In Defense of Prepared Remarks
A couple years ago, I served as best man at the wedding of one of my best friends, Mike, who I’ve known since we were 13 years old. He is someone who commands my loyalty, respect, and admiration, so it may not surprise you that I labored mightily over the remarks I made at his wedding reception. I sought words that did the occasion justice, communicating something special about the bride and groom that grandparents, peers, and little cousins could all appreciate. I’d never given a more important speech, so intense forethought and preparation struck me as the obvious approach, one that signified my respect for the occasion.
Does anyone think my preparation signifies that the speech was a fraud? That I didn’t mean any of it sincerely? Or that if I really cared for my friend, and his betrothed, I would’ve remarked on the meaning of their union off the top of my head?
Does Rush Limbaugh think that? It sounds like a strange question, but look at this bit from his speech at CPAC:
… for those of you in the Drive-By Media watching, I have not needed a teleprompter for anything I’ve said. [Applause] And nor do any of us need a teleprompter, because our beliefs are not the result of calculations and contrivances. Our beliefs are not the result of a deranged psychology. Our beliefs are our core. Our beliefs are our hearts. We don’t have to make notes about what we believe. We don’t have to write down, ‘oh do I believe it, do I believe that.’ We can tell people what we believe off the top of our heads, and we can do it with passion and we can do it with clarity, and we can do it persuasively.
Strange, isn’t it? These are speeches delivered to a national television audience, and that reflect upon the conservative movement. And a man known in the movement as one of its foremost communicators is asserting that to carefully weigh one’s words in that kind of setting, laying them down beforehand so that they are just right, amounts to “contrivance” and “deranged psychology.”
I don’t know what to make of this. As I’ve noted before, Rush Limbaugh is a singular broadcasting talent. Perhaps that is leading him astray here? As David Foster Wallace once wrote:
Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.
To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking.)
Perhaps Rush Limbaugh speaks as ably off the top of his head as most men do given days to prepare, but that certainly isn’t true of most people. Advising conservative speechmakers that they ought to fire off whatever it is that comes to mind as they stand on the podium — more than that, affirmatively stigmatizing prepared remarks — is indefensible on substance, and remarkably bad advice.
It also flies in the face of recent experience. On many matters, George W. Bush tried and failed to articulate his genuinely held positions in interviews, and his failure as a communicator hurt conservatives. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin did much better as a communicator delivering speeches from a teleprompter than she ever did articulating her beliefs off the top of her head.
Can anyone make any sense out of this portion of Rush’s speech? Or is it another example of the kind of miscues that inevitably result when you speak extemporaneously?
I can appreciate your concern to say just the right thing at your friend’s wedding, and I’d have done the same. But you miss Rush Limbaugh’s point. He says what he believes deeply; he doesn’t need a teleprompter to make sure he says the right thing for his audience. Obama’s deep beliefs are a mystery because what he says is fit to the audience of the moment. I’d really love to listen to a Limbaugh/Obama debate.
— Terro · Mar 3, 06:47 AM · #
Terro: “I’d really love to listen to a Limbaugh/Obama debate.”
The President has better things to do with his time than wipe fat drug-addicted pond scum off his shoe. As entertaining as that would be.
re: Conor’s post: extemporaneous speech and demagoguery are closely connected. Limbaugh is a demagogue, so of course he would be suspicious of people who chose and think through their words carefully. What he has never understood is that bombast doesn’t last. Nothing this man has ever said will be remembered after he is gone. Given the hundreds of millions of words to his name, that is quite an achievement.
— raft · Mar 3, 08:11 AM · #
Late last year I learned a new word, sprezzatura. Rush looks, and has always looked, like he’s trying too hard.
— Tony Comstock · Mar 3, 03:13 PM · #
Hey, that was Lee Siegel’s sock puppet name, wasn’t it? Sprezzatura. (I would love, in light of this, to change my posting name to “Lee Siegel,” but I’m too lazy.)
— Matt Feeney · Mar 3, 03:55 PM · #
Really? Do you have any other examples, besides the “pond scum” you are addressing? Because I could think of so many counterexamples (Hitler, Stalin relied on prepared text; Reagan, FDR were great extemporaneous speaker) that I doubt the worthiness of your generalization.
