There’s an old story in Washington of a long-winded senator making a speech that was as bumbling as it was verbose. At length, an exasperated colleague ventured to interrupt: “If the distinguished senator will permit me,” he snapped, “I will attempt to extricate him from his thoughts.”

I was reminded of that story by Sen. Joe Biden’s announcement on Wednesday that he would seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2008.

Biden’s last presidential run, in 1988, ended in a fiasco when it was revealed that he had plagiarized a speech from British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock. Biden’s current campaign promises to be different: It’s opening with a fiasco.

Biden’s announcement that he would run for president coincided with the publication of an interview he gave to the New York Observer in which he characterized rival candidate Sen. Barack Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

I’m a man who spent three years writing speeches for Gen. Colin Powell, so I found this characterization rather startling. So did Sen. Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and every other African-American who ever ran for president.

Indeed, when Sen. Biden called Sharpton to apologize for his remark, Reverend Al cut him short: “I told him I take a bath every day,” he huffed.

Sen. Obama, a shrewder politician, was more subtle in his response. He said that Sen. Biden was just “being Joe.”

Biden insisted that his remark had been taken out of context, but it’s clear that he’s started his campaign for president with a major political pratfall.

He should have known better. Even before the ill-fated interview, Biden was well aware that he had an Achilles mouth.

As the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden has already made himself obnoxious by his rambling monologues and repeated interruptions of other senators. A week ago, for example, he opened a hearing on Iraq with a 3,000-word statement in which he used the word “I” 88 times.

Biden modestly acknowledges that his wordiness is keeping him from being, in his phrase, “the best Biden I can be.” But, as the Observer interview suggests, he has made little effort to better himself by buttoning his lip.

Until he does, we can only speculate as to what his idea of a “best Biden” may be. I have an uneasy suspicion that he might resemble a certain British MP who boasted to Winston Churchill that he was a self-made man.

“I am glad to hear that,” Churchill shot back. “It relieves Almighty God of a fearful responsibility.”

Technorati Tag: speechwriting, speech

Gian-Carlo Menotti, who died last week at the age of 95, was an unusual composer in that he wrote his own libretti for his many operas. (Probably the only thing he had in common with Wagner.)

Menotti’s words are of as much interest to speechwriters as his music. If every speech is to some extent a dramatic monologue, some speeches rise almost to the level of an operatic aria. So it can be instructive to watch a good librettist at work.

I’ll offer one example from Menottti’s 1950 opera, The Consul, for which he received the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. This particular example is noteworthy for the power of the words and also for Menotti’s use of rhythm and alliteration.

The Consul tells the story a woman named Magda Sorel, who is a victim of political persecution in her homeland. In an effort to join her husband, who has already fled abroad, she makes repeated visits to a consulate in the hope of obtaining a visa.

On each visit, however, she is stymied by bureaucratic inertia. The consul’s secretary, whose compassion has been exhausted from dealing with endless pitiful cases of this kind, denies Magda access to the consul. Instead, she gives her stacks of meaningless forms to fill out.

In a show-stopping aria in the second act, Magda rebels against the inhumanity of these paper barriers. In desperation, she sings:

To this we’ve come:
That men withhold the world from men.
No ship no shore for him who drowns at sea.
No home nor grave for him who dies on land.

To this we’ve come;
And you, you too, shall weep …

To which the secretary replies: “You’re being very unreasonable, Mrs. Sorel.”

The country where the opera takes place is not named, although it is supposed to be somewhere in Europe. The consul is not named, nor is the country he represents. That’s the whole point. The Consul is a story that could have taken place not only in Europe, but in almost any corner of the world and in almost any decade of the troubled Twentieth Century. The despairing cry, “To this we’ve come”, must surely have been uttered innumerable times, in many tongues.

With tens of millions of blogs on the Internet, all competing with each other for attention, it is almost a chivalrous act for one blogger to cite another. So it’s only polite for me to return the compliment, and refer readers of this blog to Ian Griffin’s blog -- http://www.exec-comms.com/blog/.

Ian is a Silicon Valley speechwriter, who has written for top executives at Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. I had the pleasure of meeting him last week at the 2007 Speechwriters Conference in Washington, D.C.

I was one of the featured speakers at the conference. My topic was, “Bite the Bullet: Turn Your Speaker’s Liabilities Into Assets.” I’d tell you about my presentation, but Ian has saved me the trouble. He posted an admirable summary of my remarks on his blog, which may be accessed at http://www.exec-comms.com/blog/?p=167.

