. He writes, “So far,
therefore, is it from being an unfair method of persuasion to move the
Passions, that there is no persuasion without moving them.” I keep this quote
handy because it reminds me that rational people, like Obama and a whole lot of
clients, seem more comfortable with cold facts and juicy RTB’s – while doing
what is necessary to move the passions feels like play-acting and fluffiness.
Persuading people demands that we put ourselves into someone else’s shoes and figure out what the most effective emotional appeal would be for them. It demands style and artfulness as well as the correct rhetoric. It means that perhaps this little post could have benefited from a clever opening.
Persuading people demands that we put ourselves into someone else’s shoes and figure out what the most effective emotional appeal would be for them. It demands style and artfulness as well as the correct rhetoric. It means that perhaps this little post could have benefited from a clever opening.
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