To the larger point, Rush is linking two tropes. That the Great Communicator is actually rather hapless and can’t work without his teleprompter, and that most of his speeches are airy feints designed to divert attention from a left-wing agenda at odds with the mainstream of America. I guess it worked rhetorically, but I agree it’s a bit of a hash. If pressed he would have to concede that prepared remarks are not bad in themselves, if he were being honest (though bullying, irrelevant arrogance might be more likely).
— Blar · Mar 3, 08:11 PM · #
Limbaugh has an extremely useful talent of being able to speak lucidly off the top of his head. Most people, including the President and myself, don’t.
Presumably, Limbaugh is implying that Obama’s famous conversational style in which he seldom attempts to persuade people of anything other than that he understands them allows him to get away with covering up his true ideology. A careful reading of Obama’s “Dreams from My Father” would suggest that that is a definite possibility.
— Steve Sailer · Mar 3, 09:27 PM · #
Untrue. Well, maybe true about you, but it’s certainly not true of the President – I’m watching him do it right now.
— Chet · Mar 4, 01:11 AM · #
If Limbaughs’ words were subject to the same scrutiny as the President’s, or any primary candidate’s, he’d never get past stage one. Contemporary politicians learn how to navigate the rough seas of partisan politics.
The point of the debates is to show the candidates answering questions they don’t know in advance. McCain, the Republican champion did his best to make Obama fumble there and, personally, I think it just showed Obama all that more serious. Another indicator of his sincerity is that he took a position against the war when it wasn’t popular.
Is Obama a tricky master of political ideas he doesn’t believe in, or is he a maniac true believer? Either way, Rush is going to be h8tin. He’s said as much.
Obama is correct to let Rush speak for the Republicans. Rush will do something like call soldier’s who are against the Iraq war traitors and then the administration can spin that all week.
— Ed · Mar 4, 04:55 AM · #
Limbaugh is the bologna and cheese sandwich you take to work in your lunch pail. It’s more than slightly embarrassing to whip him out at a nice dinner.
— JA · Mar 4, 06:15 AM · #
Great political rhetoric packs a huge amount of thought and feeling into a few sentences. Consider Lincoln’s “four-score and seven years ago…”: a simple analysis of that sentence would yield at least two paragraphs, each sentence of the analysis far less compelling than the brilliant, terse words and phrases of the original. Or consider the Queen Mother’s most famous sentence, spoken at the dawn of World War II when the press asked her if the Princesses would evacuate: “The children will not leave unless I do. I shall not leave unless their father does, and the King will not leave the country in any circumstances whatever.” By deftly extending the embrace of the Royal Family to include all of the British people, and promising to stand by them come what might, that single sentence amply justified the honorific Hitler bestowed on her: “the most dangerous woman in Europe”. The density of meaning in great political rhetoric, like the density of glass in crystal, gives it an unmistakable ring.
Perhaps nobody can achieve this crystalline rhetoric without preparing a text, but reading the transcript of Limbaugh’s speech left me in no doubt about why President Obama and his staff relish the thought of Rush as the intellectual leader of the conservative opposition, and why more intelligent conservatives find the prospect disastrous. Good political rhetoric weaves together a set of connections between ideas the hearers already understand; consider the way the Gettysburg address suggests the connections between biblical morality and ideals of democracy and justice. Bad political rhetoric severs these connections with muddled thinking and plain errors. Even as someone who disagrees with Limbaugh profoundly, I found his misquoting of the preamble to the American constitution jarring. Not having, or reading, a text does not make errors less jarring, and even I, a reader from another country, know the American constitution well enough to know Limbaugh had misquoted it. If a speaker I agreed with made such a basic errors, it would have embarrassed me. Ultimately, I found the speech sloppy, self-indulgent, and overly long. As someone who disagrees with Limbaugh, I cannot imagine his arguments leaving me with anything but the hope that his faction of the Republican Party faces the implications of its defeat, and that, sooner rather than later, a new American conservative synthesis arises. Because as much as the election of President Obama excited me, I still want to see an effective and thoughtful conservative opposition to keep a check on the inevitable mistakes his administration will make.
— John Spragge · Mar 9, 07:51 AM · #