Another speaker at last week’s conference was veteran speechwriter Fletcher Dean, who blogs at http://www.thespeechwriter.com/.

I often suspect that fulltime speechwriters are becoming extinct. A poll taken at the Speechwriters Conference several years ago revealed that more than half of the attendees spent less than 20 percent of their time writing speeches. In other words, a great many speeches these days are being writing by PR generalists. Unfortunately, it shows.

So perhaps it’s helpful to the generalists that fulltimers like Ian, Fletcher and me are willing to share our expertise on line. If it is, maybe the generalists –- be they in government, the corporate world or academia -- will show their gratitude by throwing us a freelance assignment from time to time. (Hint-hint.)

My speech last week at the annual Speechwriters Conference in Washington, D.C. was on how to turn your speaker’s liabilities into assets.

The original draft included a story that I later took out because of length considerations. But since it’s too good a story to waste, I’m sharing it today with readers of this blog.

This story comes from Steel Titan, Dr. Robert Hessen’s excellent biography of Charles Schwab. Schwab was one of Andrew Carnegie’s lieutenants, who went on to become a steel magnate in his own right.

After America’s entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson “conscripted” Schwab to head the nation’s shipbuilding efforts. He did a superb job, but not everyone appreciated his work.

In 1918, while making a speaking tour of the nation’s West Coast shipyards, he encountered a hostile crowd in Seattle. Many of the workers at this particular site were members of the I.W.W. – the Industrial Workers of the World. The I.W.W.s, or “Wobblies” as they were known, were a radical labor group that had bitterly opposed America’s involvement in the war.

The owners of the shipyard agreed to assemble the workers so Schwab could speak to them about the need to increase ship production to win the war. But, given the presence of the Wobblies, it appeared likely that Schwab would be shouted down before he could utter a word. Schwab, after all, was not only a plutocrat, but a man who had made much of his fortune by manufacturing armaments. His very name was anathema to socialists and pacifists.

But Schwab met the problem head on. He began by stating the single fact that was most obvious to the workers, but was the last thing that they expected him to mention. “Now boys,” he said, “I’m a very rich man…”

The workers, taken completely by surprise, laughed, applauded and allowed Schwab to make his speech without interruption. When he finished, a group of them offered him an honorary membership in the I.W.W. – and he accepted.

Humor, candor and courage should be among the qualities possessed by every speaker. Used effectively, they can win over even the toughest crowds.

In honor of Presidents’ Day, I’m going to discuss a little-known speech that George Washington made at a little-noted turning point in American history.

The date was March 15, 1783. The Revolutionary War had been won, but the Treaty of Paris, formally guaranteeing America’s independence, had not yet been signed. Meanwhile, a new crisis loomed.

In Newburgh, New York, officers of the Continental Army met together with mutiny in mind. Not only had they not been paid in years, they had received word from Philadelphia that the new government was without funds. They feared they might receive no compensation at all for their heroic services –- except the base ingratitude of their countrymen.

George Washington appeared to address the meeting. It was a moment that defined the measure of the man. Had Washington been a Caesar or Napoleon, intent on power for himself, he had only to give the order to march. He was trusted; he was popular. His men would have eagerly followed him to Philadelphia to overthrow the civilian authority and make him dictator.

Instead, Washington pleaded with the men for patience. He sympathized with their grievances, but he begged them not to reject the principle of representative government that they had fought a long and terrible war to establish.

Unfortunately, Washington was not exactly a spellbinding speaker. He was an 18th Century gentleman to his fingertips –- cool, formal, rational, and moderate in all things.

The following paragraph is typical of his brand of oratory, even on so urgent occasion as this:

“Let me entreat you, gentlemen … not to take any measures which, viewed in the calm light of reason, will lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained; let me request you to rely on the plighted faith of your country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress; that, previous to your dissolution as an army, they will cause all your accounts to be fairly liquidated, as directed in their resolutions, which were published to you two days ago, and that they will adopt the most effectual measures in their power to render ample justice to you, for your faithful and meritorious services. And let me conjure you, in the name of our common country, as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under any specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”

As you might expect, Washington’s careful words did little to cool the rising tempers of his men.

When he saw that they wanted further assurances that the government would pay them what it owed them, Washington asked to read a letter he had received from a member of Congress, explaining the state of the government’s finances.

