Pause for Laughter
On the bus, John McCain is a Straight Talkin' raconteur. On the stump ... well, he's working on it.
John McCain is a born storyteller. Riding in the back of his Straight Talk Express, his suit jacket off and Ray-Bans on, the man who could be president takes great pleasure in telling and retelling colorful stories about his years as a hot-tempered teenage hellion. By his own account, he was a lousy student who preferred dirty Levi's to the required jacket and tie; a kid with a short fuse who was late to class, if he went at all. "I'm surprised they didn't throw me out of there," he told reporters and campaign aides hanging out on the bus in New Hampshire last year. McCain couldn't help but laugh at the portrait he was painting of himself. "I really was a little jerk," he said.
Yet it was a different McCain who showed up earlier this month to speak at his old high school in Alexandria, Va. In his speech, he once again reminisced about his youth. "Memory often accords our high-school years the distinction of being among the most happiest of our lives," he said flatly. "I remember [it] in that light." The audience barely reacted. Earlier in the speech, he tried a little humor. "If my detractors had known me [back then]," he said, "they might marvel at the self-restraint and mellowness I developed as an adult." It was supposed to be a laugh line. But McCain, woodenly reciting his prepared text off a teleprompter in front of the podium, didn't smile—or give any indication that he was being funny. The crowd missed the joke entirely. The candidate didn't seem to notice. He continued on to the next line, dutifully reciting the words silently scrolling down the screen. At times, he seemed like a man ticking off the details of someone else's life.
It's no secret McCain loathes being trapped behind a podium. "I honestly don't like giving speeches," he told NEWSWEEK earlier this year. He'd rather spend time fielding questions from voters, even hostile ones. "I like town halls," he says. "I like the back and forth." When he was racing state to state before Super Tuesday, his aides scheduled back-to-back rallies at airport hangars. As the days wore on, McCain grew irritated. Finally, at a rally in Florida, he ditched the script and asked if anyone in the audience had a question. He handed his microphone into the crowd. "We just have time for a few," McCain beamed, his mood visibly lifting.
McCain's stubbornness has sometimes been a challenge for his staff. "You can't have a presidential campaign without speeches," says Mark Salter, his longtime aide and chief wordsmith. The worry is that McCain's stilted style could put him at a disadvantage in a matchup against Barack Obama, who has built his campaign around the kind of grand speeches McCain detests. His staff hasn't yet turned to a professional speech coach, something both Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole did to smooth out their delivery. But Salter and other top aides have urged McCain to, at the very least, liven up his stump speeches to showcase some of the warmth and wry, back-of-the-bus humor that only the press corps and his own staff usually get to see.
Recently, McCain has shown a willingness to compromise. Until a few months ago, he refused to use a teleprompter. He changed his mind after he saw a tape of himself giving his victory speech in New Hampshire; the video showed him standing at the podium, head down, reading from the paper in front of him. The teleprompter has presented its own challenges. Reagan, who pioneered the use of the device, was at ease reading speeches projected on glass panels to his right and left, which let him move his head from side to side as he spoke. But McCain's staff feared their less polished candidate would look as though he were watching tennis. They settled instead on a 60-inch monitor positioned in front of the podium. That, too, proved problematic. Straining to keep up with the text, McCain fixed his eyes on the screen, giving him an intense, faraway look. Now his speeches are projected on both the large screen and side panels so he can see the text no matter where he turns.
McCain has warmed slightly to the device—at least when it's working. Several times, it has malfunctioned in the middle of speeches. On the night he clinched the GOP nomination, his teleprompter went black, sending him scrambling for his paper backup text. Two weeks ago, it happened again at the U.S. Naval Academy. McCain missed an entire page of his speech. "He's better now than he was three months ago, and three months ago he was better than he was three months before that," says Mark McKinnon, a top McCain adviser. "The more he does it, the more he gets comfortable."
Even so, McCain still tries to go off script and into the crowd as much as possible. Next week he'll hit the road for an "outreach tour," visiting areas of the country where GOP candidates don't usually go. McCain will hold a town hall in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. It's just the kind of road trip he has been itching for. Questions from the crowd. Time on the bus. Teleprompter on ice.
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Member Comments
Posted By: fifi5cents @ 04/27/2008 2:27:11 AM
Comment: danmanplan....sounds like you are a man. Would you do that and live off your wife's money?
Posted By: jgrays @ 04/25/2008 9:09:03 AM
Comment: Excerpt from Obama's 2002 Iraq speech, one week before Congress authorized it: "I don???t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income ??? to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.
That???s what I???m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Now let me be clear ??? I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.
He???s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.
I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.
I am not opposed to all wars. I???m opposed to dumb wars.
So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today. You want a fight, President Bush? Let???s finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings."
Posted By: jgrays @ 04/25/2008 8:35:36 AM
Comment: Umm. McCain graduated 894th out of 899 from the Naval Academy. That is almost last in his class. Add that to the fact that he admits that he doesn't know much about economics and it seems like a recipe for disaster. I have great respect for him when it comes to his military service, but that doesn't make him presidential material. It seems like he is just rehashing more of that "compassionate Conservative" nonsense. He has reversed direction on every platform that I might have found appealing and just become another Conservative. No longer is he a maverick. He is actually morphing before our very eyes into Bush-Lite. (announcer) "Now with a few less screw-ups, but all of the bad ideas!!" How do you go to a bunch of people who have lost everything with no kind of plan whatsoever. "Rebuild or tear it down, or something" is all that he can come up with? Before you try to meet with victims of a disaster try having some kind of answers to give them or is it just a photo-op? Don't discuss the benefits of NAFTA in front of a closed down factory. And don't tell people that their jobs are gone and they're not coming back, just tell them how you're going to help them get back to work. People keep saying that Obama is just about making grandiose speeches. Guess what? That is a HUGE part of being President. They're the country's cheerleader. "Fourscore and seven years ago...", "The only thing we have to fear...", "Ask not what your country can do for you..." People have grown cynical because we've been been stuck with "Stay the course." Our country was founded on self-reliance and our top leader is the one who is supposed to inspire us to be great. Speeches aren't the only part of the job, but I also like Obama's stances on the issues. He is smart (graduated 1st in his class at Harvard Law) and observant (back in 2002 he gave a speech against the Iraq War that foretold everything that would happen ). http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Barack_Obama's_Iraq_Speech
If more people had listened to his Iraq speech, maybe we wouldn't have gotten into the mess we're in. Speeches CAN be important. Ask Lincoln, Roosevelt, and JFK.