He drew out the letter, but the handwriting was too small and cramped for him to read it. So he stopped and reached into his coat pocket for his reading glasses. Since most of his officers had never seen him wear glasses before, they did not know he needed them. A hush fell over the assembly as Washington fumbled awkwardly with his spectacles. “Pardon me, gentlemen,” he said as he looked up. “I have grown grey in your service, and now find myself growing blind.”

That simple, unplanned aside affected the officers more deeply than all that Washington had said before. He had been their commander for eight years. Every man present knew that he was sincere when he said he had grown grey in their service. The sentiment was real; it was human; and it touched the men’s hearts. Many of them wept openly.

When the meeting ended, the officers voted unanimously to leave the redress of their grievances in Washington’s hands. Washington’s magnificent aside had saved America’s fragile experiment in democracy.

February is Black History Month, so today’s post is devoted to a notable speech by the great civil rights leader, Booker T. Washington.

The date was September 18, 1895. The occasion was the Cotton States and International Exhibition in Atlanta, Georgia. The organizers of the event wanted to impress visiting Northerners with the progress of race relations in the South. So Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, was invited to speak at the opening ceremonies.

This was at once a great opportunity and a great challenge. As a white well-wisher confided sympathetically to Washington before he left home, "In Atlanta you will have to speak before Northern white people, Southern white people and Negroes all together. I fear they have got you into a pretty tight place."

They had indeed. But Washington rose to the occasion with a speech that managed to appeal powerfully to all segments of the audience. The core of his message was this:

There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the Negro, let these efforts be turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen. Effort or means so invested will pay a thousand percent interest. These efforts will be twice blessed — blessing him that gives and him that takes. There is no escape through law of man or God from the inevitable:

Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.

Brave and sensible words. But the exhibition itself, with separate buildings for white and Negro exhibits, revealed how tragically far the former Confederate states were from recognizing real racial equality. Even the auditorium where Washington spoke was segregated, with blacks confined to separate rows of seats. (That they were allowed to be present at all was considered a great concession by those in charge.)

Because Washington accepted segregation in the course of his speech, his remarks have been called the “Atlanta Compromise.” As he put it:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.

Then, as now, Washington was severely criticized for making any concessions at all to legal inequality.

I believe that the answer to his critics lies in the words “just now.” In the preceding sentence, Washington said, “It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours.” Clearly, he was saying that in the long term, the members of his race would be satisfied with nothing less, although he was ready to compromise in the short term if it meant economic progress for the South’s black population, most of whom were desperately poor.

The irony was that only after segregation was abolished by law did it finally became apparent, even to its die-hard advocates, how much it had done to retard the economic development and greater prosperity of the South. Booker T. Washington had been right when he said in Atlanta that there is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all. Or, as he put it on another occasion, “One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.”

February 28 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is unlikely that the occasion will be observed with the same pomp as Longfellow’s 70th birthday, which was an occasion for national festivities. The man who was once America’s most popular poet has fallen on hard times. Today, his work is dismissed as sentimental, preachy, banal –- or all three.

The critics have a point. Undeniably, Longfellow is as sentimental as “The Children’s Hour”, as preachy as “A Psalm of Life”, and as banal as “The Village Blacksmith” or “I shot an arrow in the air.”

Indeed, he is worse, as a glance at these two stanzas from his poem, “Excelsior” will attest:

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
Excelsior!

Oh stay," the maiden said, "and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!"
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
Excelsior!

Believe it or not, that poem was set to music, and became parlor recital favorite.

Yet there is more to Longfellow than the aforementioned poems, or even such familiar works as “Hiawatha”, “Evangeline”, or “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

Longfellow was an intellectual giant. He was a scholar and a linguist who was a professor of modern languages at Harvard. (Among his other languages, he was proficient enough in Italian to translate the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy into English.) He was one of the first American writers to celebrate American history and landscape, and to draw inspiration from the culture of Native Americans.

He was also our first poet to become an international celebrity –- honored with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, and by a bust in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. He was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Spanish Academy. The elementary school I attended as a child was named after him.

So what, then, shall we make of Longfellow? He was perhaps not a great poet, but he was often a good one. My own favorite poem of Longfellow’s is not one of his most popular, but it’s not a bad touchstone with which to gauge his poetic gifts. It’s a romantic portrait of an old Dutch sea captain. Read it with an open mind, and then decide if Longfellow is a poet or not.

A DUTCH PICTURE
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow